Select students have been chosen to be enrolled in the Emergency Medical Technician program at Tyler Junior College on Mondays and Wednesdays. Senior female students who are involved include cheerleader Katelynn Garcia, athlete Kassidy Mumphrey, honor student Stacey Leon, and pharmacy tech student Samantha Soledad attend the 5-hour class after school with adult college students. In addition, they complete 12-hour ambulance clinicals with EMT paramedics where they are learning to save lives.

“The 12-hour shifts are done on our own time,” said Mumphrey. “We have to get a certain amount of patients, and a certain amount of hours to get our certification.”

This is the first time the program has been offered to students at Chapel Hill. By the end of the program, they will have put in 96 hours each of their own time. After one semester, the select seniors will be certified and would be qualified to have full-time jobs.

“We just get pretty much an open view of what the paramedics and EMT’s go through, and they tell us we see things that are totally different than what the nurses at the hospitals see,” said Garcia. “We go into something like a war zone, with what we see. It’s just a good program to be in because we get to be exposed to other things than what other programs here offer.”

CTE Director Brad Langley and CTE Counselor Charlissa Foster are working to get a similar program here at Chapel Hill for future students coming in.

“At first they told us we couldn’t do it at all, because we were taking so many other classes, to graduate with our Associates Degree, but somehow Mrs. Foster and Mrs. Juarez were able to work it out to where we could fit it into our 7^th and 8^th period, so now we have after school to work on our college classes and our EMT classes”, says Leon, “So for me, I have four different college classes and then this is another college class added onto that, heading into next semester.”

Foster called the students, over the summer, and asked if they wanted to participate with the understanding that it would have to be a priority in order to be successful in the program.

“You have to put your own time into it,” said Soledad. “For example, I work and have school during the morning. After school, I have to balance everything and make sure you study, just do what you can.”