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Sherman Indian High School
valedictorian chooses medical career path
A groundbreaking program designed to create five new career paths for students at Riverside’s Sherman Indian High School has had an impact in its first year. Sherman’s valedictorian has turned her eyes toward a future in health care after taking an Introduction to Health Career Occupations course offered through the Riverside County Office of Education.
The course is one of a half-dozen classes introduced at Sherman last fall. The classes were developed by the county Office of Education and are taught by instructors from RCOE’s Career Technical Education unit. The project is being underwritten by a $2.5 million grant from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.
Tracey Vackar, CTE Project Coordinator for the county office, said that in the program’s first year, Sherman’s Class of 2011 produced 18 students who graduated with 22 Career Technical Education certificates in addition to diplomas.
One of those certificated graduates was valedictorian Unique Darrell. While waiting on stage for commencement ceremonies to begin, Unique said that entering her senior year, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to study in college. She had distinguished herself in four years at Sherman. She was a two-year member of the National Honor Society, junior and senior class president, and a three-sport athlete before earning valedictorian honors.
But it wasn’t until the 18-year-old member of the Tohono O’odham Nation from Sells, Arizona, took the Career Technical Education health careers class that all her promise took on a focus. “I wasn’t sure before,” she said. “Now I want to be an ultrasound technician. We learned about a lot of medical careers in the class. I liked the ultrasound work. It will be really helpful in our (Native American) community.”
Unique plans to take up those studies at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, where she is already enrolled. Gateway has a strong health care professions program, with 16 areas of study ranging from nuclear medicine technology to health services management.
Sherman’s health careers course was taught by CTE instructor Kathy Thompson. Thompson said the class surveyed a range of health care opportunities and featured regular guest speakers who were practicing professionals. “I liked it a lot,” said Unique. “Especially if you don’t know what you want to do, exploring things like that is really helpful.”
Sherman Indian High, a Native American boarding school, has been operated by the federal government in Riverside for 108 years. This year’s commencement ceremonies reflected the diversity of Native American culture. About 50 graduates of the Class of 2011 represented at least 23 different tribes. The campus’s theater-sized auditorium was filled with extended families, many having made long journeys to witness the event. Vehicles in the crowded parking lot bore license plates from across the West, most prominently Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Wyoming and South Dakota in addition to California.
In the first year of the Career Technical Education program at Sherman, classes included conservation and plant soil science, and medical math and medical terminology as well as the career survey course. Plans call for steady expansion of the program to other fields.
The goal of the three-way partnership is to give Native American students viable new career choices, in the process developing an educational model to combat a chronic 25 percent unemployment rate among Native Americans.
For information contact:
Rick Peoples,
Public Information Officer
Telephone: (951) 826-6642
Fax: (951) 826-6199
rpeoples@rcoe.us
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