Paula Dallacqua, who is in her first year of teaching a combined ninth- and 10th-grade class at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, says she tried to create specific moments for mentoring but soon found she was forcing the issue.

“Those relationships form naturally,” explains Dallacqua, “and the students don’t even always identify it as ‘I am mentoring now.’”

Fannie Lou Hamer is a small public high school that utilizes several progressive educational philosophies; the school’s innovations have led to it being named a “Gold” School of Opportunity by the National Education Policy Center in 2015 and a “model school” by the Center for Reform of School Systems in 2016. While it merges the ninth- and 10th-grades, it returns to traditional grade structure for students’ final two years, by which point struggling students will have hopefully had time to catch up.

Frank Williams, 15, says that when he entered the school last year he was skeptical of the concept but found his elders provided critical guidance. “Building a relationship with older students helps you know what to expect, and they give an example of how to stay on track,” Frank says. “If there were any situations, I had 10th-graders right there to show me how to maneuver through them. My maturity level skyrocketed.”

Now Frank is in 10th grade and he passes on his wisdom to the ninth-graders. “He helps me with my math,” his classmate Kaleb Stobbs says.

Although the ninth- and 10th-graders are mixed together, teachers try to ensure that students in the second year are still challenged. At Parker, the math teacher Dawn Crane says a student in the first year of a multiage class might be asked to solve a problem using two different types of functions while a second-year student would be expected to use three different types.

Meanwhile, for those who lag behind, multiage education provides a crucial practical and psychological boost by blending two grades, says Nathan Larsen, the assistant principal at Fannie Lou Hamer.

“If ninth grade ends and you are only three-quarters of the way toward mastering the material in a traditional school you will be left back, but here you stay with your class and have time in the second year to catch up,” he says.

Extra time is helpful in any school, but it’s crucial at Fannie Lou Hamer because here, in one of the nation’s poorest congressional districts, 50 percent of the children live in poverty and students “frequently come in with gaps in their education—they are overage and undereducated and they have missed out on stuff” says Larsen. (More than half the students also grow up in households in which English is not the main language.)

Friedlaender adds that poor and underserved children frequently struggle with the perseverance required to catch up. “They’ve had so much trauma and heartache in their lives and it becomes survival instinct, so a psychological wall goes up when things don’t come easily,” she explains. “Just saying that you have the ability to master the material and have the extra time can help them develop the capacity to persist.”