Putting dreams into reality Gloucester Daily Times, October 10, 2005

By Richard Gaines, staff writer

Misty Amero, a recent graduate from Action's Health Care Industry Program, takes Susan Levasseur's blood pressure while working at Family Medical Associates as a part time medical assistant.

Seven months of five-hour days, four days a week locked in a classroom learning anatomy, medical law and ethics, the language of medicine, office and clinical skills, blood taking and other tests.

For 16 low-income, high-responsibility women, the work was perhaps the toughest thing they ever did besides what they did before they went back to school.

Eight years out of Gloucester High School, Misty Amero was trying to raise two kids without their father's help and without a job — after the death of the elderly patient she had cared for as a certified nursing assistant.

"I'm 26, and I was just getting tired of all the things I tried," she said. "I said to myself, 'Self, why do I have to settle?' All mothers are multi-taskers, and all of us have done a 180 or a 360 or whatever it is. It's a scary world out there. My greatest fear was starting at the bottom, but we can start over as many times as we need to."

Amero's latest starting over — in the Health Care Industry Career Program, run jointly by Action Inc. and the Millennium Training Institute — could well be her last for a while.

She gave the valedictory address last week to 13 other graduates honored at graduation ceremonies Tuesday night at the Gloucester House restaurant. They already have been welcome into professional health care positions, most still as unpaid interns but all with realistic expectations to stick it out and proceed up a career path in the field that is today hungriest for new entrants in the local market.

Amero already got her paid-job offer — from Family Medical Associates, a busy group practice in Manchester — as a part-time medical assistant in the field of her dreams.

"I always knew I wanted to be in the medical field," she said in an interview, noting she has two other steppingstones in her sights. She has enrolled at North Shore Community College on the way to the big prize: Becoming a nurse.

Elizabeth Hill, administrator for the eight-physician practice, said Amero has more then lived up to the raves she received in the pitch from Action's Patty Bongiorno, who sought spots in which the students, women ages 22 to 55, could complete their 120-hour internship that is part of the curriculum.

Hill said within a few hours, Amero had picked up the essential intricacies of the practice and announced she'd fallen "in love" with the office. It was requited.

She began volunteering to work nights and special shifts to extend her part-time hours.

"We hadn't done this before," said Hill, "but I thought we should be helping women trying to get back into the working world."

Her selection to deliver the valedictory speech didn't result from best grades. The Action-Millennium program is pass/fail and any of Amero's colleagues who accepted diplomas from Action's Bongiorno and Ronna Resnick could have talked about reviving their careers.

It was Bongiorno and Resnick who together convinced the for-profit company Millennium to partner with their nonprofit economic opportunity and social agency, then wrote the grant proposal to the Massachusetts Department of Workforce Development last year that scored $200,000 to underwrite the program.

Millennium vice president Kevin O'Brien told the graduates, their families and friends and Mayor John Bell the Action duo moved with lightening-like speed putting the grant application together. He recalled Resnick's certainty that "we can get this done" despite starting not two weeks ahead of the filing deadline.

He called the partnership with the nonprofit "very unique," but essential. Action had the clients — women like Amero, underemployed and overworked at home in its database of 5,000 on Cape Ann — and Millennium had the expertise in job training.

The state recognized the assets in mixed marriage by making it the only exurban recipient of the five grants it approved. The other four went to programs operating in metropolitan Boston.

A second class, selected under criteria of eighth-grade reading and math skills plus well-organized support systems to allow full commitment to the classroom, began Thursday for 16 more aspiring medical field professionals.

Lest the new enrollees get the wrong idea, they can check with Amero or her classmate, 35-year-old Lori Keyes, who moved out of Gloucester and dropped out of the high school class of '88. She bounced around odd jobs, cashiering and the like. She was married, had two kids and got divorced.

"It was a bad divorce. Financially I was a complete wreck," she said. "I never wanted to be in such a bad financial situation again."

She then found herself attracted to the Action-Millennium program by an advertisement for students in the Times.

"The whole experience gave me so much self-esteem back that the divorce had taken away," she said.

Keyes graduated into an internship at Northeast Health System's Hunt Center for Healthy Aging in Danvers and is planning to enroll in North Shore Community College's radiology technology program to become a technician.

She said the Hunt Center wants her to have a job, which might open up in January.

Organizing her life — she had to account for Emily, 13, and Jason, 8 — to clear time for the classwork was difficult, involving "neighbors, friends and family" and meant she had to give up working to clear her schedule.

But it was worth it. Emily, who sat with her brother at graduation, learned to cook.

"I can cook macaroni," she said.

And she learned about the importance of education. For now, Emily, too, wants to be an X-ray technician, though her mother wisely assumes that will change over time.

At home in the evenings, Mother would sit next to her children while they all did homework.
"I take care of people," said Keyes. "That's what I do — a daughter, a man, a friend."

At the Action-Millennium classes, she learned how to turn that into a career and thought to herself, "I did extremely well in class, maybe this is something I can do."