A partnership between a local school and hospital is providing some special needs students opportunities for real, on the job experience and to learn skills valuable for job success.

“These are kids that really need opportunities to shine,” Char Gardiner, president, St. Joseph Warren Hospital, said. “We put some structure around it to make sure we were meeting their needs and I think it has been amazing.”

The hospital and Trumbull Career & Technical Center revived a relationship during the 2022-23 school year to train and employ students.

They had collaborated previously through TCTC’s hospitality program for students to train at the Eastland Avenue SE health care facility, but state mandated changes to the program’s curriculum made the relationship unable to continue.

“We said if and when the opportunity presents again, we want to be able to reach back out,” Melissa Starkey, special needs / program supervisor at TCTC, said.

The door opened in 2022 when Gardiner assumed the role of president.

It was, she said, in talks with leaders about hospital operations they mentioned the TCTC students at the facility and “how meaningful it was.”

This renewed partnership, now with its second group of students, is through the school’s job training program.

Eight to 10 students participate. Each works about 2.5 hours a day five days a week at the hospital in a variety of departments, from nutrition service to housekeeping to supply chain.

Also, each student is partnered with a mentor to learn and develop job skills.

“We brought in leaders from our hospitality team, so that would be food and nutrition services, environmental services, (and) we even had facilities and supply chain. They were all-in. They said immediately, yes, let’s do it,” Gardiner said.

Said Starkey, the goal is to give the students experience outside of the building — to work in the community — and to transition what is taught in school to the workplace.

“We have great opportunities here (TCTC), but there is nothing that mimics actual real work in the community,” she said. “So the goal is for all of our job training kids, before they finish the program, to get into an offsite program somewhere, and we have been fortunate because at St. Joes, it offers us multiple different areas for them to work.”

“It’s giving them real on the job experience, which is exactly what the program is designed for,” she said.

This past summer, Sarah Wood, a job training coordinator with TCTC who with Matt Lukach, job training instructor, helped get the program back into operation, worked with the Trumbull County Board of Developmental Disabilities and Opportunities with Ohioans with Disabilities, a state office that helps and supports residents with disabilities, to figure out how to keep the students working through the summer.

They accomplished that through an internship program by making the hospital a vendor site with the state agency.

“Which is great,” Starkey said. “The kids aren’t just coming to learn, they also are coming to work and get paid, motivating them even more to want to come out and be part of that with the end goal for them to find employment at the end of their high school career.”

The training program goes beyond learning skills needed to simply complete the work to include soft and interpersonal skills, from how to appropriately communicate with co-workers to following directions.

It’s also helping to build their confidence, knowing they are contributing and making a difference, Gardiner said.

“They know they are part of a big team that is focused on caring for our community,” she said. “I think that really resonates with some of these students.”

Plus, it opens the door for possible employment at the hospital.

“We went into this with the goal of being able to offer 70% of these kids employment,” Gardiner said. “If they could flourish, if this is something they wanted to do, we’ve got a lot of opportunities. Hospitals are like cities, there are so many different jobs, and just getting them in the door and seeing how comfortable they are and what they want to do … is just the starting point if they would like to do more.”