It started with a health class that wasn't like the other health classes.

Christian Atkinson is a junior at Meridian — quiet, clear-eyed, and already pointed toward something specific. He plans to enroll in the CNA program next year, with a longer view toward becoming a registered nurse. Ask him what kind of nursing, and he'll give you an honest answer: "Straight nursing for now." He's got time to figure out the rest.

What he already knows is how the direction got started.

"All my other health classes, we just sat on the computer, and it was really boring," he said. Then came Ms. Jill Boser. "The first day I got in there, she told us how it was gonna be. It was a really fun class in general."

The difference was registered immediately. From there, Christian started sitting in on CNA classes during free periods — not because anyone told him to, just to see what the program actually was. "I was like, okay, I'm gonna try this out." Friends who had already done CNA helped close the gap between curiosity and commitment.

"Between them and Ms. Jill talking about it," he said, "I was like, okay, that seemed like something I could be interested in."

He's not alone in this. The same classroom, the same teacher, the same pathway — Ms. Boser's health program has been quietly pointing Meridian students toward healthcare careers in ways that are starting to show up in actual plans, actual applications, actual futures being built. Christian's story is one of them.

His interest in nursing isn't only about a class, though. His second-oldest sister is already in the field. His grandmother, Cora Baggett, and his mother, Tina Blake, shaped the kind of person he is before any teacher ever got the chance.

"That's really how I've always been raised," he said. "It's role models like that."

Growing up surrounded by women who showed him what it looks like to care for people, he says that inclination always felt natural — not a departure from who he was, but an extension of it. The nursing field, the CNA pathway, the long view toward a four-year degree: these feel like the right continuation of a way of being that was already there.

He's thinking about Shawnee Community College as a starting point, then possibly SIU Edwardsville or SIU Carbondale to complete his RN. When he imagines where he might eventually land, St. Louis comes to mind — he visits his aunt up there a couple of times a year, knows the area, feels something possible in it. What he wants most is to leave, build something, and do it in a place where opportunities are real.

What he says he'll remember most about Meridian when he gets there are "most definitely all my teachers" — not a specific lesson or event, but the quality of presence in the classrooms where he was actually engaged. He names teachers who made class interactive, who made him feel like learning was happening to him rather than at him. Ms. Boser is the clearest example, but the impulse seems to run across his years here.

There is nothing loud about Christian Atkinson's ambitions. He doesn't announce them. He thinks about nursing homes and clinicals, about the path from CNA to RN, about which schools make sense financially. He is planning without performing the planning.

Asked what he'd leave behind if he could talk to a younger version of himself, he doesn't have a ready answer for that — he's still becoming the version that would know what to say. But he knows where he's pointed, knows who helped get him there, and knows enough to move.

A grandmother. A mother. A sister already in nursing. A teacher who ran class differently from the first day. Friends who showed him what the program looked like from the inside.

None of that happened by accident.

"I would most definitely say all my teachers," he said. "How they made the class more interactive."

For a young man heading into a profession built around showing up for people — that answer, more than any specific credential or career plan, feels like the truest thing he could have said.