Vidant Medical Center Partners with Wellcome Middle School for NCBCE Teachers@Work Program | Eastern North Carolina Now

Press Release:

    GREENVILLE     Vidant Medical Center (VMC) is pleased to announce that it will be hosting two teachers from Wellcome Middle School during the week of July 24 as part of the North Carolina Business Committee for Education's (NCBCE) Teachers@Work® program.

    Teachers@Work ® is a joint initiative between NCBCE, the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI), STEM East and the North Carolina Community College System. The partnership links education and the business community in order to help teachers create relevance between their classroom curriculum and the skill sets needed by local businesses.

    VMC is one of 12 businesses participating in the initiative in eastern North Carolina. As part of the program, participating teachers will spend one week during the summer monitoring a local company in or close to their community. Teachers will be paired with employees of the company and will be exposed to different aspects of the business. At the end of the on-site program, the teacher will create a lesson plan showcasing both hard and soft skills needed by future employees that are specific to their partnering business or industry. VMC will also participate in a job shadowing or job mentoring program with our partnering teachers' students.

    The two teachers participating in the program with VMC are language arts teacher Tenisha Holloway-Powell and STEM teacher Elrica Cooper, both from Wellcome Middle School in Greenville. They will be among 50 middle and high school teachers throughout the state participating in the 2017 NCBCE Teachers@Work® program.

    "Teachers help shape our future workforce every day," said Lisa Lassiter, Vidant Health administrator, health careers program. "The Teachers@Work® program promotes the teachers understanding of business skills needed in health care and the relevance of those skills in the classroom. Once the teachers have a broad understanding, they can produce a lesson plan that reflects what they have learned. This lesson plan can then be shared with both students and other teachers, helping to spread an increase of better understanding about health care skills throughout the school system."

    During the week Holloway-Powell and Cooper will spend with VMC, they will be exposed to several different skills needed in the health care system by job shadowing current team members.

    Teachers@Work® is made possible by grants from Biogen and State Farm. In eastern North Carolina, the program also receives support from the Golden LEAF Foundation.

    For more information about NCBCE Teachers@Work®, visit www.ncbce.org.

• Contact: Amy Holcombe
•     amy.holcombe@vidanthealth.com