High school is more than their love; it's become their vocation
ZERO period at Palmdale High School begins at 6:30 a.m., an hour before the regular school day. It is optional, and for much of the year, students who have chosen this particular form of self-punishment arrive in near darkness, with hesitant strips of pink cloud beginning to glow in a cobalt sky.
So it is slightly surprising to walk into Steve Wilson's class at 6:35 a.m. and find 32 students not only present and awake but also barely able to contain their enthusiasm over the start of another school day.
"Once you come to the class and you know what you're going to be doing, you want to get up in the morning," said Rosa Bermeo, a bright-eyed 11th-grader with wavy brown hair who is dressed, as are most of her classmates, in a yellow sports shirt stamped with the class logo.
The class is sports medicine, and it is offered by Palmdale's Health Careers Academy, a 15-year-old school-within-a-school that has become a model of what a successful career education program can be. Students in the academy learn such real-world skills as giving injections and reading X-rays and also take college-prep math, English and science with a medical focus.
In Wilson's class, students don't learn just from textbooks. They practice clinical techniques, often using student athletes who limp in with various minor strains, pulls and bruises.
This morning, in a back room, juniors Veronica Buenrostro and Mirtha Ramirez are icing and massaging soccer player Davey Ramos' sore knees.
"Ow!" Davey says, wincing as ice meets flesh.
The academy isn't for everybody, and some students wash out by their junior year. But those who stick it out seem to share a joy in learning that often eludes their peers.
"It makes you want to be better," Rosa said. "It makes you want to strive to be the best you can be."
YOU don't always hear talk like that in big public high schools like Palmdale, which serves a largely poor, predominantly Latino student body on a low-slung campus in the Antelope Valley. That is why programs like this are being watched in education circles and being copied by school districts all over the country.
Once, this sort of learning had a different name: vocational education. But by the 1990s, it had been largely discredited for selecting students by race and class and discouraging them from higher education.
