The first logo for SHIFT was a gear shift. It didn’t quite fit the bill.

"After the first rendering," Brent Ward said, they pivoted. They went with a race car instead — a NASCAR theme — and the whole identity grew from there. The upperclassmen mentors became the pit crew. The freshman orientation day became Time Trials. The curriculum sessions became pit stops. And nearly two decades later, the program is still running laps.

SHIFT — Students Helping in Freshman Transition — is one of the quieter engines of Tri-Valley's culture. It pairs juniors and seniors with incoming freshmen through a structured, year-long mentorship built on peer-to-peer connection, intentional curriculum, and the understanding that a teenager can reach another teenager faster than any adult in the building.

The statistic that shaped everything came from a visit to Normal Community West, which had its own mentoring program: it takes seven days to seven weeks for an adult to have the impact that a peer can have in seven seconds to seven minutes.

"We thought that was just a phenomenal stat," Brent said.

The Wards are the program's architects. Brent teaches PE, drives the bus, and has been at Tri-Valley since he student-taught under Tom Boward in the spring of 1994. He got hired at the elementary school right after and never left. Jamie, also PE, is in her 31st year. She grew up in LeRoy and co-oped at Tri-Valley for basketball and softball in the late '80s — coming back to build a career felt like a dream, she said. They met here. Their two kids, now 20 and 26, are both Tri-Valley graduates.

The seed of SHIFT came from Brent's graduate work at ISU around 2005. He needed a research project and noticed something that nagged at him: a lot of freshmen kept showing up on the eligibility list.

"I kept seeing a lot of freshmen on the eligibility list that particular year," he said. "And I'm like, well, I wonder how common that is."

Very common. When they dug into the data, over 20 percent of incoming freshmen had at least one D or F in the first semester.

The reasons weren't mysterious once you started listing them. The high school had three-minute passing periods instead of five. Lockers were far from classrooms. Eight different teachers replaced a four-teacher pod. Tests were cumulative. Homework volume jumped. Nobody coordinated exam schedules across departments. And freshmen, confronted by all of it, were making a specific academic mistake the Wards hadn't anticipated: if an assignment wasn't finished or wasn't good enough, they just didn't turn it in.

"Five out of ten is better than zero out of ten," Brent said. "You gotta do the math."

By 2007, SHIFT was built into the school day — a 25-minute block at the end of the day, approved by administration and the board. Mentors are selected through an application process: teachers rate candidates on character, attitude, leadership, and role model potential. It's competitive. This year, about 60 applied for roughly 40 spots.

"Some really good kids don't get selected," Jamie said. "It's a competitive program."

Pairing is deliberate. Jamie and Brent meet with eighth-grade teachers to match mentors with incoming freshmen — sometimes by shared interests, sometimes by academic need, sometimes by personality. A kid who needs structure gets a mentor who'll keep a thumb on them. A kid with math anxiety gets someone strong in math. And certain freshmen who won't work well together get placed in different homerooms.

"It's kind of these puzzle pieces," Jamie said.

The curriculum has evolved constantly. Early versions used Sean Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens. During COVID, they created virtual backpacks with recorded mentor content. Now they run eight "pit stops" across the year, with Google Slides presentations delivered by the mentors themselves — covering everything from Chromebook organization and note-taking to communication with teachers, stress management, extracurricular involvement, and course selection for sophomore year. Counselor Emily Howse meets with freshmen before Christmas to walk through four-year planning, and mentors follow up with their own presentation on choosing classes.

"We don't want to get stale," Brent said.

The content is shaped by end-of-semester surveys from both mentors and mentees, plus teacher feedback on what freshmen are still missing.

Before any of that curriculum kicks in, though, the freshmen meet their mentors in May and exchange contact information for summer check-ins. Then, the day before school starts, they come in for Time Trials — a full walkthrough of the building with their mentor, locker practice (if a locker's broken, they put a work order in right then so it's fixed by day one), a panel discussion run by Principal Frank Arnolts, lunch together, and a dry run of their daily schedule.

"We make a pattern," Jamie said. "You're not going to be able to go to the bathroom between every class. But take these three classes, then go to your locker, then hit the bathroom."

During the first week and a half of school, mentors wear neon pit crew shirts on a rotating schedule by classroom — obnoxious enough that a lost freshman can spot one from down the hall.

"They're supposed to look for those deer-in-the-headlights looks," Jamie said. "'Where's math again?'"

The results showed up early. Freshmen appeared on the eligibility list at lower rates. Discipline referrals dropped. Extracurricular involvement grew — partly because mentors actively invite freshmen to games, tailgates, and club meetings during that 9th-hour window.

"You don't have to be a best friend to this person," Jamie tells her mentors. "But help guide them and invite them places. You don't have to drive them, but meet them there."

The program changes the mentors too. Many return for a second year. Lorelei Arnold, who was interviewed elsewhere in this issue, applied again. So did Bleona Imeri. They're developing leadership skills in real time — stepping out of their comfort zones, learning to read a room, and figuring out how to reach a nervous fourteen-year-old who won't make eye contact.

"It's a dual purpose," Jamie said.

At the end of the interview, Brent checked his watch. He had to drive the bus in five minutes.

That's the Wards. Thirty-one years of PE, coaching, mentoring, bus driving, and building a program from a bad gear shift logo into something that shapes every freshman class that walks through the door. They met at Tri-Valley. They raised their family at Tri-Valley. They're still here.