GREENSBORO, N.C. — Sixteen high school students in a North Carolina school district are now certified nursing assistants.

What You Need To Know

  • Students in Angela Hamilton's honors health science 2 class have already accepted jobs as certified nursing assistants
  • Northwest Guilford High School senior Lauren Benamati has plans on joining the Air Force as a nurse

  • The skills students learned in their class helped them pass their test

Students say hands-on training they received in honors health science 2 prepared them.

Lauren Benamati, a senior at Northwest Guilford High School, said practicing the skills in class and having a 100% pass rate before going to their clinical site was important.

“Learning these skills in the lab with the rest of our nursing class really helped us whenever we’d go and get actual hands-on experience,” she said.

In addition to taking a patient’s blood pressure, students performed range of motion exercises.

“It helps patients and residents become free of pain and give them full mobility and movement,” Benamati said.

Her favorite part about this class is the connections she’s made.

“We are all a really close class, and we’re with each other every day, so we really get to know each other well and practice our skills together,” she said.

This class is just one of many things that will help the ease the shortage of health care workers.

North Carolina says it expects a shortage of 12,500 registered nursed and 5,000 licensed practical nurses by 2033.

“It feels amazing to know that we are going to be helping anywhere in the world for the shortages of nurses,” Benamati said. “We are also trying to come together and make sure that we have other students filling our roles currently within our school.”

She credits her teacher — Angela Hamilton — for helping her and her classmates.

“I love all of my students,” Hamilton said. “We spend so many hours together and we're very real in this class, and we have to be because we're working with real people where they're learning how to communicate.”

Hamilton said she’s preparing students to be future health care workers.