For the last four years, Winston-Salem State University has partnered with Cook Literacy Model School to host a mentorship program between the kids and college students.

But since the local school board voted to close Cook at the end of this school year, the program will be moving elsewhere.

To close out the years-long partnership, mentors held a special farewell celebration involving an unlikely combination of activities: poetry and basketball.

In one game, the children bounce the ball back and forth, calling out one letter for each pass until they spell the word “poetry.”

At another hoop, flash cards of words like “simile,” “haiku,” and “lyric” are scattered around the floor. The kids take a shot from those cards, and when they make a basket, they try to use the word in a sentence.

It’s a fitting celebration for the Radical Academic Mentoring Service, or RAMS program.

Winston-Salem State University Professor Dawn Hicks Tafari leads the initiative and planned this end-of-year event, featuring the Kids Poetry Basketball program based in Greensboro.

“Sometimes we, especially as a society, we think there's something wrong when children are playing, but that's how we learn, is through the curiosity. It’s through the exploration of play," she said.

Tafari says it’s beneficial for her university students to see activities like this too — they’re in this program, in part, to learn about working with kids.

“They are able to sit back and see how children light up when you integrate academics with athletics," she said.

There are 29 mentors in the RAMS program this year. They’ve been regularly meeting with 80 fourth and fifth-grade students for lunch at Cook. The mentors talk with the kids about their feelings, fears and goals.

Then, at the end of the program, the children visit Winston-Salem State for a closing celebration. But this year, Tafari decided there should be a party at Cook too.

“I wanted to just let them have some fun in their gym, you know, the gym that they have played in for so many years, and really just do something nice for those children," Tafari said. "And the teachers. The teachers get to have a little fun as well.”

The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school board voted last fall to close Cook due to declining enrollment. Tafari said that news was tough to take in and cast a bit of a shadow over the year.

But the RAMS program will live on. Next year, they’ll be at North Hills Elementary. Until then, Tafari says they’re giving their all to Cook.

“Supporting the teachers, supporting the students, and helping them take this school year out with a bang," she said.

Off at one end of the court, Nasjah Dickey, one of the mentors, is all smiles, watching the kids play. But she says it’s going to be hard to say goodbye.

"I've kind of formed an attachment to the kids, and it's like, it’s gonna be very bittersweet and sad that I won't be able to connect with them anymore," she said. "I just hope that I had an impact on them and that they will remember me.”

While Dickey won’t be with this group of students anymore, she wants to become a school counselor when she graduates. She likes the idea of building kids up and helping them work through their problems.

“That was kind of what inspired me to do this, because I wanted to be the person that I never had,” she said.

And the students say the mentorship program has made a difference. Like Fifth Grader Sophia Villalba-Dejesus.

“I love it a lot, because I can tell them whatever is happening and stuff, and they won't tell nobody else," she said. "And I can express my feelings and how I'm thinking to them.”

She says her mentor also helped her prepare to transition to a new school next year. Her classmates, YaMasie Raymundo-Bristow and Zion Greene, said the same. They think mentors would be helpful for all kids.

“They could tell you stuff to motivate yourself during the day," Raymundo-Bristow said.

“I do think it's important to have a mentor for like, a sense of guidance in your life," said Zion Greene.

Villalba-Dejesus summed the relationship up like this: “They’re like your motivational best friends.”

And while it’s usually the mentors cheering on the kids, the celebration at Cook ended the other way around. The children gave a big round of applause for their WSSU mentors before the university students headed back to their school.