Editor’s note: In recognition of Career Technical Education Month, the Telegraph is presenting a series of stories on North Florida Technical College.
BY CLIFF SMELLEY
Telegraph Staff Writer
Are you interested in nursing as a career, but can’t envision how you’d possibly balance going to school and taking care of family?
Perhaps you should look into Practical Nursing at North Florida Technical College, which offers a part-time program.
Practical Nursing is 1,350-hour program. For full-time students, that equates to a four-day commitment (8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Mondays and Tuesdays, 7 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays), which will require 10 months to graduate.
The part-time program, however, is just a two-day-a-week commitment (7 a.m.-5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays), which will require 18 months to graduate.
Instructor Lynn Dickinson has eight students in her current part-time program. She asked them why they went with the part-time option. The consensus was that they were all working full-time and supporting families.
“We’re all parents,” student Brandon Boettcher said.
Dickinson said she overhears her students talking about such things as what they’re going to feed their families that night or how they’re taking their children to ball practices.
“They are truly the masters of time management,” she said.
That is the key, which is why even part-time students take part in a time-management activity at the start of the program. Dickinson said they’re asked to put down on paper how many hours in a day they need to devote to studying, housework, grocery shopping, etc.
Most students will probably tell you the part-time program is still tough, but they’re in it because they have a goal, which they want to accomplish.
“It is a very high-performing class,” Dickinson said. “They have excellent attendance, and they are academically advanced.”
The students seem to be following in the footsteps of the previous part-time program, which graduated in December 2021. All 11 students in that class passed the That’s what the 11 students in the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) on their first attempt.
Dickinson said the LPN students (part-time and full-time) have done extremely well on the NCLEX for years.
“We have a higher pass rate on the NCLEX than local practical-nursing programs, such as Santa Fe College, Gateway College and all of those,” she said. “Right here in Starke. It’s amazing.”
Students divide their time between the classroom and clinical rotations at various facilities, such as HCA Florida Starke Emergency, Riverwood Health and Rehab Center in Starke, the Florida Department of Health in Bradford and Union counties, UF Health in Gainesville and Northeast Florida State Hospital in Macclenny.
“We have good partnerships with those facilities,” Dickinson said.
The NFTC students make quite an impression on those facilities in a short amount of time.
“They just love them,” Dickinson said. “After maybe one or two (clinicals), they’ve already basically offered them jobs. With the market great for nurses, they want to snag them up.”
Even if students are in the classroom, they’re expected to behave as if they were on their clinical rotation. In a Jan. 27, 2022, Telegraph-Times-Monitor story, Dickinson said, “We expect and demand excellence from them in the classroom setting in all aspects, as if they were on the floor giving medications, arriving to work on time, giving their best and not cutting any corners or compromising. We hope they take that into the clinical setting. I feel like they do.”
In that same January 2022 story, Dickinson said the NFTC instructors are demanding of their students, but then asked if anybody would want it any other way, considering that those students will one day be working in healthcare.
“We kind of say, ‘Would I want her taking care of me one day? Or my mother? Or my grandmother?’ They have to toe the line,” Dickinson said.
You might naturally expect the program to draw students from Bradford and Union counties as well as Keystone Heights, but students also come from such places as Hawthorne, Jacksonville, Macclenny and Middleburg.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded the number of licensed practical and licensed vocational nursing jobs in the U.S. in 2021 at 657,200. The bureau projects the number of jobs to increase by 6 percent by 2032. (The average increase of jobs is 5 percent.)
In 2021, the median pay, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was $48,070 per year, or $23.11 per hour.
At a more local level, Career Coach (a Santa Fe College resource) shows that there are 18.744 licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses within a 120-mile radius from Santa Fe College in Gainesville. Career Coach projects that figure to rise to 19,689 by 2032.
“There’s definitely a market for the nurses we have,” Dickinson said.
NFTC has an agreement with Santa Fe and other colleges so that its LPN students, if they wish, can bridge over into those school’s Registered Nursing programs.
“It cuts down on their time,” Dickinson said.
To find out more about Practical Nursing at NFTC, please visit bradfordschools.org and select the college in the “Our Schools” tab.
You may also call 904-966-6764.
