A Medical Experiment : Program Gives Youths Early Premed, College Exposure

In David Cooper’s lab at Moorpark High School, the future careers of doctors and nurses are being hatched.

The 22 sophomores around the room’s lab stations Thursday morning belong to the school’s new Health Science Academy, a program designed to give students interested in medicine an early start and tie high school classwork into a real-world context.

Across town, Moorpark College has opened a new Health Sciences Institute offering the first premed and pre-dental degrees in the school’s history.

And in a unique arrangement, the high school and community college programs are linked, with high school students able to earn credit from Moorpark College for some classes.

For the school district, the link provides a chance for some of its students to work with college professors in several classes.

For the college, the connection could help lure more of the area’s top students, who might not otherwise show interest in the community college.

“Part of our hope is that we can attract those 4.0s,” said college physics professor Clint Harper, who is also president of the Moorpark school board. “There’s no disadvantage to going to Moorpark College if you want to go to medical school. You’re going to have smaller classes, better instructors.”

The high school program works by relating everything possible--English composition, math, history--to medicine. Cooper’s mission: to teach his charges basic science with a medical twist.

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“What is the first step of the scientific method?” he calls out.

“Observation,” several students respond.

“Observation: just looking and seeing,” Cooper says.

He then tells how the life-saving drug penicillin was discovered by a scientist watching mold and bacteria interact in a petri dish.

“One of the hugest breakthroughs in science was made simply through observation,” he said.

Other subjects in the academy’s four classes receive similar treatment.

Students in Anna Karchem’s math class may learn the volume of the human heart and the rate at which blood flows through the body. English teacher Deborah Kolodney may have her students read and write about the books “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” as a way of addressing issues raised in medical science. And all four of the academy’s instructors work together on lesson plans, finding ways to link the topics they teach.

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If it works as planned, the academy will show its 46 students the connections between their classwork and the world outside school.

“In math, the most common question is ‘When am I going to need to know this?’ ” Karchem said. “And if you can show them relevance, it helps.”

At Moorpark College, the new Health Sciences Institute offers students associate, pre-professional degrees in dentistry, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, pharmacy and other health specialties. About 30 students are taking classes in the first year.

Most of the institute’s degree programs are designed to give students all the basic course work they need before transferring to a bachelor’s degree program at another school. Two of the degrees--in nursing and radiology technology--will qualify graduates for entry-level jobs in those fields without the need for further study.

High school and college officials started working on their projects independent of each other, but they later saw the advantages of linking them, Harper said.

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As a result, the academy students will be able to take several classes taught by Moorpark College instructors. If the students then attend Moorpark College, they will receive college credit for those classes, credit they can transfer to other colleges or universities.

Not everyone in the academy plans on attending Moorpark College, however. Ashanti Brown, 15, has her sights set on Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she hopes to study neurology.

“The brain is so interesting to me,” she said as she examined two flasks of cloudy liquid during a lab experiment. “I want to help find the cure for brain cancer and other things.”

Although she would not receive college credit for her academy work if she went straight to Howard, she said the program will still help her gain entry into the medical field. “This will be perfect for that,” she said.