Like most kids, Alaina James is nervous about changing schools.

The 11-year-old from Plymouth is making the upward move from Bird Elementary to the sixth-grade confines of West Middle School, along with some 300 other fifth-graders from five different elementary schools in the Plymouth-Canton district.

Understanding their nervousness, and buoyed by the success of last year's Link Crew mentoring program for incoming freshmen at the high school park, district administrators went about finding ways to make the transition easier for the new middle schoolers.

To accomplish it, they turned to the WEB (Where Everybody Belongs) program, a national idea that puts eighth-grade mentors in leadership positions with small groups of sixth-graders to help them ease into their new surroundings. The program is being used at all five of the district's middle schools.

And the new sixth-graders, like Alaina, appreciate it.

“My biggest (concern) is not knowing where the classrooms are,” Alaina said. “(WEB) is making me feel a lot more comfortable at West.”

Administrators know those are the kinds of fears kids harbor as they move to a new school. Students don't know who their teachers are going to be, where their classrooms are, how the lockers work (an especially big fear for students).

The idea of WEB, according to West Middle School Principal Clint Smiley, is to ease those concerns. The mentors — all of them members of the National Junior Honor Society — work with small groups of sixth-graders, playing games to introduce them to each other and teaching them what life is like at the new level.

Teachers were trained in the program, then came back and trained more than 50 eighth-graders (at West alone) who signed up to be mentors. The mentors help the new kids on the block learn their schedules, show them where classrooms are and how to work their lockers.

“Starting a new school is very stressful, and the biggest stressor is the unknown,” Smiley said. “They don't know about their lockers, they don't know where their classrooms are. (WEB) gets them into the school, and when they leave ... they're much more relieved.”

That's what eighth-grader Rachel Dunlavy of Canton hopes. She knows what it's like coming into a new school, and she didn't even come from within the district, having done her elementary school years at All Saints Catholic School.

“I came from a Catholic school, and I didn't really know anybody,” Rachel said. “I wanted to help the sixth-graders, because I know it was really rough when I came in here.”

The program took a school-wide (and district-wide) effort. West Middle School Counselor Valerie Swift said their teachers took the program and molded it to fit West's needs. For instance, West administrators grouped the incoming students by homeroom, something the WEB model doesn't call for.

“We wanted them to get to know the other students in their homerooms, because they're going to be with them in homeroom and the first hour of the day, at least,” Swift said. “It's working out pretty well, I think.”

Emily Chepynoha, and 11-year-old sixth-grader from Plymouth, felt more comfortable by day's end.

“Going from an elementary school to a middle school is a big change,” Emily said. “They're teaching us how sixth grade works.”