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CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misspelled the name of Teresa Jimenez Marcos.
Within a matter of months, Alexander Lee will graduate from Cardozo High School in Northwest with several college credits under his belt and professional experience that places him along his desired career path in cybersecurity.
Alexander counts among nearly 200 students, from 13 District public and public charter schools, who are enrolled in the Advanced Technical Center (ATC).
Since the 2022-2023 school year, this program, now housed within the Lemuel Penn Center in Northeast, allowed District high school students to take career and technical education courses in preparation for college and high-skill careers — free of charge.
Course offerings, provided onsite by instructors from Trinity Washington University and University of District of Columbia, are cybersecurity and nursing. At one point, students even studied health care information technology.
At the behest of his father, Alexander enrolled in the ATC cybersecurity pathway last school year.
Throughout the week, Alexander and his peers traveled to Trinity Washington University in Northeast where they learned coding and other elements of what’s a lucrative and relevant career field. Those lessons have since continued at the newly opened Penn Center site, where cybersecurity and nursing ATC students accumulate college credits and hands-on experience in on-site labs.
For months, Alexander worked on computers similar to what government agencies use, learning how to code and create firewalls and malware in a controlled environment. Such lessons, he told The Informer, augment what he has learned in Cardozo’s engineering pathway and his internship at the Department of Labor Federal Credit Union.
“The program made it easier to understand computers,” Alexander said. “It’s just language. You’re able to understand it in a few months, and you’re not overcomplicating things. People freak out about simple problems, but it’s [part of] a branch. When you slow down and understand what you’re doing, it’s a lot easier to fix the problems at hand.”
In August, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D), State Superintendent Christina Grant and other D.C. government officials celebrated ATC’s launch at the Penn Center. Months earlier, during the 2022-2023 school year, ATC students earned a total of 740 college credits for free at Trinity Washington University, ATC’s temporary location.
Nearly nine out of 10 students who took ATC courses that year returned for the 2023-2024 school year.
The $10.3 million facility constructed by the Department of General Services includes a welcome center and science and technology labs. It counts among the District’s ongoing efforts to create and expand educational and enrichment activities for high school students.
An ATC official, speaking on background, told The Informer that the program, currently on one floor of the Penn Center, serves students from all eight wards. They said there are conversations about expanding the center to other floors of the building, and even opening an ATC facility in a community east of the Anacostia River.
For ATC nursing pathways student Teresa Jimenez Marcos, more young people can benefit from the program just as she has over the last couple years.
Teresa, a senior at Jackson-Reed Senior High School in Northwest, said she wants to enter the global health field as a dermatologist. She’s taken steps to pursue this career path while at ATC, in the biomedical pathways at Jackson-Reed and as a member of a student club known as HOSA-Future Health Professionals.
This past summer, Teresa interned at Georgetown School of Medicine, which she said further cemented her goal of studying preventative medicine. She’s currently interviewing for a school-year internship through D.C.’s Advanced Internship Program.
Teresa, whose family hails from Mexico, gains inspiration from her grandmother and other family members who she, as a youngster, saw battle health problems. In her career, Teresa aspires to help first-generation American families overcome insurance hurdles and language barriers that complicate their access to health care.
As Teresa explained to The Informer, ATC places her on the trajectory to fulfilling her career goals much earlier than other youth her age. When she’s not in the classroom, Teresa is standing alongside her ATC nursing peers in a lab, tending to a mannequin that’s experiencing a simulated medical emergency.
“It makes you feel powerful — like you have more possibilities,” Teresa said. “I talk to adults in the health care field, and they tell me how awesome it is to get opportunities beforehand. It opens me to more options in the future. We’re in a workspace ready to jump right into college-level work.”
Xavier Amos, an ATC associate administrator, watches closely as ATC students, over the course of a year, break out of their cocoons, build friendships with peers from other schools, and develop an intrinsic motivation to research their career field of choice.
In his role, Amos ensures students safely get to and from the ATC, provides them with food and supplies, and connects instructional partners with on-site support. Amid government officials and residents’ concerns about public safety and quality of education, he credited ATC with expanding young people’s imagination about what they can achieve.
“ATC opens young people’s eyes to the possibilities of who they can become, what they have in them, and how things align purposefully,” Amos said.
The ATC associate administrator emphasized the program’s dual benefits “from a high school and college lens.”
“It’s not just college-focused, but career-focused,” he said. “With workplace credentials, we’re showing students how they can impact this world and be change agents. That’s beautiful and shows them the power of who they already are.”