HOSPTALS
as much of a thing as it is,” Cost said, nodding to an IV pole in his hand but referring to the constant exchange of the contaminated for the sterilized.
Cost is part of a jobshadowing program that started six weeks ago for students of Columbus’ South High School. It is designed to reveal the wide variety of jobs that exist just a mile north of their neighborhood. Nationwide Children’s is a city within a city, said Matt Stein, training and development specialist, with workers in everything from purchasing to nutrition to landscaping.
The jobs the students are seeing are entry-level, Stein said, but they have promotion potential and solid benefits, including collegetuition assistance. Some of the more intense jobs, like working in the restocking warehouse, call for long hours early in the morning. There’s a lot of turnover, Stein told Cost, but that’s where leadership qualities become apparent and workers get promoted.
“They drive by that hospital every day, not realizing that there is a great world of opportunity waiting for them,” said South High School Principal Edmund Baker. “This program allows them to see jobs from the entry level all the way up to the top.”
Before the students started, South teachers went through the hospital rotation to see how they could link the experience to their lesson plans.
Baker hopes this first group of 25 sophomores picks up the “soft skills” needed in the work world: punctuality, conscientiousness, customer service, appearance. The hospital plans to check back in with the teens every year, perhaps offering longer internships for some that involve more than shadowing.
The eventual goal is to make this into a career pathway, in which students can earn a credential and some job experience before they graduate.
“In education, a constant struggle is finding an organization with the resources to invest back into the school,” Baker said. Nationwide Children’s has done that, he said.
Every week, a group of 25 hospital staff members mentors 12th-graders at risk of not graduating. A nurse practitioner and a behavioral health caseworker from the hospital are stationed at the school.
Nationwide Children’s employs around 11,000 workers. The neighborhood just south of it, according to 2015 census figures, has a median household income of just $26,442, well below the Franklin County median of $52,341. Unemployment there is 17.3 percent, while the county is at 4.6 percent.
The hospital in recent years has tried to help the community, said Dr. Kelly Kelleher, Nationwide Children’s vice president of Health Services Research. A new low-income residential complex at 755 E. Whittier St., due to be completed this summer, also will include a hospital job-training program for residents.
Nationwide Children’s belongs to the Central Ohio Compact — a local effort led by Columbus State Community College — of schools, colleges and companies aiming to raise the percentage of central Ohioans with at least an associate degree to 60 percent by 2025. The region is still about 20 percentage points away.
There’s a shortage of people to do “middle-skill” jobs, Kelleher said, which call for more specialized knowledge than a high-school diploma but don’t require a four-year degree.
“Boy, if we could just hit that sweet spot with this group of kids, we’d really be doing well,” he said.
At 16, Cost doesn’t know what he wants to do with the rest of his life. He did perk up when Stein told him Central Distribution workers like Yoe average about 16,000 steps a day.
“That’s what I tell them in interviews,” Stein said. “You’re getting paid to work out.”