Many middle school students would be embarrassed to take their fathers to school with them.

David Bomgardner doesn’t care.

“There’s some other dads that the kids are absolutely mortified that the old man is coming, but that’s our job is to mortify our kids,” he joked.

Bomgardner is one of a handful of dads at Lakota Middle School organizing a group to volunteer on campus throughout the school year. The program is called WatchDOGS Across America and has already been implemented at Sherwood Forest and Adelaide elementary schools in Federal Way. Lakota will be the first middle school to begin the program this year.

“Honestly, we feel it’s more important at the middle school age,” Bomgardner said. “It’s a very confusing time period… They’ve got a lot of outside influences and peer pressure that they have to deal with that the little kids don’t have.”

Bomgardner’s eighth-grade daughter, Sarah, said she is comfortable having her dad on campus.

“I’m proud of him. He doesn’t really embarrass me,” she said. “It’s nice hanging out with my dad and it’s nice having him help people including me, and it’s nice to see him.”

WatchDOGS Across America is a nationwide program aimed at building strong relationships among fathers and students by encouraging volunteers to spend at least one day each year at their child’s school. Fathers, stepfathers, uncles, grandfathers, adult siblings and family friends are all encouraged to participate. Volunteers spend the day on campus helping staff and teachers with a variety of projects.

“It’s so fun to have your dad at school and to have people experience what it’s like to have your dad at school,” said Rubia Garcia, a sixth-grader at Lakota whose dad is a WatchDOG.

“He helps people with their work and he tries to help the teachers with whatever he can,” she said. “It’s like having a substitute teacher in your class. The WatchDOGS help. They try to help as many people that need help in all the classrooms.”

Pam Tuggle, principal at Lakota Middle School, said she is enthusiastic to have volunteers on campus and positive male role models. She said the WatchDOGS will help in math, science, language arts and social studies classrooms as well as provide supervision in the hallways and at lunch time.

“I think they could get in where they could build some good strong relationships with kids and become mentors,” she said.

It has been difficult to recruit males to volunteer on campus, Tuggle said.

“Usually our volunteers are mostly moms,” she said. “It’s really unusual for us to get too many males who are willing to volunteer during the school day.”

Tuggle hopes the WatchDOGS can increase students’ willingness to try math by showing them how math is used in adult jobs. Among the hardest things to teach middle school students is the real-world application of skills they are learning.

“Some of the boys might begin to see ‘Hey, yeah I can use math when I get out of high school,’” Tuggle said.

Tuggle said she hopes to have a WatchDOG on campus at least one day a week this year.

“I’m just happy to have dads more involved, or you know, men more involved in schools,” she said. “The presence of men is really important. Especially at this age.”

Contact Margo Hoffman:

mhoffman@fedwaymirror.com