LeBron’s mentoring program, with about 1,100 students and their families from all over Akron, was started in 2011 with a mission of raising reading rates for children identified as “at risk” of failing to make it through school and graduate. Starting in the third grade, those students gain access to reading and math tutoring, after-school and summer programming, goodies from LeBron’s corporate sponsors (like Nike), letters and even phone calls from LeBron. And their families can get money for rent, or groceries, or even a TV from Samsung, not to mention help passing high school equivalency classes and finding jobs. It’s out of that group that the first batch of students will graduate from high school, and waiting for them, if they want, are scholarships to the University of Akron or Kent State, in northeast Ohio.