Health fair opens career doors Health fair opens career doors (April 09, 2004)

High schools host Health Quest 2004
by Teresa C. Brown

Baby dolls, a dissected cat and an ambulance were some of the many sights and sounds students experienced last week when Foothill and Amador Valley high schools jointly hosted Health Quest 2004.

The annual health fair, which is organized by the students, raises awareness of health- and bioscience-related services and careers, said Debbie Emerson, Amador's Health and Bioscience Academy teacher.

"The kids also get a great chance to work alongside health care professionals and make some valuable contacts," she said.

With both students and professionals setting up booths in Foothill's gymnasium, more than 1,700 students and adults attended the five-hour fair.

Displays ranged from personality tests to the ValleyCare Health Library and Ryan Comer Cancer Resource Center to a student-operated parenthood booth with an "empathy belly" demonstration.

At the parenthood display, 16-year-old Samantha Schmidt tried on the empathy belly, a 35-pound padded chest and belly that simulated the average weight a woman may bear when nine months pregnant. Schmidt awkwardly sat on the floor and slowly stood back up again. Her reaction: "It's too heavy." The hardest part was trying to stay balanced, she said.

Also milling around the parenthood booth were short-term parents: students assigned to care for specially designed baby dolls.

Serena Kurtz, 17, explained how the life-sized doll worked. A microchip is implanted in each baby to keep track of the interaction between the assigned parent and the doll. While in the care of the "parent" for five days, the baby randomly cries, day and night, and it is up to the parent to find out what the baby needs, such as feeding, changing, burping, comforting.

The microchip records how long the baby cries and therefore if the parent took care of the baby's needs and if the baby was handled properly.

Kurtz' baby, that she named Andrew, did not cry a lot, she said. Although one night it woke her up at 1:30 a.m.

Overall, she enjoyed the project; however, on the last day, Andrew cried without respite. Kurtz admitted that she could not stop its crying and she yelled at it to "shut up."

"My mom thought it was a good experience, but she wished it cried more," Kurtz said.

Her final grade for the baby-caring project was a "B," Kurtz said, because the baby cried a total of 88 minutes and the doll's head had fallen back six times.

At another booth, students offered a physiology lesson, using a glass-encased dissected cat. Parent Ursula Mews stopped by the booth as she walked through the fair.

Mews' daughter, a Foothill student, has an interest in genetic engineering, she said, and the fair offers a good opportunity for her and the other students. "Health Quest gives them insight in what they have to do," she said. "It's really good."

This year's fair was a first for Bioscience Academy classes at both Amador and Foothill. "This was our first joint effort with the health fair," said Emerson, who coordinated the event along with Foothill teacher Linda Gullick. "Our kids did a phenomenal job of working together, and as a result, we think we had the best health fair ever."

Amador has been having a fair annually since 1999. "That was the first year of Amador Valley's Health & Bioscience Academy, then called Health Careers Pathway," Emerson said. "I had a group of about 40 sophomore students." Since that time, the 20-booth fair has grown to 40 this year.

The Bioscience Academy, which was offered at Foothill for the first time this year, is an academic program for students with an interest in the health and bioscience industries.

"Students may enroll in the program their sophomore year and continue through the senior year," Emerson said. "The students are grouped in their English, history and health classes, and teachers work together to provide an integrated curriculum that includes common skills and expectations."

After the program, some students take up health-related careers. "I would estimate that the majority are still pursuing careers in health," Emerson said. "In fact, this year the respiratory therapy booth was organized and presented by one of my academy graduates who is in the respiratory therapy program at Ohlone College."

Emerson noted that the school district is conducting a formal follow-up study to not only track those students who pursued health-related careers after participating in the academy, but also to gain their input in how much the program prepared them for college.

While the program's goal is to open career possibilities for students, this year's fair given by the two high schools had another benefit. "Too frequently we hear only about the cross-town rivalry," Emerson explained. "While competition can be a strong motivator, I think that cooperation and collaboration is not only more powerful, but ultimately more rewarding because everybody wins."

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