Ten new high schools specializing in healthcare are set to be established across the country, including in Dallas.
Bloomberg Philanthropies, a foundation run by former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, has donated roughly $250 million to Baylor Scott & White Health and the public charter school system Uplift Education in order to erect the schools.
Two campuses will be in Texas, one in Dallas and the other in Houston. In Dallas, the program’s partners will allocate $14.6 million to develop West Dallas’ Uplift Heights Preparatory into a healthcare-focused campus.
As Bloomberg explained in a recent X post, the initiative “will offer high school students interested in healthcare hands-on paid internships, specialized classes, and mentorship, and will prepare them to graduate directly into roles with family-sustaining wages.”
Uplift Education already has a notable presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Yasmin Bhatia, president and CEO of Uplift Education, reported last April that it serves 23,000 children across 45 schools in six different cities, as previously covered in The Dallas Express.
Although six Dallas ISD campuses already offer health-science-related courses, the new initiative will provide direct pathways to meet the growing workforce demand. Beginning in grade 9, students will be able to choose between biomedical science, nursing, health care therapeutic, and distribution and logistics, with several dual certification options available to help them start their careers immediately after graduation.
The 10 new healthcare-specialized high schools in Texas, Alabama, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and New York will collectively enroll around 6,000 students. Those who attend will have a new pathway to success in a high-demand field while minimizing costly loans for a postsecondary degree.
Bloomberg wrote in an opinion piece that there are currently around 2 million healthcare job openings, with median salaries starting at $70,000. This number of unfilled jobs is expected to double by 2031 due to increased demand caused by the United States’ aging population.
“We cannot expect that the market will solve the labor shortage on its own,” he said.
The recent rise in charter schools has offered North Texas families a number of education alternatives. Meanwhile, a steady decline is being seen in student enrollment figures in state-funded school systems across the region, as covered extensively in The Dallas Express. This has been a longstanding trend at Dallas ISD, though its budget has counterintuitively continued to grow.
Despite the billions of dollars in taxpayer money the district spends, Dallas ISD has continued to put up dismal student outcomes. Only 41% of students scored at grade level on the STAAR exam in 2021-2022, according to the latest Texas Education Agency accountability report. Additionally, almost 20% of seniors did not graduate within four years.
