For the past few years, the school has been involved in an extremely fun and rewarding collaboration with nearby Covenant Preparatory School, an all-boys middle school located in Hartford. Through this program, Covenant Prep students make regular trips to Avon Old Farms to engage in a variety of activities alongside Avon students and staff. Some of these activities include joining in a varsity basketball practice, exploring the technology in the engineering lab, taking part in a poetry writing workshop, or expressing their creativity in the Estabrook Fine Arts Center. The visits also include an hour for Avonians to assist the boys from Covenant Prep with their homework while sharing a snack together.

The program has only grown in scale and popularity since it began, which has prompted the school to take things up a notch. The new and improved collaboration now has an official name: “ASPIRE,” which stands for Avon Service Program for Impactful Relationships and Experiences.

The goal of the upgraded program is exactly what the name implies, to ensure participating students form deeper relationships with each other which in turn allows for more meaningful and rewarding experiences, according to Art Department Chair Cristina Pinton, who is leading the formalization of the program. “It takes time to create a relationship. This is an opportunity for middle school and high school kids to bond and share,” she says.

Pinton explains that her own experience with the program led her to create ASPIRE. “I started realizing my joy came from the repeated exposure to the Covenant Prep kids, getting to know them and their personalities. Obviously they all have a great time with the activities but the real joy was in getting to know someone, and that feeling was reciprocated in the Covenant Prep students. They were excited to see the same boys they had gotten to know their last visit,” Pinton says.

She also shared how the program is beneficial as an educator. “It’s invigorating as teachers to tap into the energy and spirit of middle school students and bring it back to our high school classrooms.”

After Head of School Jim Detora P’12 eagerly approved the new program, Pinton met with Covenant Prep administrators to begin putting things in place. The next step after that was to put out the call to current Avonians to find students interested in being dedicated “ASPIRE Mentors” who would help plan and run the different activities.

Going forward, the AOF mentors will be paired up with one or two mentees, or “little brothers,” from Covenant Prep. Throughout the course of the school year, these pairings will become friendships that make each visit more exciting. The boys at Avon have already indicated their excitement for the program. “We were originally thinking we’d have 12 mentors, but we settled on 15 because more than 50 students applied,” Pinton says.

Starting next fall, ASPIRE program participants will meet every other Tuesday afternoon with their new little brothers to learn and have fun with each other on Avon’s campus. We are happy to see this collaboration continue to grow!