EMT Career Pathway Program for High School Students

By Jenniffer McCloskey, Director of Saratoga County Employment and Training

In June of 2022, the Saratoga County Department of Employment and Training launched the EMT Career Pathway Pilot Program. Born out of the need for current and future first responders, the program was designed to be the first step in what we hope will be a lifelong dedication to public service and greater medical careers for participants. Partnering with the Town of Clifton Park, Clifton Park-Halfmoon EMS, Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC), Shenendehowa High School (Shen), and Career Jam, we aimed to create a community-based collaboration to provide the structure and supports needed for success.

Starting small with a group of six from Shenendehowa High School in Clifton Park, students were enrolled at Hudson Valley Community College and began their training at the HVCC TEC-SMART campus in Malta. Upon completion of the program, they earned seven college credits. Committing much of their summer, the program encompassed 140 hours of instruction and practical lab time in addition to ten patient ride-alongs with the Clifton Park-Halfmoon EMS. Understanding that the cost of tuition, books and supplies can create barriers for many students contemplating their next steps after high school graduation, we provided these necessities to students enrolled in the program so they could be as successful as possible during their journey to becoming our community’s future EMTs, paramedics, nurses, and doctors.

During the program’s kickoff event, Dr. L. Oliver Robinson, Superintendent of Schools stated, “As a school system, it is our responsibility to provide students with options and opportunities to lead them into the future. Creating this career pathway prior to students graduating from Shenendehowa allows our young people to serve their community and meet the growing workforce demands in frontline emergency response.”

Phil Barrett, Town of Clifton Park Supervisor said, “This unique program not only offers students with an interest in the medical services field an option to enter the workforce while pursuing their post-secondary certifications and degrees, but also helps to meet a critical need for more EMTs in our community.

I’m thankful to our partners at Saratoga County Employment and Training, Clifton ParkHalfmoon EMS, Hudson Valley Community College, Shenendehowa High School, and Career Jam, who’ve come together to create this important and innovative program.

As a Shen alumni myself, (Class of 1997), I was excited to launch the Saratoga County EMT Career Pathway pilot program at my alma mater. We had hoped the program would be successful and would give us insight into whether it was a worthwhile endeavor to expand county-wide. What we didn’t expect was how impactful, successful, and lifechanging the program would be.

Director of Saratoga County Employment and Training, Jenniffer McCloskey; three EMT Career Pathway students.

While the students clearly had an interest in the emergency medical field, this experience lit a fire within them. Many plan to continue this pathway to become paramedics, doctors, and surgeons. The program was such a success, it was recognized by the New York State School Board Association for their “Champions of Change” award.

Today there are six new EMTs in Saratoga County and next summer our goal is to double or triple that number. With the cost of $2,000 per student, the contribution we have made to our communities, our young people, and our partners, has clearly delivered a worthwhile return on our investment.

Saratoga County EMT Career Pathway Pilot Program Students.

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Retaining Graduates and Investing in the County Workforce

By Kate Pierce-Nimz, NYSAC Multimedia Specialist

NYSAC recently published an episode of its County Conversations podcast on a new county initiative that aims to keep local college graduates in the area after graduation. The program is called Rochester Emerging Talent and Innovation Network or RETAIN. The RETAIN program offers recent graduates a $2,000 lump sum payment after having lived, worked, and networked in Monroe County for at least one year. The following interview is an excerpt from the podcast in which Monroe County Executive Adam Bello detailed this innovative workforce development initiative.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

KATE PIERCE-NIMZ

Can you give us an overview of the current student population and workforce in Monroe County?

COUNTY EXECUTIVE ADAM BELLO

Rochester is actually known to be a college town. We have over a dozen colleges and universities in the region, not just in Monroe County, but the whole Finger Lakes region. Between 60 and 80,000 college students that call our region home for most of the year.

But while we have one of the highest per capita number of students compared to almost any other region in the country, we have one of the lower retention rates of any of the regions across the country. We have jobs we need to fill right here in our region, and we have students right here in our region graduating. We're trying to think of ways to keep them here, incentivize them to stay here and help grow the economy in that way.

KATE PIERCE-NIMZ

Once you identified this gap in retention, what drove the creation of the RETAIN program?

COUNTY EXECUTIVE ADAM BELLO

The inspiration here around the RETAIN program, which stands for the Rochester Emerging Talent and Innovation Network, is really to try to look at who are these 19,000 college graduates that are graduating from our region every year? Where are they going? And what would it take to keep them here to help bridge that connection between individuals who are looking for work and employers who are trying to fill those gaps and fill jobs.

And what RETAIN is supposed to do is try to bridge that connection between those college graduates, local employers, while also allowing those employers to be competitive, to be able to offer salaries and other incentives, to try to hire people to fill those gaps.

We launched this program by bringing the Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Rochester Enterprise together with the county and then with our colleges and universities and the student groups associated with those universities and our young professional organizations here in town. We were able to create this pilot program that we think meets the needs of both college students and businesses.

It incentivizes a graduate from a local university to stay in town by offering them a $2,000 incentive, essentially a bonus, to stay here and work here. Because we're doing it through the employer, we're actually giving that employer another tool to help recruit talent and fill those job vacancies. So, it's really a win-win for everyone.

The funding is being supplied by the Monroe County Industrial Development Corporation - what will those grant funds look like when they're distributed?

COUNTY EXECUTIVE ADAM BELLO

What's interesting about the way this program is funded through, we call it the MCIDC, is that the development corporation partners with businesses to help them in their financing for expansions and things like that. As part of that, the MCIDC collects fees from local businesses that they are helping to expand. What we've tried to do here was reimagine what those fees should be used for.

In the past, what the county would do is they would take fees through MCIDC, they would take fees to our Industrial Development Agency that we refer to as COMIDA. And those fees really weren't part of any strategic plan. So, I asked the two boards to create a strategic plan on reinvesting those fees back into the economic ecosystem. So that when a company comes to COMIDA or a company comes to MCIDC, they're looking for an incentive, they're looking for some type of public private partnership and they're paying a fee to do that. Those fees, in my view, then should be reinvested back into the ecosystem that helps support those companies so they can then be successful after they come here.

KATE PIERCE-NIMZ

What do employers in the county – companies and businesses - have to do to be eligible, and what industries are eligible for the RETAIN program?

COUNTY EXECUTIVE ADAM BELLO

There are a few guidelines in order to be eligible for this type of funding. The first is that the employee who the company is applying on behalf of in order to receive the incentive has to have graduated within the past three years from a college or university located in the county, and hold a four-year degree or a master's degree.

They have to have obtained full-time employment at a business that's headquartered within Monroe County, and it's also only for companies that have 100 or less employees. We're looking at employment in the technical fields like advanced manufacturing, life sciences, optics, photonics and imaging, or software and IT development. So the degree has to match an employment in one of those fields.

We've had dozens of companies already reach out looking for applications so this pilot program may actually end up expanding quicker than we anticipated because those are really growing and emerging fields in our county, but also in the whole Finger Lakes region.

To listen to the full conversation on the RETAIN program, as well as Monroe County’s training and employment program for CNAs, make sure to visit NYSAC.org/Podcast.

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