$1M GRANT FUNDS STUDENTS

What if the next time someone needed life-saving CPR or an anti-allergy shot, a La Salle College Preparatory student was the emergency medical provider? In La Salle’s initiative to offer students potential career pathways, the school has rapidly expanded its medical careers curriculum with the help of a $1 million grant from the Carrico Family Foundation.

The donation is the largest one-time gift in the high school’s nearly 70-year history and has provided funds for high tech equipment, instruction and a newly built CARLOW Center for Medical Innovation.

The CARLOW Center, a combined name honoring both the Carrico family and Maggie Carrico’s late husband Lowman, serves as the homebase for the school’s Medical Careers Pathway, a key portion of La Salle’s five-year Strategic Plan. One of the key tenets of the Strategic Plan is to expose students to career fields in meaningful ways, with the hope that by the time students choose their college programs, they’ve had a real-world look at their career of choice. Most students are asked at 18, 19, or 20 years old to choose a professional field of study, but how do they really know they’re studying something they’ll be happy doing for years to come?

Students who participate in the Medical Career Pathway receive hands on experience in labs up to three times a week; sometimes they work with tissue cultures, other times they strive to create prosthetics with 3-D printing technology and learn the intricacies of kinesiology with the 3-D Anatomage Table at the CARLOW Center.

Ms. Elizabeth Parga, both a science teacher and the center’s director, is most excited about the way the medical careers curriculum empowers students to make better informed decisions about their future. “Time is money in college and when you are wasting your time you are wasting your money. Some people graduate medical school and they realize [being a doctor is] not for them,” Parga said.

In the Medical Terminology courses Ms. Parga has taught, she’s witnessed students light up when they recognize that medical terms come from the roots of words they know in English and Spanish. For 15 year old sophomore Bella Zhang, who speaks English as a second language, the CARLOW Center and its medical program helps her in two ways: at the same time she’s learning about a variety of healthcare professions to pursue, she’s also practicing her English vocabulary and connecting those words to the medical terms she’s learning.