FTHS BioScience Academy Partnerships

Partnerships

The greatest key to building our future health care professionals and scientists is to give them as much exposure to the real world that awaits them as possible. It is our hope to develop meaningful partnerships with as many local facilities as possible in order to inspire high school students to pursue careers that would someday allow them to come back and work at these facilities.

FoothillTechnology High School’s BioScience Academy is privileged to be working with some phenomenal partners in our community:

• Ventura County Medical Center and its many associated clinics has opened its doors to our students enabling them to have unprecedented first hand experiences at the side of talented physicians and nurses who take the time to explain what they are doing. Students are able to job shadow in numerous locations in the hospital and in clinics and in so doing, are being inspired to pursue the long academic road that is necessary to prepare them to someday be the professionals they are observing.

We publicly thank Dr. John Fankhauser, the medical director at VCMC, who, along with the staff at VCMC, have welcomed our students into their world and opened their eyes to the world of health care.

• Coastal Marine BioLabs is a unique lab run by Dr. Ralph Imondi and Dr. Linda Schantse who are directing their scientific expertise towards involving high school students in professional scientific laboratory experiences. Wendi Butler and Darcy Perez have been working with CMB to facilitate Ventura Unified School District’s participating with the Barcode of Life Initiative that CMB is participating in. The Barcoding Initiative is an international effort to form a data base that contains samples of the COX-1 gene, a mitochondrial DNA gene found in all organisms, in order to create a cohesive record of the biodiversity of our planet, but more specifically, our local marine ecosystem. Students, through the protocols and lecture series that BioScience teachers and the CMB staff have collaborated on, will be able to isolate mDNA from local animal samples, purify and amplify the DNA and send it to be sequenced, all in our biotech lab. Finally, students will be able to upload this information to an international data base and become scientific contributors to this effort. Real science – done by high school kids!!

• Life Source Technologies – we are investigating a partnership with them currently. They have provided many amazing speakers from many departments in their company as well as a great deal of donated equipment that is being heavily used in our biotechnology lab.

• Baxters BioScience has opened its doors to students for an intensive job shadow experience over the last few years and have sent us several wonderful speakers.

• Ventura County Red Cross – we have received CPR training as well as psychological first aid training from some wonderful Red Cross volunteers. In addition, they have served as assessors during our Multiple Casualty Simulation and Disease Projects.

There have been many dozens of professionals from all areas of Ventura County who have participated in our program by speaking or assessing projects.