Neither Alaina Mahlandt nor Breanna Callender walked into their child development class with a five-year plan. Alaina signed up sophomore year because she thought it would be practical knowledge for her own life someday. Breanna enrolled for much the same reason. What neither of them expected was that a class about infant and early childhood development would quietly reroute where they were headed — one toward elementary education, the other toward the NICU.

Alaina is a senior. Breanna is a junior. Both are students of Ms. Shipley at Centralia High School, who teaches the full sequence of child-focused courses the school offers: Child Development, Child Care, Introduction to Education, and Educational Methods. The four courses build on each other, and Alaina has now taken all of them. Breanna is currently in Child Care after completing Child Development last year, with plans to continue into the education courses as a senior. Both of them, asked to describe their teacher, use the same word without consulting each other: helpful.

"She explains the topic really well," Breanna says. "If you have a question, she explains it in a way that makes it click. It's a really discussion-based class." Alaina agrees — and adds that Ms. Shipley does something not every teacher does, which is to stay present beyond the lesson plan. "Being a senior, I've asked her questions about colleges, about what I should do to get my degree," she says. "She's really good at answering those." Both students describe a classroom where personal questions get real answers, and where the teacher checks in on students as people, not just as names on a roster.

The class does not stay in the classroom. Students in the Child Care course have been making weekly Tuesday visits to Head Start throughout the school year, riding a bus down the street to spend 30 minutes with preschool-age children. They divide into pairs and small groups, rotate rooms each quarter, and observe and interact with kids — drawing with them, playing in the gym, reading aloud, watching development in real time. They come back and write structured observations, documenting what they saw in terms of children's cognitive, social, and physical development. "It helps you really break it down and observe what you actually saw," Alaina says, "and not just say 'I went into this room.'" The class also has visits planned to Trinity and to the early childhood program at Kaskaskia College, which Breanna describes as being set up exactly the way the textbook says it should be.

For Alaina, the classroom experience has extended into a full internship. Every school day — sixth and seventh hour, about two hours — she drives herself across the street to Jordan Elementary School, where she works in second-grade teacher Michelle Witzel's classroom. 

She's been there the entire school year. "I get to use the skills I learned in my early childhood classes and apply them," she says. "It's really cool to make those connections between the classes and real life." The internship program is optional for seniors who can choose it regardless of career path, but Alaina chose the classroom because that's where she's going. She plans to start at Kaskaskia College in the fall, then hopefully on to Illinois State University — which she calls one of the top education programs in the country — as her transfer target.

Breanna's path is still taking shape, but the direction has sharpened considerably since she started these classes. Early in high school, her counselor, Marion Russell, asked what she wanted to do and got a vague answer. Now the answer is NICU nursing — working with newborns in intensive care — a goal that grew out of child development class and the hours spent with infants at Head Start. "My answers were completely different than what I have now," she says. She's planning to earn her CNA certification over the summer through a jump-start program, a pivot she made after it was too late to fit the health occupations class into her junior year schedule. Counselor Marion Russell helped her find the path around the deadline. Her senior year course schedule, still being finalized, will include Introduction to Education.

Both students credit their guidance counselors as essential — Alaina hers, Becky Brooks, for steering her toward dual-credit courses that will save her real money in college; Breanna hers, Marion Russell, for pushing her toward opportunities before she fully knew she wanted them. "I don't think I would even be able to afford college if I didn't have the dual credit program," Alaina says.

Breanna puts it plainly when asked what she thinks about the child care classes. "The child development class should be required," she says. "Somebody is always going to interact with a child. No matter who you are, you're going to see a child. It's important to know what to do." Alaina nods. Both of them learned that, once, in a class they took for personal reasons that turned out to be far more than that.