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Monday, November 16, 2009


Program Creates Eager Students

By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Journal Staff Writer
      Editor's note: This personal column is the latest in a series of Journal reports on New Mexico's long-standing achievement gap between Hispanic and Anglo students. We are looking at the problem from different angles and featuring people, schools and programs that appear to work, along with those that don't.
    Arianna London hoists a glob of gummy cat guts in her gloved hands, presenting the bundle of neatly eviscerated organs to teacher Bob Sorensen as if it were a gift.
    "Merry Christmas," she jokes as Sorensen's eyes twinkle and mine, well, wince. Just a little.
    Moments before, Sorensen had asked the class, "Who wants to dissect a cat?" and nearly every hand in the room flew up.
    London and two classmates were the, um, lucky ones.
    Hands had also flown when he asked for volunteers to take my blood pressure (anyone who visits his class is an automatic guinea pig, I learned too late).
    You might have thought he had asked who wanted out of school early, the kids were so eager to slap a cuff on me.
    Here, though, Sorensen's students at Capital High School in Santa Fe come early — he sets the limit at 6:30 a.m. or they might come earlier than that — and stay late. They come on weekends, school vacations, lunch.
    "We practically have to make them leave sometimes," he says.
    It's true. The students enrolled in his Healthcare Careers Pathway program, now in its fourth year at Capital, want to be here.
    What a concept.
    This is no small feat. Capital, located in the decidedly less coyote-and-concho-belt chic part of Santa Fe, has for years struggled with a bad image, high poverty and lower than average national math and reading scores.
    Nearly three in four students are classified as "economically disadvantaged." Slightly more than half of its students graduate, according to the state Public Education Department.
    For Hispanic students, who comprise 89 percent of Capital's enrollment, the achievement gap is wider. Their graduation rate is just under 48 percent.
    "People think of us as the south-side school, the ghetto school with the gang wars and dropouts," Sorensen says. "But these kids had never been challenged. They've always been told, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.' They were never told what they could do, and they were never told why they were doing it."
    Sorensen, fellow Pathway teachers Natalie Garcia and Stephanie Gurule and community coordinator James Brookover tell the students what they can do — relentlessly.
    They expect much of their students.
    "We're not doing our jobs if they're not griping," Sorensen says as London rolls her eyes.
    She knows just how true that is.
    Healthcare Careers Pathway is a dual-enrollment program — meaning students earn both high school and college credit — that exposes them to a variety of medical fields in a rigorous, real-world, hands-on way.
    The program was conceptualized by Sorensen, a biology teacher with a background in the medical industry, and born of a need Brookover says the local medical community has for more trained professionals.
    Through school funding and a number of grants from local and national entities, including the McCune Foundation and the Santa Fe Medical Society, and partnerships with Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, Santa Fe Community College and Eastern New Mexico University, Pathway has grown from a class of 18 crammed into a cleaned-out storage room to a four-year program with more than 220 students in a high-tech lab that rivals those at some colleges.
    Students here draw blood, perform urinalysis, take EKGs, take vitals, identify bacteria, solve murders (OK, staged ones), suture wounds.
    Field trips find them elbow-deep in cadavers at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque or vaccinating, de-horning and castrating cattle on the Fort Union Ranch.
    "We do things a student wouldn't see until medical school," Sorensen says.
    But it's not all fun and cat guts.
    The work they are required to do is on level with first-year medical school. This, while still maintaining their regular high school requisites.
    "It's hard, but the things we learn here help us improve in all our other classes," says Greg Gonzales, who credits the program for pushing him toward his goal of becoming the first in his family to graduate from high school and attend college.
    Students wear lab coats — teal for the newbies, white for the upper-level kids — during class, though it's not unusual for the students to don their coats throughout the school day.
    "The lab coats are a status thing," teacher Garcia says. "These are the new cool kids."
    Like the school, Pathway is populated predominantly by Hispanic students, many from families where English is a second language.
    Though data from the program will not be completed until next year, Sorensen and the others say there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to show that Pathway is helping to narrow the achievement gap.
    "We're seeing our graduation rates go up, our test scores go up," Sorensen says. "We estimate that 90 to 95 percent of our Pathway kids are graduating and about 80 to 90 percent are going into post-secondary training, most in the medical or veterinarian fields."
    The program works, he says, because it makes education relevant, challenging, limitless.
    "This is something that they want to do. This is something that means something to them," he says, still with that twinkle in his eye. "It's no longer just reading from a book. This is something they can do, and isn't that wonderful?"
    My blood pressure, incidentally, was pretty wonderful, too.
    UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Joline at 823-3603, jkrueger@abqjournal.com or follow her on Twitter @jolinegkg.