Pine Ridge High health care teacher helps students find path after graduation

The freshmen were struggling.

For the first time, the Pine Ridge High School students were trying to take each other’s blood pressures manually. They had to get the cuff on the correct arm, find the pulse to put the stethoscope over, pump up the cuff with one hand before slowly letting the air out, watch the dial as it went down and listen to get a reading, all while keeping up some light conversation with their “patients.”

It wasn’t easy, but their teacher Renae Lee-Rogers moved between the confused students and talked them through the steps again and again. Her voice rang out over the din with reminders.

“If you can’t hear it, you can’t hear it. Be honest.”

“If you don’t document it, it didn’t happen.”

“You can’t think you have a bodily injury! Be confident.”

She showed the students the steps to take someone’s blood pressure with her characteristic patience and enthusiasm. Lee-Rogers, nominated for the News-Journal’s Amazing Teacher for the month of March, uses the Healthcare Academy at Pine Ridge to teach medicine, but also empathy.

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As students in her class grow quiet trying to find each others’ pulses, she gently reminds them to talk to their patients. It’s important to get to know them, she said, to put them at ease. Her students began to make nervous small talk with each other.

“You will get this,” she told them. “You are ahead of the game by learning this. You are on your way.”

The hands-on lesson is one of many organized by Lee-Rogers. She came to teaching after 13 years as a banker, followed by several years spent as a school nurse. When she was hired at Pine Ridge in 2014, she wanted to teach the way she wanted to learn: with lots of direct ties to the real world, beyond the four walls of her classroom.

An adjacent room where students practice their skills is even designed to look like a hospital, complete with beds, wheelchairs and other medical equipment along with two medical mannequins to emulate patients.

Now the director of the academy, she helped transform it from its focus on emergency and sports medicine to something more broad, designed to introduce students to all aspects of the health care field. In an era of education where schools are moving toward career and technical training options for older students, Lee-Rogers has an excellent track record of helping students figure out where their passions lie, and how to turn those into a career.

By their senior year in the Healthcare Academy, students have mastered skills like taking blood pressure and range of motion exercises to become Certified Nursing Assistants. Lee-Rogers’ seniors can now take the certification exam, which will give them the skills they need to start working right after high school.

Like former student Kelsie Wilkinson, who at 19 works at John Knox Village as a CNA before going to college. Now she volunteers in Lee-Rogers’ class to help students learn the same skills she did.

“I want the students to get the same experience I did,” she said. “It could change their lives, like it did mine.”

Beyond the exam, Lee-Rogers spends a lot of time figuring out how to expose the 110 students in the academy to the health care field. They do so now through internships and field trips, as well as regular guest speakers.

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Senior Lisette Osorio started high school wanting to be a forensic pathologist. But after her time in the academy at internships and shadowing health care workers, she knows that she wants to be an orthopedic surgeon.

She said part of her decision came from Lee-Rogers’ encouragement to be determined and focused, and to always aim higher.

Lee-Rogers, also the high school’s Teacher of the Year for 2019, isn’t planning to slow down any time soon. Even as director of the academy, a teacher, a sponsor of several campus clubs and in pursuit of a graduate degree in educational leadership, she is hopeful that in the future she’ll be able to shift her focus to at-risk or reluctant students, rather than those who are self-motivated to join the career academy.

“I want them to find their passion before they leave, because we don’t want to waste any time,” she said.

For her, that’s the best part of the job.

“It’s watching them evolve into what they were actually born to be.”