Bringing medical training into the high school classroom

By Virginia Fasulo 

Career and technical education addresses gaps 

It is well-established that each student is a unique individual, with specific needs, goals, backgrounds and learning styles. Despite this, education is still heavily standardized, all the way from curricula to testing.  

Because of the changing nature of the country’s career needs, and the sweeping budget cuts of the 1990s, electives and technical education fell by the wayside. Courses such as woodshop and home economics were removed from the curriculum entirely and never replaced. I believe that it would be beneficial to reconsider career and technical education (CTE) as a way to tailor the educational experiences of our students in a way that actually prepares them for the future.  

In October of 2023, my school and I were recognized for our Biomedical Sciences program when I received the Milken Educator Award, one of the greatest honors of my life to date. I hope to use the platform provided by this national award to facilitate real change in the way we view career-based education and to promote the idea of bringing health care programs into more schools in the United States. 

 My story 

My path into education was a long and winding one. My own mother was a home and careers teacher for close to 40 years, and she used to bring me with her to her classroom during the summers, where I helped her clean and prepare for the students’ arrival in the fall.

I was always struck by the amount of care and effort she put into maintaining a well-balanced environment that somehow felt like home while also mimicking a professional kitchen where students could learn real skills in a fun, engaging way. My father painted the walls with culinary themed murals, and my mom always wore her black executive chef’s coat to show her students what a real professional looks like in the field.  

Her culinary classes did the catering for her school’s events, giving her students hands-on experience in food service and hospitality, and helping to bring her school community closer together.  

My mother’s efforts paid off. She was consistently one of the most popular and effective teachers in her district and won multiple awards for her programs throughout the years.  

However, despite witnessing my mother’s success and happiness in her career, I always believed that I would go into medicine in some form or another. I became a veterinary assistant in high school, and this hands-on experience taught me more about medicine than a thousand textbooks ever could have. I still consider it one of the most important and formative times of my youth, and I will be forever grateful to Dr. James Lawless for providing me with that opportunity at such a young age.  

In college, I went into the pre-med program, and signed up with the campus’ volunteer ambulance corps. During this time, I was again struck by how much on-the-job training benefited me and helped develop both physical and soft skills.  

I also worked as a lifeguard, where, as well as serving as a first responder, I also taught swim lessons—my first real experience in the role of teacher. I found myself increasingly drawn to human medicine, thanks largely to my comparative anatomy professor. He was a maverick in his own field, suggesting zoonotic disease epidemiology as a compromise between the fields that held my interest. I latched onto the idea and began working toward my master’s in public health upon graduating. 

In February 2008, one semester before I was scheduled to finish graduate school, my father was diagnosed with Stage 3 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Feeling helpless and terrified, I began training for a triathlon with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to help raise money for research into his disease.  

One spring day after a particularly tough workout, I collapsed on the track, unable to breathe, and was given my own lymphoma diagnosis on April 1, 2008, two days after my 24th birthday.  

Dad and I started treatment on the same day in May, and after six rounds of chemo and a month of radiation, we were both declared to be in remission that October. This experience brought my family closer, and totally changed the trajectory of my life.  

 I finished my master’s in epidemiology in 2010, and afterward, began working for the American Cancer Society. There I organized special events and conducted patient outreach and education. During this time, while working with high school students and teaching patients about their diagnoses and the resources that could help them, I realized that teaching was what I was meant to do. In 2014, I received the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship to go back to school for a degree in education. I graduated with my master’s degree the following year.  

CTE should be relevant and widely available 

I began my teaching career as a high school biology and general science educator, with classes at every level of student ability within the same school day, ranging from special education to Advanced Placement. This was challenging, but the experience also opened my eyes to the real meaning of differentiated education.  

Despite their differences in interests, personality, and academic ability, I found that all of my students responded positively to stories about my personal experiences in science and medicine, and that relating subject matter to real-life scenarios engages their interest in a way that theoretical instruction just cannot do. 

Everything changed for me during my second year of teaching. I was approached by a group of students who wanted to go into medicine but weren’t sure how, or where, to start. As someone whose life has revolved around medicine, both as a recovered cancer patient, and having worked in several different fields of health care and public health, I was well suited to help them.  

I started a Pre-Med Club that year. When 80 students showed up to my first meeting, I knew we were onto something. That summer, I began teaching an anatomy and physiology class, and soon that one pre-med class turned into two, which has since turned into a full blown pre-med curriculum featuring four different courses covering a range of subjects in the medical field.  

Since our first year, the Pre-Med Club has attended six live surgeries, hosted countless guest speakers from various fields, attended various medical trainings including “Stop the Bleed,” done organ dissections and even had a two-hour Facetime session with social media personality and “plastic surgeon to the stars,” Dr. Miami.  

Local hospitals and doctors’ offices have been excited to get involved as well, creating excellent learning, networking and even potential career opportunities for our students. 

 In 2020, we opened a state-of-the-art Biomedical and Exercise Science Lab featuring a fully working hospital wing with three suites, all boasting real, functioning medical equipment. We have two CAE Patient Simulation Training Mannikins, each in their own working hospital bed. We also have a phlebotomy and physical exam suite, and augmented reality simulations. In eight years, my school went from having no medical curriculum at all to being on the cutting edge of career-focused education in biomedical and exercise science. 

Our newest addition to the program is a pre-veterinary and agricultural club, where students learn about animal husbandry, gardening and the veterinary field. We keep five Delaware hens in our school’s courtyard, which is surprisingly easy despite the urban setting of our campus. This project began during the pandemic as a way to keep students engaged while virtual. I hatched the eggs in an incubator in my home, and live-streamed the whole process. It actually worked!  

The students were so excited to see the chicks develop and hatch, and even as adults, the hens are highly engaging for even the most apathetic students. The chicken habitat has become a schoolwide project that crosses curricula: our math and physics departments host chicken races to learn about calculating speed, and we even got our engineering and construction teams to design and build a state-of-the-art chicken coop, including a working HVAC system. 

The changing world of post-COVID education 

With my background in epidemiology, I always knew that the pandemic was never just going to be a two-week-long situation, and that the consequences of it would be far reaching, particularly in health care and education. We are seeing this play out in real time now, with issues ranging from student apathy and record-low mental health to the staff shortages in health care and education.  

We are trying to educate students who are less engaged and more distracted than ever, while also being bombarded by ever-changing policies and political attacks, all created by people who, for the most part, have never been educators. Students are entering the workforce feeling less prepared than they should, both academically and emotionally, and this is, in part, due to the gap between what we teach and what our students need to know—in college and beyond. It is my belief that putting a heavier focus on CTE could help bridge this gap.  

Now, when I teach, I don my white lab coat and my stethoscope to show the students what a professional in the field looks like, the same way my mother did with her chef’s jacket all those years ago. It is my sincere hope that my students leave my classroom feeling as inspired and prepared for their future careers as hers did.

Virginia Fasulo, a 2023 Milken Educator Award winner, is a science teacher at Lodi High School, where she serves as an association representative for the Lodi Education Association. She can be reached at v.fasulo@gmail.com.