Magnet Gives Students a Taste of Medicine : Education: Van Nuys High and Valley Presbyterian Hospital work together to offer teen-agers hands-on experience in health care.

Grace Kim remembers the time the electrocardiogram of an elderly patient suddenly went Code Blue.

As the 14-year-old high school freshman watched, the sharply angled line on the screen abruptly flattened, alarming the teen-ager until it leaped to life again a second later.

Jerry Lai, also a Van Nuys High School ninth-grader, recalls the queasy pang he felt the first time he drew blood with a syringe. Last week, he tried it again--this time without any undue turning of the stomach.

These are the realities of health care that Grace, Jerry and 120 fellow students experience during weekly work sessions at Valley Presbyterian Hospital.

But the youths aren’t drawn from the hospital’s usual corps of volunteers. Instead, they belong to the first medical magnet program in the San Fernando Valley and the first in the entire Los Angeles Unified School District to pair a public campus with a private facility.

Launched in August after months of planning, the program is designed to acquaint students with the medical field. More than just spotlighting physicians and nurses, however, the magnet seeks to expose students to all aspects of the health-care industry, down to the unheralded--but crucial--work performed in hospital accounting offices, kitchens and even linen closets.

“We’re not trying to make them all into young doctors,” magnet Coordinator Joan Martin said of the students, who are freshmen and sophomores from throughout the district. “We want them to be aware of everything that goes into the medical field.”

The program is an expansion of the school’s popular math-science magnet, from which all but one of the seven teachers were recruited. Several boast backgrounds in health-related fields, including a former U.S. Navy emergency medical technician, a longtime medical research analyst, a clinical psychologist and a onetime paramedic.

“When they started talking about it, I started screaming, ‘I want to be in it!’ ” said Lola Rigby, who teaches the sophomore health science class.

“My background has been in medical research for 20-some years before I went into high school teaching. In the medical profession, there are so many facets that a young person can get into.”

Throughout the spring and summer, Rigby and her colleagues and hospital officials met to plan a curriculum that essentially had to be built from scratch. Although L.A. Unified’s two other medical magnets have been around for some time, the Van Nuys group felt it should set its own agenda to serve the needs of a smaller pool of students and of Valley Presbyterian.

The result is a highly structured program in which students split their time between the campus and the hospital just half a mile away, where they do their weekly fieldwork, attend some classes and abide by a strict dress code that elicits groans (no jeans or fishnet stockings, among other rules).

Teachers weave medically oriented concepts into the required educational framework. Sophomore English instructor Tim Howard, who spent much of the summer traipsing through university libraries in search of material, has had his students compare the 19th-Century classic “Frankenstein” to “Mutation” by Robin Cook, a contemporary author best known for his medical suspense novel “Coma.”

“The focus of that unit was the effect of medical advances on humanity,” said Howard, who served as a paramedic for four years prior to teaching. “Many of the concerns that Mary Shelley brought up . . . are the same ones that Robin Cook brought up in a much more scientific form in 1991--how a creature could be created, about the actual technology of gene splicing.”

Howard’s syllabus also taps George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which should spark discussions on behaviorism and genetic engineering.

“It certainly has been exhilarating . . . because we’re throwing materials at students we don’t normally throw at 10th-graders. It is very sophisticated,” Howard said.

History teacher James Bechtel is equally enthusiastic about the program. Although he originally approached teaching freshmen with some trepidation--”I’d been convinced that ninth-graders were little terrors”--a counselor finally persuaded him to sign on to the medical magnet.

Drawing from books with titles such as “Plagues and People,” Bechtel’s course demands that his freshmen regard world history partly from an epidemiological and medical perspective. Last week, for example, students considered various theories of the Aztec conquest by Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes, including the argument that smallpox, and not just superior weaponry, did much of the work of wiping out the native people.

“These kids are showing enthusiasm beyond what regular students would do,” Bechtel said. “Some of these kids are simply brilliant. Their skills are extraordinary.”

Several students call their academic course load challenging. In addition to their magnet classes, which include medical-illustration and computers units for freshmen and physics for sophomores, the teen-agers take foreign language and physical education courses.

There is talk among some of switching into the general math-science program because of the rigidity of the medical magnet schedule. Some youths complain that the time slots of their magnet classes prevent them from enrolling in other electives or participating in extracurricular activities such as orchestra or sports.

But many say the trade-off is worth it--especially because of the hours spent at the hospital, where they rotate to various stations, from laboratories to medical floors to administrative offices.

Sophomore Yu-Yung Chen, 15, who hopes to become a pediatric nurse, got a lucky draw in the station lottery: the intensive-care unit for newborns. The Van Nuys teen-ager assists the staff by organizing supply cabinets, running errands and soothing crying infants. “These are the smallest ones I’ve held,” she said while cradling a week-old preemie to her chest.

The first time she held an infant at the hospital, the baby’s intestine was hanging outside its body in a small sac. Surgeons were to place it inside.

“I was afraid of damaging it,” Yu-Yung said. “Sometimes it makes you feel sad to see them so sick. They’re in pain. They’re really small and fragile.”

Less wrenching are Raina Roessle’s duties in the linen department, where she folds blankets and towels and delivers linen packs throughout the hospital. The Panorama City 14-year-old said her experience has shown her how much goes into running a hospital. But Raina is aiming to be a physician and had hoped to be assigned to another department.

“I wanted autopsy, but they wouldn’t give it to me,” she said. “I don’t think they want me in there.”

Which is true, according to hospital officials.

In farming out the students, officials said they tried to avoid stations that could involve traumatic situations, such as the emergency room, or violate patient privacy, such as the labor and delivery wing. Teen-agers are also legally barred from the nuclear medicine and radiation therapy departments.

Many officials were initially wary of having teen-agers wander their halls, but Allan Serviss, head of the hospital’s medical staff, said the feeling has dissipated.

“If I can speak for the staff of the hospital as well as the medical staff, they’ve been really enthusiastic about the program,” Serviss said. “The maturity level has been higher than our expectations.”

In fact, the hospital and the school district are already studying the idea of expanding the program. Two months ago, the district authorized a developer to craft a plan for a mixed-use facility on a parcel of district-owned property directly across from Valley Presbyterian. The facility would include a 98,000-square-foot medical magnet high school.

“The program’s a real winner,” Board of Education member Roberta Weintraub said. “We’re going to have to fight kids off as word of the program grows and grows.”

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