Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home High School seniors Samantha Virtue, Brook Womack and Lilly Lindsey have spent time this year learning to make crowns, working with fillings and taking dental impressions.
They are among 60 high school students statewide who have been traveling to Oregon Health Sciences University since November to participate in the Dental Exploration Program.
In the program, students meet monthly for a lecture presentation, followed by hands-on laboratory projects, with assistance by dental students. Their final session is scheduled for April 1.
“They teach us about a different field in dentistry each month,” Lindsey said. Topics include orthodontics, dental anatomy, oral surgery, dental implants and restorative dentistry.
Sweet Home High School science teacher Michelle Snyder got them plugged into the HSU program through her health occupations class.
“Anybody could have applied,” she said.
The three seniors decided to apply to get a taste of the profession. All three were considering careers in dentistry. Virtue said she intends to continue after high school, planning to pursue dental hygiene.
While they considered becoming hygienists, both Womack and Lindsey changed their minds after their HSU experience and say they will pursue careers in medical imaging.
“Any exposure to a medical field when you’re going into a medical field is a positive experience,” Snyder said, noting that medical programs are all highly competitive. The HSU program gives students a leg up as they turn in applications.
This experience was better than doing a job shadow, Virtue said. “When you shadow, you just get to watch. This is hands-on.”
In fact, it was the hands-on part, putting hands in someone else’s mouth, that helped Lindsey make her decision to go into medical imaging.
“We work on each other,” Lindsey said. “We use fake stuff (simulations) too.”
Womack said she decided not to be a hygienist because of the way hygienists must lean over patients. She has a problem in her neck that makes it uncomfortable.
The experience confirmed her choice.
The program goes in depth, Lindsey said. “There’s a lot more than I thought there was going to be.”
“It’s not dumbed down,” Virtue said, and the high school students work with practicing dental workers, teachers and students.
The people taking the courses help the high school students, Virtue said. “They show you, and you do it yourself.”
“I love cleaning,” she said. “It’s fun to me.”
All three plan to attend Oregon Institute of Technology after graduating from high school.
Lindsey said she always thought medical imaging was cool. At a field trip at Linn-Benton Community College, the medical imaging station was her favorite.
“You never know what you’ll see,” Virtue said.
Among the images they saw there, for example, was a set of lungs infected by coronavirus.
At high school, the girls are exposed to health occupations similar to the school’s career and technical education programs.
Snyder has never been a health professional, so she cannot create a formal CTE program, she said, but she can and has used Measure 98 funds to pay for the health occupations classes and programs. She also is qualified to give related college credits.
“The more I can expose them to that stuff, the better it is,” Snyder said. “All too often, students say ‘This is what I want to do.’ When you get down and dirty with it, they say, ‘Maybe this isn’t what I want to do.'”
The class experience gives them a chance to explore possibilities, she said, and it prepares them, helping make them competent in programs that will take them to solid career paths.
If school were still in session this week, Snyder would have had them learning to draw blood and hang an IV bag with a disembodied artificial arm.
Snyder, who has been in the district for four years, noted that Sweet Home had no such hands-on career-oriented science classes when she arrived.
“It’s relatively new,” she said. “I’ve been slowly building the program.”
Her classes have covered a variety of health-related topics, with students learning things like dental skills, taking blood pressure readings and suturing.
She teaches the students the techniques so that when they go into a nursing program, for example, they’ll be able to say “I’ve done that before.
“The more knowledge you go away with, the more competent you are.”