Gaby Mendez is so persuasive, she can talk a fourth-grader into attending summer school voluntarily. The 31-year-old case manager for Neighborhood Houses CASASTART program projects an aura of calm authority. Its a handy trait to have when ones job involves keeping track of 18 students in second through fifth grades whose housing or family situations place them at high risk of eventually falling into drug abuse and delinquency.

For the past two years, Mendez has been one of two case managers at Sitton Elementary, the northernmost of Portlands public schools, where 81 percent of the 294 students qualified for free and reduced-price lunch programs in the 2009-10 school year.

Its Mendezs job to check that her students have made it to school, observe how theyre working with their peers in the classroom, encourage them to participate in after-school and summer programs and give them one-on-one tutoring. She keeps in touch with their parents to ensure that progress at school isnt hampered by trouble at home. She helps parents find employment or housing when they need it, and connects them to other social services.

If we do enough work in the early years, Mendez says, we can help students be more successful later.

In an example of just the sort of activism the Skidmore Prize is designed to recognize, Mendez started a monthly Latino Parents Meeting in 2009. Sittons student body is 40 percent Latino, and Mendez says the parents had little involvement in the school.

In other countries, the culture is different; theres a separation, she says. Parents send their kids to school to learn and parents take care of them at home, but they arent involved in education. But for your child to be successful, we do need some parent involvement.

At the meeting, Mendez has brought in experts to teach home math exercises and other teaching skills, a financial adviser and representatives from the County Library and Hacienda CDC.

[Mendez] anticipated and met all of the needs that might have kept families away, wrote Jane Fielding, Sittons principal. Through her care, a community has been built and their contributions to the school has been felt.

Mendez says she enjoys her work, but, like everyone in social work now, she struggles to make the most of tight assets. There are not enough resources available for families that need them, she says. It limits us in ways that we can support them through various challenges they may face.

You, reader, can change that.