WATERVILLE — Hannah Rumery holds a job as salad and dessert prep manager at Joseph’s Fireside Steakhouse and in May she will take her state boards to become a certified nurse assistant.
The 17-year-old Waterville Senior High School junior is also attending college — right at Waterville High — as part of the Bridge Year program, a special course of study that enables high school students to take college credits at a fraction of the cost of actually attending college.
“I want to be in OBGYN and specialize in neonatalogy, working with high-risk pregnancies and sick babies,” Rumery said. “I’ve wanted to work with babies since I was 7.”
Like Rumery, Noah Perry also is 17-year-old junior and has the opportunity to earn 30 credits — a year’s worth of college study — toward a two-year associate degree in applied science by the time he graduates from high school. That means he would need to do only a year of college after high school to earn an associate degree.
But Perry wants to be an electrical engineer and the college credits he earns at Waterville High will be transferable to a bachelor’s degree program at the University of Maine, where he hopes to enroll.
Both Rumery and Perry are the first generation in their families to attend college.
“It feels good but at the same time, it’s a lot of pressure,” Rumery said.
She and Perry are two of 14 Waterville High students taking part in the Bridge Year Program, a collaboration between the high school, the University of Maine and Mid-Maine Technical Center at the high school. The 14 students travel together as a “co-hort” to English, math, science and social studies classes taught by high school teachers who have become adjunct University of Maine professors and work with the university’s professors to ensure that the students are meeting standards of both the high school and college. The students will be part of the program in their senior year as well.
The program is geared toward students who are motivated but may otherwise not have the financial support needed to attend college. Ten of the 14 students in the program are in the first generation in their families to attend college, and of the 14, five were able to pay their own way.
The Bridge Year Program, a nonprofit organization run by a board of directors, was started four years ago by Fred Woodman, then the director of United Technologies Center, a technical school that serves high schools in the Bangor area, and others including college and business officials who saw a need for such a program.
Woodman said they wanted to create a program that gave high school students both academics and technical skills while they were still in high school and challenge them to study them in a different way. The students do internships at businesses and spend time in all types of workplaces, which gives them a chance to explore career choices.
The state Department of Education awarded Waterville’s program $60,000 for this school year as part of $500,000 awarded to schools for that purpose, according to Samantha Warren, spokeswoman for the education department.
“This year, the LePage administration has proposed $2 million for Bridge Year over the biennium that would be available to Maine schools,” she said.
That funding is funneled to participating technical schools, who then hire the Bridge Year organization to coordinate the programs, according to Woodman.
“We aimed it at kids in the middle because the drop out rate in college is high and we wanted to prevent that,” said Woodman, now coordinator of the Bridge Year Educational Services in Maine. “A lot of kids leave college with a lot of debt and not a lot of skills.”
Hermon High School was the first school to participate in the program that now is in eight schools from Houlton to Rockland. Next year, several more high schools plan to participate. The high school teachers in the program are required to have their master’s degrees, he said.
Maine’s program is also being looked at by several other states. Woodman said education departments in New Hampshire, West Virginia, Missouri and Oklahoma have contacted Maine to help start programs there.
“There are no other state programs like this in the country, to our knowledge,” he said.
Having been not only director of a technical school, but also a schools superintendent in two Maine school districts, as well as a teacher and principal at elementary, middle and high schools over his career, Woodman knows what it takes to help students to become successful.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said.
CREDITS AT A DISCOUNT
As part of the program, Waterville students pay only $45 a credit instead of $279 a credit that regular UMaine students pay.
“You’re looking at a yearly cost of $675 versus $4,185,” said Peter Thiboutot, assistant superintendent of Alternative Organizational Structure 92, which includes Waterville, Winslow and Vassalboro schools.
Thiboutot, who coordinates the Bridge Year Program in Waterville, said the credits students earn may be applied toward a bachelor’s degree program at the university. Credits also transferable to other colleges out of the UMaine system.
Students apply for the program, which is rigorous and requires they work hard. School administrators, teachers and guidance counselors choose who gets into the program.
“They’re really looking for special students — those who have great potential, who might not consider college without some support,” Thiboutot said. “They have to be mature, because they’re giving up a social perspective.”
High school juniors in the program take math, science, social studies and English courses developed by both the high school and UMaine faculty. The students also are required to take a course of their choice at the tech center.
Rumery chose a medical career course, which is in her field of study. On Fridays, she does clinical work at Lakewood Manor Nursing Home on Kennedy Memorial Drive in Waterville.
“We do patient care — we do what CNAs do and we go around with CNAs and help them to do everything they do,” she said. “We get to do activities with patients. It’s challenging but it’s definitely rewarding at the end of the day.”
