Central Los Angeles : Program Targets Latino Students for Health-Care Careers
Project Medico, a program designed to increase the number of Latinos in the health-care field, was launched last weekend and will be held for the next two Saturdays at the University of Southern California.
About 100 juniors from Bell, Huntington Park, Garfield and Roosevelt high schools are participating in the workshops, which include intensive training for taking the Scholastic Assessment Tests and panel discussions with Latino medical professionals.
“One of the biggest stumbling blocks to more admissions to top schools was the fact that not enough kids were taking the SAT and those that were scored 200 points below the [national] average,” said Felix Castro, executive director and co-founder of Youth Opportunities Foundation, which is sponsoring Project Medico.
“We begin intervention at the junior high and high school level for students and parents,” Castro said, with workshops like the one at USC.
Youth Opportunities Foundation is a nonprofit group that was founded in 1964 to get more Latino students into colleges and universities by offering scholarships and holding college fairs.
Castro said he hopes to expand the program to other parts of California with large Latino populations such as the Central Valley region, San Diego and Santa Barbara.
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