FAIRMONT, W.Va. (WBOY) — This week, Pierpont Community & Technical College received a grant that it’s used to start up its Future Nurse Academy, a three-day program geared toward rising juniors and seniors from local area high schools.

“They’re coming to us because they have an interest in nursing or maybe something in the medical field, and they wanna know more about the programs we have,” LPN (Licensed Practical Nurse) Program Clinical Director Miki Demary-Andrew said.

“When you’re an incoming junior and senior in high school, you probably don’t necessarily know that much about the nursing field,” Demary-Andrew added. “So what we’re doing this week is we’re trying to provide them a couple different certifications.”

After completing the three-day program, students will walk out of the Future Nurse Academy CPR and AED certified. Demary-Andrew said that they’ll also be learning how to stop bleeding if somebody begins hemorrhaging around them.

“We’re just trying to give them a generalized idea of what the field of nursing is so that they can understand more about what goes into it, and then also how they can obtain their degree from us,” she said.

Demary-Andrew feels that it’s important to give students a look into the LPN program because many students coming in don’t know what they want to do after high school because they feel that they have many years left of education. “The reality is it’s coming sooner than you know,” she said. “So if you’re at all interested in the nursing field, we can start them when they’re in high school their senior year.”

By taking classes at Pierpont’s campus during their senior year, Demary-Andrew said that it can help bridge the students from high school into the LPN program. Then after that, they can join the program full-time under the West Virginia Invest Grant and receive their first certification without having to pay anything.

“We think that it’s gonna provide a lot of insight into what nursing is for the area high school students,” Demary-Andrew said of the Future Nurse Academy. “And we hope to keep giving back year after year.”