Paving a Career Path

Shortly after noon today, 19-year-old Richard Caraig will put on his best dress shirt and tie and don a burgundy cap and gown. Caraig finished high school in June, but tonight, he and his family will celebrate a milestone they consider just as meaningful.

He will be graduating from the Youth Employment and Development Health Academy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The program combines a mentoring program with a work-study curriculum, giving students 10 units of school credit per semester for 16 hours of work per week. “This program gives you the idea of what the workplace is really like,” he said. “It’s important for us. It means we achieved something.”

What the students achieve are job skills they cannot get from fast-food restaurants and clothing stores that are the mainstays of the teen employment scene. Students not only learn practical job and computer skills, but they learn how to write resumes and cover letters.

“It was this or McDonald’s,” said Omeni Osian, a 1996 graduate. “Here you learn to use computers. The other choice was saying [to a customer], ‘OK, that’s [meal] No. 1? What kind of drink do you want with that?’ ”

While some students interested in the medical field are placed in labs or health care departments, others gain clerical skills in administrative offices. Cedars-Sinai budgets $300,000 per year to pay for the students’ salaries.

“The hospital really is a city within itself,” said David Gomes, an Employee Development coordinator. “We have everything here: legal services, finance, food and nutrition, computers, in addition to medicine and nursing.”

But for many of the students, the program wasn’t merely a resume booster; it was a way to keep out of trouble by staying focused on their future.

LaShonta McGlover, 21, completed the program three years ago. McGlover said she is one of the few people from her circle of high school friends who has finished school and is on a career track. She had been interested in nursing and wanted to see first-hand what the job entailed. McGlover now works as a licensed vocational nurse for the county’s Department of Health Services.

“When I get together with my friends, and I ask them how they’re doing, they say I’ve got two babies, or three babies,” McGlover said. “I think, ‘I’m glad I’m not them.’ ”

Another graduate from the program, Nephtali Aldana, 21, said that most of his friends in high school were in gangs. “I was born and grew up in South Central, which a lot of people call the ‘gang capitol’ of L.A.,” he said. “I could’ve gotten involved in a lot of things, but this work [at Cedars-Sinai] gave me something to look forward to.”

Aldana just finished his second year at the University of Georgia and plans to major in business management.

The program began after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. The idea, said Deborah Wilson, director of Employee Development, was to create better career options for at-risk youths in the community.

“We’re looking at the average kid in a tough family situation,” Wilson said. “Maybe their family doesn’t have a lot of money, or their parents aren’t college-educated. Many don’t have access to these jobs.”

Though the majority of students come from Fairfax High School, Cedars-Sinai’s partner school, a handful of students come from other schools in Los Angeles County. Partnering with one to two schools makes it easier to monitor the students academic progress, said Andrea Perry, program director. Students must maintain a 2.0 grade point average to qualify and remain in the program.

Each year, there are 25 slots for students, who must demonstrate a good work attitude and willingness to learn. Since the program began in 1992, more than 300 inner-city high school students have graduated from Cedars-Sinai. A year after Cedars-Sinai began hiring high school students for part-time work, the medical center joined a nationwide youth mentoring program sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund in New York and administered by the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The fund provides an additional $80,000 per year for mentor training programs and social activities. Fifteen hospitals around the country participate.

While teaching job skills has been invaluable, Perry said, providing students with role models in the form of mentors has been one of the program’s keystones to success.

Johana Delgado, 18, said her mentor, Tonie Ortiz, helped her work through problems at home. “There were a lot of family pressures, my parents were getting separated,” she said. “She could understand. And the people treat you like adults, not like teenagers that goof off.”

Delgado said she is looking forward to tonight’s graduation. “Being here has taught me a lot about myself,” she said. “My mom’s really proud.”