Manalapan pupil says Natural Helpers is an outstanding program
My name is Meredith Beirne and I am a seventh grader at the Manalapan Englishtown Middle School in Manalapan. I am writing to you because I think everyone who reads your newspaper should know about a great program called Natural Helpers at my school. I want people to know about it so it continues for many years.

Our guidance counselor, Mrs. Barbara Rosenblum, runs this program and has been the adviser for many years. I am a Natural Helper at MEMS along with about 30 other seventhgraders. We became Natural Helpers at the beginning of seventh grade and we will do it until we graduate at the end of eighth grade.

Natural Helpers is a peerhelping program that is very different from other programs. We learn communication and helping skills so we can help our friends in school and others in the community. It is very simple. We all know that when we have problems and need help we often go to our friends who we can trust for advice or just to listen.

The Natural Helper program teaches us the skills to better help our friends when they come to us with a problem.

Natural Helpers are picked by their friends and not by the teachers or principal. Every seventh grader writes down who they think is trustworthy and who we think is helpful.

Mrs. Rosenblum makes sure that every kind of kid is represented in the Natural Helpers group, from the smart kids to the athletic ones, to the popular ones, to the less popular ones.

Once we were picked, we actually went away all together for a weekend retreat to get to know each other and we got 30 hours of training on how to help others and take better care of ourselves.

We learned if a problem is too big for us to help we know what resources are there for our friends.

After the retreat and for all of the seventh and eighth grade we go once a week and meet with Mrs. Rosenblum for more training on stress, school pressures, relationships with family and friends and drug and alcohol abuse.

I want everyone to know about this program because there should always be money in the school budget for it so MEMS kids will always benefit from it.

In fact, I believe there should be a Natural Helper program at the high schools in the Freehold Regional High School District so we can continue to learn more skills.
Meredith Beirne
Manalapan