Orlando Health Helping Create Future Leaders of Healthcare at George Jenkins High School
READ IN THE FULL DIGITAL VERSION OF ISSUE 103
By RJ Walters
Photos provided Polk County Public Schools
As the rhythmic “wop wop wop” of the Orlando Health Air Care helicopter grew louder and louder as it descended onto Jerry May Field at George Jenkins High School in front of hundreds of students and faculty this April it did not signal an unexpected moment of crisis—it was actually a symbol of clarity.
Orlando Health—a private non-profit healthcare organization that is currently constructing a 300-plus bed hospital less than four miles from George Jenkins High School—has made its mission to enhance the school’s long-standing Medical Academy, inspire the next generation of healthcare workers and ideally train and hire many of the students to create a lasting impact in the community.
More than 460 students were part of the Medical Academy during the 2023-24 school year, and Orlando Health’s first year as an official partner for the Eagles brought everything from students simulating emergency responses on campuses, conversations with active Polk EMS professionals, mock interviews with Orlando Health HR staff.
As Dawn Willis, a community relations manager for Orlando Health and a longtime Lakelander, puts it: the collaboration has been “magical” from the very start.
Orlando Health makes investing in local schools a high priority and the timing was perfect to come to an agreement with GJHS as Polk County Public Schools continues to put a lot of time and resources into growing and improving its college and career readiness options.
“What was even more incredible here in Polk County is we had the academies specifically focused on the medical—or even the other academies that fit into all the areas where we’re going to be recruiting team members—[and] we will need 2,500 to 3,000 new team members when we open the new location,” Willis said.
“The teachers were just so great to work with and helped find those areas that we could bring our clinical teams in to give the students the experience that are going to build a pipeline for us with the help of Lakeland LEADS and the school’s help.”
It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s an EMT. It’s a real life breathing human being who walks and puts their pants on just like I do,’” he says with a chuckle. “Sometimes being able to visualize that kind of brings it home, whether or not they pursue that career path.”
– Brad Hiers, GJHS Assistant Principal
Willis said it’s rewarding to see students go from thinking that nurses and physicians make up the majority of healthcare to understanding how it takes people of so many different passions and skill sets to create qualified and capable medical and healthcare teams.
“All of a sudden I think we brought those real life experiences to the classroom where the teachers appreciated that because they’re working with all the different classes and have 14,000 things coming on every day on their plate,” Willis said. “It showed students how that interaction happens on a daily basis. All of a sudden everybody was excited; it was happening in real-life, even though it was [in controlled settings.].”
For GJHS Assistant Principal Brad Hiers and the school’s leadership team, it has taken what was already a well-respected program and accelerated it to the next level of excellence, evident by the fact the Medical Academy was nominated for a Lakeland Leads Academy award and GJHS and Orlando Health were nominated for a Lakeland Leads Business Partner of the Year award.
Hiers acknowledged there are a lot of people and businesses who want to help students thrive, but it takes an extraordinary commitment and a true shared passion to create lasting opportunities that help unlock student’s giftings and teach them how to put them into practice. One year into the collaboration with Orlando Health, he is clearly impressed.
“When we’re talking about business partner relationships … .what we need the most, and the hardest thing to get honestly, is just time, and have someone we can reach out to,” Hiers said. “My hope for the partnership—which really played out over the last year—is that we can reach out and say, ‘This is where we have an identified area of need or lack of ability to provide relevant experiences to kids. Can you help us out there?’”
Sometimes that help included Orlando Health donating supplies to the school and sometimes that help looked like Willis and her colleagues painting a picture of how current GJHS students could soon be on a payroll for Orlando Health or other healthcare providers.
She said when the new Highlands hospital opens—which is slated currently to be in about 1.5 years—the company will be able to hire 16-year-olds for $15 an hour in some positions, not just related to the Medical Academy, but also potentially related to the GJHS Culinary Academy and other programs. There will also be volunteer opportunities and professionals for students to job shadow in the near future.
The partnership is already paying dividends for students in real time. Willis said that recent GJHS graduates now attending Valencia College and University of Central Florida have been hired at Orlando area locations to gain experience while focusing on their studies.
Hiers said the excitement the partnership has added to the academy is palpable, allowing students to gain a truer understanding of what many different professions are really like.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s an EMT. It’s a real life breathing human being who walks and puts their pants on just like I do,’” he says with a chuckle. “Sometimes being able to visualize that kind of brings it home, whether or not they pursue that career path.”
Hiers, a Bartow High School graduate, said another benefit is that the wide scale expansion of healthcare in Lakeland means that programs like this can help students see the long-term potential to work and live where they grew up.
“A lot of time our kids will go off to a four-year university or postgraduate school in a bigger city…and never come back. Now, maybe at the very least, if you walk through those doors [starting] in 2026, maybe they will remember that this is where it all started and they will want to come back here one day.”
