Do we as parents help find a willing soul at West Point as "sponsor family", or do they draw names out of a hat???
Neither. If you know someone, you can ask them to volunteer. The way the program works is that staff and faculty members volunteer to be mentor families. They must live on post, must be an officer or an NCO, and must have a family. They can request cadets by name or request cadets by some characteristic - home state, company, religion, etc. They must accept at least 2 cadets for each class they get a cadet from- -- in other words, plebes are not left alone with a mentor without aclassmate. Cadets can also request perticular families or families with similar characteristics. If both cadet and mentor request each other,they usually get matched. Otherwise, it is luck of the draw. Both the cadet and the family can pull out of the program if the other does not hold up their end. And, cadets can be unofficially mentored by a different family. The "assignment" of a family to a cadet has no official status after it is made. It is important to note that the family your cadet attends the "Ice Cream Sunday" with during Beast Barracks is NOT automatically assigned as the mentor family. I sponsored four cadets "officially" and four unofficially. I had one cadet "withdraw" by failing to ever show up at my house after repeated invites. Most mentor families take the first step and invite the cadets over several times, but after that, expect the cadet to ask to come over, or, in my case, after the first year, just drop by whenever.
Doug Dribben