New Bern — During Career and Technical Education month, Kylie, a 12th-grade student at New Bern High School, spoke with Miss Belle, the school’s EMT and public safety instructor and a paramedic with more than 25 years of service in Craven County, about the program that lets students earn emergency medical responder (EMR) and emergency medical technician (EMT) certifications while in high school.

The program gives students classroom instruction and hands-on experience, Miss Belle said, including emergency medical responder and EMT certifications, 9-1-1 dispatcher certification for public safety students, basic life support (CPR) and ride-along clinical time on ambulances with local rescue squads. “They receive their emergency medical responder and their EMT certification,” Miss Belle said. “The EMR and EMT class actually gets to go out and do clinical ride time on the ambulance with our local rescue squads, on actual 911 calls.”

Why it matters: The program aims to create direct pathways from high school to paid emergency medical work in Craven County. Miss Belle described multiple former students who now work on ambulances locally and gave specific examples of student experiences, including administering naloxone to a patient and assisting with a childbirth during calls. One former student is now leading campus EMS at Western Carolina University, Miss Belle said.

Students in the EMT track complete practical ride time and earn credentials identical to those taught at community colleges, Miss Belle said. She noted the class requires 48 hours of clinical ride time for students in the EMT program; by contrast, she said, her paramedic training required roughly 600 hours of ride and clinical time. The program also covers emergency vehicle operator skills, basic first aid and the community emergency response training (CERT) curriculum for public safety students.

Miss Belle described teaching high school students as “rewarding” and “harder than I was expecting,” saying that the work renews her commitment to EMS. “There’s so many skills. I’m gonna have to say the most important is they learn to recognize, intervene in emergencies and literally save lives,” she said, attributing the program’s success to both classroom work and on-ambulance clinical experience.

The instructor urged prospective students to be prepared for the rigor and emotional exposure of the course, including parental waivers for potentially distressing clinical experiences. She warned that mistakes in patient care can cause harm: “If you don’t pay attention to the proper way to insert an airway, you can cause harm to someone,” Miss Belle said.

Kylie said she has enjoyed the clinical experiences and is preparing to take a certification test. Miss Belle closed the conversation by encouraging her and other students: “Good luck. Enjoy the class. I really do. Plan to be an EMT,” she said.

The program is presented through Craven County Schools at New Bern High School; details such as annual enrollment numbers and budget sources were not specified in the interview.