Perry, whose grandfather was a master electrician, takes an electrical course at the tech center as part of the program. He says the work load for the Bridge Year program is harder than a regular high school program and the standards expected of him are higher, but he knows it is worth it.
“It gives you a jump start and a choice of what you want to do — and it gets you thinking about what you want to do in the future,” he said.
The students in the program work together, help each other and support each other, according to Perry and Rumery.
“It’s kind of like a bonding thing,” Perry said.
BRIDGE YEAR FUNDING
Of the 14 students in the Waterville program, five were able to pay for their college credits and the rest needed financial support. Thiboutot pounded the pavement seeking donations for the program from organizations and raised $5,000 to $7,000 for the other students to enroll this school year.
But in order for financial assistance to be available in the future for students not able to pay, Thiboutot needed more.
He met several times with the Coburn Classical Institute Board of Trustees, a trust that has helped to fund special programs at area high schools, and asked if the board would be willing to help students in the Bridge Year Program.
Teachers at the high school were surveyed to see if they would agree to forgo Coburn funding for their own special programs so that the Bridge Year Program could receive a grant, and all the teachers agreed, according to Thiboutot.
On Thursday, Ann Schoenthaler-Ervin, a member of the Coburn Board of Trustees, announced the trust was donating $35,000 to the program. The trust itself was formed after the closing of Coburn Classical Institute, a school organized in 1820 to prepare young Maine men for the academic rigors of the classical education to be offered by the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, which became Colby College.
The purpose of the school was to prepare young men, and later the women who enrolled, in classical studies now known as the liberal arts, according to information issued by Schoenthaler. After Coburn closed, its trustees provided teacher-initiated grants to area high schools. The grants were targeted for capable students who may not have considered college with stimulating programs that might spur them to pursue academic possibilities.
A school psychologist, Schoenthaler-Ervin said she recognized the importance of the Bridge Year Program and wanted to support it. Other trustees also deemed it worthy and decided to fund it.
“We are happy to do it,” Schoenthaler-Ervin said. “The program is just so worthwhile. I’m in schools a lot as a psychologist and I’ve seen a lot of programs come and go that are funded by the state. This is definitely one that’s needed.”
She said Coburn also is looking at ways to create a separate fund for students in the program who go on to college and need help in that first year.
“We want that support to be there for the third year,” she said.
Thiboutot said the Coburn gift is much appreciated and will provide students with funding for tuition.
“This donation is a huge lift to our wings in terms of helping kids continue with this initiative,” he said.
‘A LIFE-CHANGING OPPORTUNITY’
Thiboutot said Waterville High’s principal, Don Reiter, and guidance counselor Brenda Holt lend strong support to the program as do the instructors — Rosemarie Smith, who teaches science; Sherry Brown, English; Donna Forkey, math; and Koren Coughlin, social studies. The teachers are not compensated for the extra work, so they’re volunteering their time.
Smith, who has been teaching 32 years — 29 at Waterville High — and is chairman of the science department, said she chose to be part of the program. She teaches the juniors environmental chemistry, which is both interesting and challenging, she said.
Being in the program is rewarding professionally, although it requires a lot of preparation and coordination, according to Smith.
She has met with teachers in other schools that use the program. Those schools include Bangor, Brewer, Hermon, Hampden, Houlton, and Ellsworth high schools, as well as Medomac Valley High School.
Meanwhile, Woodman said that the schools in the program this year plan to continue it next year and more are enrolling, including Messalonskee, Edward Little, Schenck and Hodgdon high schools, as well as Foxcroft Academy.
Woodman and state legislators, as well as Hermon High School graduate Morgan Harvey, 19, visited Waterville Senior High School on Friday to discuss the program.
Harvey graduated from Hermon last year after being in the program two years and in December earned an associate degree in fire science from Eastern Maine Community College, Woodman said. She continues to be an EMCC student and is a live-in firefighter program at Hermon Fire Department.
She said that when she entered the Bridge Year program, she had been a straight A student in honors courses, but rarely went to class because school was easy.
“I missed every day of school that I could because I didn’t see the point in going if I could still pass my classes without being there,” Harvey said via email.
She enrolled in the Bridge program, and enrolled in public safety courses at the area’s vocational school. Her interest and attendance improved.
“The class was interesting and I started to want to be at school and hated missing days. My attendance greatly improved,” she said.
Recently, Harvey accepted a conditional appointment to the Bangor Fire Department as a firefighter/EMT, and credits the program with helping her map her career path.
“It was a life-changing opportunity for me,” she said.
Amy Calder — 861-9247
Twitter: @AmyCalder17
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