YOUTH ON THE GO
Saugerties High School seniors Eddie Cullenen and John Skiff were selected to participate in the New York State School Music Association All-State Music Festival.
The festival takes place from Thursday, Nov. 29, through Sunday, Dec. 2, in Rochester, N.Y.
Cullenen and Skiff will be singing with the AllState Mixed Chorus. They were chosen based on their individual performances last spring at the association’s Solo Music Festival at Kingston High School. Only those with stellar scores on their solos were picked to participate in the winter festival.
The All-State Festival will culminate with a performance in the historic Eastman Theatre.
••• New Paltz High School seniors Marcel Duvivier and Keira Coulard-Smith were named 2018-2019 National Hispanic Scholars by the College Board’s National Hispanic Recognition Program.
Duvivier and CoulardSmith qualified to apply for the honor by scoring in the top 2.5 percent among the Hispanic and Latino testtakers in the region who took the Preliminary SAT/ National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. To be designated as scholars, they also had to achieve a cumulative grade point average of 3.5 or higher.
Coulard-Smith is a member of the New Paltz swim team. She is also a pole vaulter with the school’s track and field team and a member of the Pride Alliance. A musician, she plays the flute and piccolo in the school band. She plans to study engineering in college, possibly at Worcester Polytechnic Institute or Roger Williams University.
She is the daughter of Teri Coulard and Lance Smith of Gardiner.
Duvivier is a Boy Scout, as well as a member of Youth for Unity and Mathletes. He is looking forward to pursuing his interest in math and engineering in college. At this point, his first choices for college are Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Union Col-
lege and Washington University in St. Louis.
He is the son of Eric Duvivier and Cathy Sanchez of New Paltz.
••• Students from the Ulster BOCES Surgical Technology program had a real-life operating room education for the first time at HealthAlliance Hospital: Broadway Campus in Kingston. The students attended practical, experiential classes two days a week for six weeks in the hospital’s high-tech operating rooms in the Foxhall Ambulatory Surgery Center.
A surgical tech, also called a scrub or operating room technician, is a surgical team member who prepares an operating room by setting up sterile surgical instruments, equipment
and supplies, ensuring everything is in place and working properly. During surgery, the tech anticipates the surgeon’s needs by passing instruments and providing needed supplies such as sponges, performing counts of the instruments and sharps, providing solutions and medications to the surgeon, receiving tissue specimens to be passed off to the nurse who manages a patient’s surgical nursing care, and ensuring there are no breaks in the sterile technique to prevent the patient from acquiring a surgical site infection.
Being in a real-world work environment introduced the class of 17 students to a wide range of conditions and challenges that exist in operating rooms, where the students will spend most of their clinical time after graduating and gaining employment in the field.
Ulster BOCES Adult Education Director of Surgical Technology Barbara Maderi said in a press release that attending labs in a real operating room advanced the students’ communication, behavioral and teamworking skills. It also provided the instructors with opportunities to sharpen the students’ Ulster BOCES Community Relations critical-thinking skills, as well as demonstrate the importance of having an eye for detail in the medical profession.
Student Shelby Vitarius of New Paltz saind in the release that practicing in a real operating room was very important. “It’s preparing us for what we are going to be facing once we get out into clinicals,” she said. “It makes what we are about to do more realistic. Without HealthAlliance’s help, we would not be able to have this unique experience.”
The Ulster BOCES Surgical Technology program is a rigorous 970-hour, 10-month program that prepares students to assist surgeons in the operating room — pre-, during and post-surgery. Surgical instrumentation, sterilization, patient transport and preparation, positioning, and monitoring are a few elements of the program. To learn more about Ulster BOCES Adult Education programs, go to www. ulsterboces.org.