The High School Where Students Wear Scrubs
A Sacramento public high school blends work-based learning, medical science, and academics for a new generation of vocational education.
At Arthur A. Benjamin Health Professions High School (HPHS), students wear scrubs to class. They use algebra to calculate dosages. They study books like The Hot Zone, a nonfiction thriller about Ebola. By the time they graduate, they know the difference between a phlebotomist and a pharmacist, and may have visited one at a local hospital.
High schools used to ask students to choose between career-focused and college-preparatory courses. In California, a strategy called Linked Learning blends both pathways together. State legislators have been so taken with the approach that they recently set aside $500 million to help schools adopt strategies like it.
Linked Learning makes a lot of sense for a field like health care, where most jobs require some kind of advanced training. At HPHS, which has used the strategy for a decade, not all graduates decide to pursue a health care career. But they all leave well informed about a growing sector that offers all kinds of good-paying jobs.
With its theme, uniform, and well-equipped, modern buildings, HPHS gets mistaken for a charter school. It's not: It's a public school that accepts students from all over the Sacramento area. "We've got straight As and straight Fs, and all of our students have the same opportunity to access the curriculum," says Marla Clayton Johnson, the school principal.
Clayton Johnson estimates that about 60 percent of students enroll because they're interested in health care (usually they want to become doctors, nurses, or veterinarians). The rest enroll because they want to go to a small school, or because their parents push them, or because they've been asked to leave another high school in the district. Most students are Hispanic or African-American, and almost all come from low-income families.
The school is closely tied to two foundation-funded reform efforts that have swept the Sacramento City Unified School District. It was one of several small, themed high schools created in the early 2000s with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. And it was an early adopter of Linked Learning, a strategy the district embraced in 2009 with funding from the James Irvine Foundation
Before HPHS opened its doors—initially, as portable classrooms set up in a parking lot—regional health systems committed to joining the school's community-advisory board. They all committed to connecting students with job-shadowing, mentoring, and other work-based learning opportunities.
"We felt like it was a good investment to ensure that health care workforce needs are going to be met," says Laura Niznik Williams, assistant director of government and community relations at the University of California, Davis Health System, one of HPHS's strongest partners. The health system particularly wanted to work with a school that reflected Sacramento's diversity, she says.
Just like students in a career and technical education pathway at a regular high school, HPHS students take a sequence of career-focused courses. But the health care theme spreads beyond medical-science classes and into every academic class.
In her ninth and 12th grade English classes, Marsha Stanley still teaches classics like Romeo and Juliet. But she also teaches nonfiction like And the Bank Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, and poems written by doctors and patients. "I love the theme—it makes The High School Where Students Wear Scrubs - NationalJournal.com:
