breaking the cycle

MOSES LAKE — Graduate from high school. Get a plan. Don’t be ashamed of where you go to school, even if it isn’t a big or important school. Take advantage of all your opportunities, be resilient, and recover quickly from your setbacks.

That was the advice Terry Shines, an interventions counselor at Sunnyside High School and one-time baseball player at Big Bend Community College, gave about 450 Moses Lake High School juniors Thursday morning.

“This is where I got my opportunity,” Shines said of Big Bend Community College. “Without this place, I might not have gone to college.”

Shines said he was the first person in his family to go to college. But once he went, others started too.

“Be the first, break the cycle,” he said. “If Big Bend Community College is your choice, take it and run with it. There are a lot of people here willing to help.”

The 11th-graders were at Big Bend Community College to learn about the different options they might have for career and school, and that there are a number of “different pathways” to college, according to Jacqueline Wells, a career and technical specialist at Moses Lake High School.

So the students wandered the campus meeting with employers, other schools from across Washington state, and looking into various Big Bend vocational programs — specifically medical technology and aviation.

Outside the aviation building, Shayla Morton and her friend Jennifer Moreno sat behind the controls of a small, single-engine cargo plane while an instructor patiently showed them which levers they to adjust the flaps and help the plane land.

“I guess I’m a professional airplane driver now,” Morton said.

Students also got to watch an unmanned aircraft demonstration as part of the college’s new and slowly arising unmanned systems program.

They got a quick rundown on the rules for drones from Rafael Villalobos, who has been teaching in the program for only a few months.

“You don’t fly at night, you don’t fly over crowds, keep the vehicle within a line of sight, and you don’t fly higher than 400 feet,” Villalobos told a crowd of 11th-graders.

“Oh, and you don’t fly within five miles of airports or hospitals. We had to get some very specific firmware upgrades to our drones to use them here,” he said, pointing the runway less than a mile behind him.

This is the first year Big Bend Community College and Moses Lake High School have put on an event specifically for MLHS students.

“We just wanted to have something for Moses Lake students,” said Monica Medrano, event coordinator with Workforce Education Services at Big Bend Community College. “We wanted to get these kids here, show them elements of career pathways, see where what they want to line up with our programs, and have them walk the campus.”

“To have them get familiar with the programs before they even get here,” she said.