Power Lunch

This year will be completing our 10th year with Power Lunch. Power Lunch is a mentoring program that we carry out at a local, underprivileged elementary school. The school has an extremely high ESOL rate.

Each school year the school faculty picks 15-20 students to participate in the year-long program. They're nominated because they've fallen behind on reading and other factors. The students must show improvement in reading, academics, behavior, and other areas to remain in the program.

Throughout the school year the students meet every Thursday with their mentor. They're assigned a mentor for the entire school year. They eat lunch together, read, work on other subjects, and sometimes just talk. These students show fantastic results, a lot achieving at least an one year gain in reading level and some over two years.

At Christmas, the students join us for a Rotary meeting with Santa Claus. They enjoy lunch at a real Rotary meeting in their honor and get a chance to see Santa and take a picture with him.

This program impacts the mentors as much as it does the students. It shows another side to a sometimes one sided story and allows us to help the youth in our community.

We are honored to partner with Northside Elementary, Pizza Hut, and Quick Buys.

Northside allows us the use of the library every week.

We are extremely proud to partner with Pizza Hut in Cairo. They provide pizzas and desserts for the students and the mentors, at no cost to our club.

Rotarian Sanjay Patel, owner of Quick Buys, provides drinks each week and is a mentor.