Fairborn, though, has run a class to get students interested in healthcare to determine if they want a career in that field for 16 years under high school teacher Amanda Spirk.
“We have a high interest of students that want to go into biomedical sciences,” Spirk said. “It’s kind of nice to have a pathway for our students, for those four years.”
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
Spirk’s classes are extremely popular. The district offered four first-year healthcare classes this year and added another teacher, Alexis Knick, to take on some of the load.
Biomedical classes are offered for second-year students, third-year students and fourth-year students as well.
While pre-nursing is a popular course in career centers, the Fairborn class is different. Sprik’s class aims to explore health, the body and the kinds of careers that could come from an interest in health care. Students do get credentialed, including in CPR, but Spirk wants the students who come in with a specific idea of what they want to do after high school to know if they want to do that or not.
Many students come in freshman year wanting to be a doctor, a nurse or an anesthesiologist, Spirk said. Those careers are popular because those fields make money or more visible. But the focus in the class is to introduce them to other careers.
“Most of our kids don’t ever think about ultrasound tech or X-ray tech or phlebotomy,” she said.
She encourages them to explore various careers and takes her students on field trips. She estimates 90% of students who take all four years of her classes end up in healthcare careers.
When I visited Spirk’s high school seniors, who have taken her class for four years, the students were writing “I wonder” statements about the body. Spirk uses Project Lead the Way for her curriculum, which is project-based and focuses on inquiry.
Senior Taylor Yocum said she’d always had an interest in the medical field and said she began taking Spirk’s class as a freshman. She liked how the class was taught, so she kept going.
She always wanted to be a nurse, but said through Spirk’s course, she found out what specialties in nursing don’t work well for her. She’s interested in emergency room nursing after a visit to an ER through Spirk’s class.
“I just want something kind of fast paced and different every day,” Yocum said.
Yocum is also the Health Occupations Sciences Association president for Fairborn. Fairborn’s HOSA team has placed at state competitions multiple times in the last few years.
Yocum said she tells freshmen who are interested in healthcare that they should just try HOSA.
“I’m always like, okay, just join,” Yocum said. “Like, come see a meeting. Come see what we have.”
Senior Brayden Rawlings said he was originally interested in travel nursing as a career, but through Spirk’s class, he found more about different careers. He’s now interested in getting a two-year degree and becoming a radiology technician.
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
“I learned more, and more in detail, about certain careers that I wouldn’t have done before,” he said of his high school experience.
Spirk, who started as a high school biology teacher, said her class is different every day.
She said one of her favorite parts is watching the growth of freshmen students, who feel they need to get through the process of asking questions to the right answer, to seniors, who are more comfortable making mistakes.
“Really the process leading up to it is what our goal is, is how do we go through and teach, experimental design, running an experiment, analyzing it, and you might not get the results you thought,” Spirk said. “Then, going back to look at the process that you did to build up to that. And I think that’s science, right?”
Eileen McClory is an education reporter for the Dayton Daily News.
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