Emergency service workers connect with Charlottesville technical school students

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - Students at Charlottesville Area Technical Education Center got some hands-on learning experience with critical care service providers.

UVA Health Pegasus and Charlottesville-UVA-Albemarle Emergency Communications Center came as part of the visit.

“One of our big pushes here at CATEC is career development,” EMT instructor Stephanie Corbin said. “We are setting students up for their futures.”

Corbin says the opportunity came as a collaboration to cover a range of topics for students.

“This is a combined effort today between the IT program, the firefighter program and the nursing program,” Corbin said. “Pegasus is here today teaching about helicopter safety, air medical utilization, so when to launch the helicopter and how to set up and establish a safe landing zone.”

Corbin says days like these give students the chance to learn from people who are actually doing it.

“Having the ability somebody local coming in as a subject matter expert, it gives the students a different perspective and hearing the same information we’ve been teaching from somebody else,” Corbin said.

For the students, it was an eye-opener.

“This has, like, been a really, really great opportunity for me to do this,” CATEC EMT student Kaya Thompson said. “I definitely see myself doing this right out of high school. And I want to be a paramedic. My teacher is a paramedic, and it’s extra certification years after, but I definitely see the effort and the work, and I want to put that in.”

Thompson wasn’t the only student thinking about a career in emergency services.

“I’m volunteering as a junior firefighter right now in firefighters often secure landing zones for Pegasus and stuff like that,” CATEC Fire Science student Daniel Heetderks said. “So it’s good to kind of get an inside view from how to do those sorts of things.”

EMT instructor Corbin says that is what it’s all about. Showing students there are multiple different routes to choose from.

“There are so many different opportunities regardless of what program they’re in,” Corbin said. “Just because they’re in a nursing or fire program or EMT program, that the job opportunities that these programs can take them to are endless and so this is just opening another door for them that they can look at after their high school graduation.”

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