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Tammy Brown and her daughter, Dejenee Brown, apply at the Carroll Medical Magnet Program

Carroll Medical Magnet School wants to bring students into its career development program while fulfilling a federal desegregation order.

And the recruitment process has had mixed results.

 

Families with children in grades 9 through 12 are applying to a Monroe City School’s Carroll High Medical Magnet program.

 

Thirteen-year-old Boris Allen has submitted an application. He hopes to become a pharmacist one day. Allen says he loves what the medical profession can do for people.

 

“I like to see people well and I like people to have smiles on their face.” 

 

 

If he’s admitted, the ninth-grader will receive a wide variety of instruction. Catherine Johnson is a Registered Nurse who teaches at Carroll. She says students will be exposed to a comprehensive entry-level slate of medical topics.

 

“In the classroom they will learn different things, like anatomy and physiology. They will learn abbreviations. I even had a student this last semester who told me she learned how read a prescription that a doctor wrote because of the different things we learned in class.”

 

Shandra Smith is a program coordinator for Carroll High School’s medical magnet program. She says the recruitment process is designed, in part, to attract students from across the city.

 

“It’s also to bring in more diversity into the program. We want to open it to all of the students, city-wide in the City of Monroe – give them an opportunity to earn industry-based certifications as well. Not just for Carroll students, but students from the north side, the south side, the east side and the west side of Monroe City.”

 

 

Carroll High’s student body is overwhelmingly African-American. And Shandra Smith says that there are currently no non-African-American students in the medical magnet program. Smith hopes that the recruitment process will change that.

 

“We are under deseg order. And under the deseg order, it is to increase the diversity in the medical magnet program. So it is a part of the consent decree, in which the school board is under.”

 

The efforts of the magnet program represent a trend in the district. Monroe City Schools’ attorney Doug Lawrence says the district is moving toward ending its desegregation order.

 

“We are on track – I emphasize on track – for consideration for full unitary status at the summer of 2014.”

 

Meantime, Shandra Smith remains hopeful that the medical magnet program will benefit all of the city’s students.

 

“It’ll bring students from all over. Students who may not have heard of the program who attend Neville High School, who attend Wossman High School - it’ll draw more students in from all cultures and backgrounds.”

 

Still, Smith says that, as of July 26, no non-African-American families had applied for the program. She hopes the recruitment drive will help double last year’s 40 student slots to 80. Smith says acceptance letters will be mailed in early August.