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This is the first study to examine the benefits of informal mentoring on the educational resilience of sexual minority youth. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that having a mentor, especially one that is a teacher, is associated with higher levels of post-secondary participation for gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth. Teacher-mentors are particularly significant to the educational resilience of sexual minority women of color. Unfortunately, sexual minority women of color are also the least likely to be mentored by teachers. Our findings underscore the urgency to understand how school-and community-based mentoring efforts can better meet and respond to the needs of sexual minority youth of color, especially women.

This retrospective, mixed method study examined the natural mentoring experiences of a national sample of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Sexual minority youth were found to be less likely than heterosexual youth to have family members as mentors, but more likely to be mentored by school adults. A paradox was noted wherein sexual minority youth, while more likely to be mentored, miss out on the cumulative benefit of mentoring since they meet their mentors almost a year later than heterosexual youth. Findings also suggest that the prevailing same‐sex pairing of mentors and mentees in formal mentoring programs warrants re‐examination for sexual minority youth, as male sexual minority youth were found to be more likely to have female natural mentors than heterosexual male youth. Implications for mentoring programs with a particular focus on positive youth development for sexual minority youth were also discussed.

This article argues that metal detectors bestow an organizational stigma to schools. One symptom of this is students' heightened level of fear at school. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and a matched-pair design, this study finds that metal detectors are negatively correlated with students' sense of safety at school, net of the level of violence at school. However, this association is different for urban students. The negative association between metal detectors and urban students' sense of safety is 13% less than what it is for students attending suburban or rural schools.Metal detectors are one way that American public schools have chosen to manage the problem of weapons in schools. Despite the high financial costs associated with acquiring and operating metal detectors (Green, 1999), many school districts have been able to afford them by turning to state and Federal funds that have been set aside for investments in school safety (Ballard, 1998;. According to recent statistics, 6% of public schools are conducting daily or random metal detector searches of students. The majority of these schools are in urban areas. Ten percent of students aged 12

Adolescents spend only a fraction of their waking hours in school and what they do with the rest of their time varies dramatically. Despite this, research on out-of-school time has largely focused on structured programming. The authors analyzed data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002) to examine the out-of-school time activity portfolios of 6,338 high school sophomores, accounting for time spent in school clubs and sports as well as 17 other activities. The analytical sample was balanced with respect to sex and racially and ethnically diverse: 49% female, 67% White, 10% Latino, 10% African American, and 6% Asian and Pacific Islander. Approximately 76% of the sample attended public schools, 30% were in the highest socioeconomic quartile, and 20% were in the lowest socioeconomic quartile. The authors identified five distinct out-of-school time activity portfolios based on a cluster analysis. The demographic profiles of students by portfolio type differed significantly with respect to sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, school type and location. Students by portfolio type also differed significantly in terms of measures of academic success, school behavior, victimization and perceptions of school climate, controlling for covariates. These findings underscore the importance of more complex considerations of adolescents' out-of-school time.