INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Every month, WISH-TV highlights a local school district with “The Morning Bell,” a conversation focused on new or exciting programs and accomplishments within Indiana schools.

On Monday, Carmel Clay Schools featured the district’s Work-Based Learning program where high school seniors get to work in the community and earn credit.

Chard Reid, program coordinator at Carmel High School, and Amy Pollard, a clinical nurse specialist at IU Health North Hospital joined Daybreak to talk about the program.

The district says the work-based learning, or W.B.L., experience connects a student with a local business that assigns meaningful and authentic career-related experiences. The school, student, and workplace mentor create a training plan to guide the student’s W.B.L. experience. Through this experience, a student will develop specific career-related skills, as well as a variety of employability skills, necessary for success in today’s workforce.

“Students go for two periods and they do that all year long. Most of our internships are paid – I’d say about 90%,” Reid said. “And so we actually have opportunities in almost 30 different career pathways now. So we’ve got nursing, which we’ll talk about today. But we’ve also got accounting and automotive. We’ve got construction and computer science and engineering. And the list goes on.”

To be eligible for a work-based learning experience, the district says students must be enrolled in the capstone course of a career pathway.

Carmel High School currently offers 21 career pathways. Each pathway offers a four-course sequence featuring a principles course, two advanced courses, and a culminating capstone course. 

“It’s helping students to develop those employability skills that are so critical to success in the workplace, regardless of what field they’re going into,” Reid said. “But I think for a lot of our students, they’re still not 100% sure what they want to do. So this is an opportunity to kind of test the waters and see if this career path is right for me.”

The program allows students to see and feel a potential career years before most opportunities typically are available. Pollard says the nursing path enables students to learn the role of a certified nursing assistant.

“They are learning the role of the CNA in the acute care setting. We have four adult and patient units that they’re assigned to. So the medical unit, the post-surgical unit, the progressive care unit, and the intensive care unit. They do all the things that our CNAs do (we call them patient care assistants), but vitals, patient hygiene, learning the importance of mobilizing patients when they’re hospitalized,” Pollard said.

The students get the benefit of this experience and learn about other healthcare professions that they may not know about.

“I think that helps the students grow and help them navigate where they want to go with their career. But then the other side of that is that IU health, we get a benefit that we’re helping to develop that future generation of nurses or health care providers,” Pollard said.

Learn more about the Work-Based Learning program here.

(WISH-TV’s Hanna Mordoh, Amy Pollard – clinical nurse specialist at IU Health North Hospital & Carmel Work-Based Learning Program Coordinator Chard Reid)