Which is a strange thing to call a school until you have watched a good caregiver quit because nobody was in her corner. That is the whole reason this place exists, and it is why the address ends in dot community rather than dot com.
Christina spent her first week as a nurse aide certain she had made a mistake. She was twenty three, she had trained at a large school that moved fast, and she could recite the theory perfectly. On her third shift she was asked to change the sheets on an occupied bed and she had no idea how to do it without hurting the woman in it.
Ruth had been an aide for thirty one years. She did not sigh, or make a joke of it in front of the resident, or report it. She said, come here, watch my hands, and then stood next to Christina while she did it herself twice. It took nine minutes. Nobody at the school had ever shown her, because the class had been forty people and the lab time had been twenty minutes.
Fourteen years later, after a nursing degree and a long stretch as a clinical educator watching new aides arrive underprepared and leave within a year, Christina started writing down what a school would look like if it were built around those nine minutes instead of around a timetable.
Twenty four seats, so that everyone gets watched. Every competency signed by hand. Prices published. Evenings and weekends, because the people who are best at this work usually cannot afford to stop working to learn it. And a phone number that still works after you graduate.
That is the school. It opens in January.
Every school says it cares. These are the specific, checkable commitments we made instead, so that you can hold us to them and so can our own staff.
Federal rules require nurse aide training to be delivered by or under the supervision of a registered nurse with at least two years of nursing experience, of which at least one must be in long term care. We meet that comfortably, and we also insist that anyone teaching here is still doing the job somewhere, at least one shift a month.
DNP, RN · Curriculum and clinical compliance
Nineteen years in acute and post acute care, the last six building training programmes. Andre owns the curriculum map, the state paperwork and the argument about whether a competency has genuinely been demonstrated.
CNA, CDP · Dementia care lead
Twenty two years as an aide, sixteen of them in memory care, and a certified dementia practitioner. Deborah teaches the module most students say changed how they treat their own grandparents.
RN, BSN · Founder and program director
Fourteen years from nurse aide to clinical educator, most of it in skilled nursing on the southwest side. Christina teaches the first block of every cohort herself, which is a promise she will regret making by cohort four.
Your clinical rotation is supervised by registered nurses at partner facilities, not by us. They are the ones who will decide whether you are ready, and they have no reason to be generous about it. We think that is exactly right.
Before every rotation we brief you on that facility specifically: who runs the floor, what they are strict about, and what they will expect you to know without being told. Walking in prepared is most of the battle.
We are on Richmond Avenue, a few minutes from the 610 loop, with parking at the door and a bus stop on the same block. The building is not glamorous. The lab inside it is properly equipped, which is the part that matters.
Two hospital beds with full rails, a hoyer lift, a transfer board, a wheelchair, a commode, mannequins for CPR, and enough linen that four pairs of students can practise an occupied bed change at once instead of taking turns. Vital signs equipment for every pair rather than one set passed around the room.
There is a front room with chairs, a microwave and a kettle, because a lot of our students come straight from a shift and have not eaten. Nobody has ever learned a transfer technique well while hungry.
A director of nursing, two agency owners, a hospice social worker, a family caregiver and a former student of Christina's who is now an LVN. They meet quarterly, they read the curriculum, and they are the ones who told us the original timetable was built for people who do not have children.
None of them are paid and none of them guarantee employment to our students. Their job is to be the room where somebody says the uncomfortable thing before a cohort of twenty four people pays to find it out.
We publish who they are because a school that will not tell you who is checking its work is asking you to take rather a lot on faith.
Tours run Tuesday and Saturday mornings from the first week of November. Bring whoever helps you make decisions, and ask us anything you like about the lab, the money or the instructors.