Jobs in Emergency Medicine Before High School Graduation?
It’s true! Through our continued efforts, COM’s Fire Technology Program now offers two year-round Emergency Medicine courses for high schoolers that, upon or even before graduation, facilitate direct entry into careers in Public Safety, EMS, and Firefighting, among others.
After the success of our fledgling EMR, EMT 1A, and 1B courses offered during the 2023/2024 school year, interest in our dual enrollment pathway that prepared students for a lucrative job just out of high school grew exponentially.
Inquiries were made by students and parents alike about which careers these courses trained their graduates, whether it was really as turnkey as suggested, and how one would go about enrolling for the 2024/2025 school year.
So, it came as a shock to many when informed that a subsequent EMT course was not planned for the following Fall or Spring. Most disappointed were the EMR students who qualified for the EMT courses but would be unable to continue toward certification. Rest assured, I was able to remedy the injustice.
What is not commonly known is that those students were offered priority seating in my evening EMT course at College of Marin to ensure they did not miss the opportunity to begin work in lifesaving just out of high school. For many like myself, college was largely paid for by working EMT and EMS-adjacent jobs. This is not only a way of helping others in need, it is a means of supporting oneself while in medical or nursing school.
Whether from hearsay, administrative pushback, the quality of education, or seeing our EMR students running scenarios on campus, with classmates acting as patients and oozing fake blood and guts, student-body acclaim for the courses “hemorrhaged.” Going into the Summer of 2025, student enrollment in EMR and EMT 1A indicated that the courses would require a perennial, simultaneous pathway alongside NHS’s traditional medical training program.
Of the twenty-six students who graduated from the prerequisite Fire 215 (EMR) course last Spring, more than two-thirds of them enrolled in EMT 1A for the Fall. Through great effort, those seventeen are on track to complete EMT 1B this semester, and sit the certification exam in June. Following first period EMT 1B class is second period Fire 215, with twenty-eight brand-new, fresh-faced sophomores and juniors eager to foray down the path of emergency patient care.
The time, effort, coordination, and faculty onboarding and training required to get these courses operational deserve attention, and since this is my portfolio, I will take a moment to reflect on them. New faculty onboarding and promotion began in July, and by August, the EMT course was running without a snag, thanks to the diligent planning, training, quick thinking, and flexibility of the cadre at the eleventh hour.
I laid out the faculty schedules, created the curricula for all three courses and created their online learning course presence, drafted EMR and EMT skills books, translated the dense course material into daily daily lesson plans in order to meet the high school’s hour-long bell periods, worked rigorously with Novato High’s administration to have physical and online learning materials like new books, workbooks, and necessarily graphic websites cleared for classroom viewing, and even recorded online lectures, which freed up time in class to demonstrate concepts through labs and experiments, run scenarios, or work one-on-one with students who needed additional guidance.
When asked, I served as a support unit for the main teaching cadre—collaborating on the composition of the Squads, assisting with test creation, and preparing progress reports. I mediated between the COM administration and the faculty only when I could help clarify or alleviate incongruities. Most importantly, I offered our faculty opportunities to collaborate with one another and work with the faculty and administrators at Novato High, knowing that they would eventually be at the helm of the dual enrollment courses, navigating the system largely without my interference.
And this is in addition to the three courses I was teaching…Sometimes I even impress myself.
This Spring, twenty-seven students are enrolled in EMR, and they will begin their path just as the previous cohort is finishing theirs, setting off for college and careers in Emergency Response. This is largely due to the caliber of our faculty, whom I will introduce in the next section. Some are retirees from venerated fire agencies such as San Rafael Fire and Berkeley Fire District, while our new hires are with us briefly before being swooped up by surrounding fire and EMS departments. In fact, the only downside to hiring talented Fire Technology alumni is that they’re off to greener pastures as soon as they’re just finding their rhythm teaching! Most have, however, promised to return to COM once their career lives are settled and they have some experiences to share.
With EMR packed beyond capacity this Spring, it will be a welcome challenge to see how we run EMT with that many students in the Fall. Could there be an opportunity to run joint courses with San Marin High School? Only time, finance, and faculty will tell…