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By JOSEPH P. FRIED

 

DANCING to the driving beat of 1960s twist music, the three high school students tried to rouse the spirits of the 50 people in front of them. Some in the audience swayed slightly in their chairs or wheelchairs, or clapped or nodded with the rhythm. Others simply watched; a few dozed despite the high decibels from the live singer and his synthesizer.

The scene on a recent morning was a music therapy session at the Queens Boulevard Extended Care Facility, a nursing home and rehabilitation center in Woodside, Queens. The three young women work there as part-time interns in a program that encourages New York City high school students to explore careers serving the elderly.

Tatiana Vargas and Dacia Castillo, both 18, and Genesis Nan, 17, are among 12 students participating in the Young Gerontologists’ Career Program this year. (Nine others work at two nursing homes in the Bronx.)

The program is a joint effort by the city’s Department for the Aging and the Department of Education.

Ms. Nan said that she hoped to become a physical therapist aiding geriatric patients. “I like working with older people,” she said. Like Ms. Vargas and Ms. Castillo, Ms. Nan lives in Queens and attends John Bowne High School in Flushing.

Ms. Vargas said that she was looking toward a career as a recreational therapist who would work with both older people and disabled children.

Ms. Castillo spoke of a career in geriatrics as a fallback. Her plan is to study forensic psychology or, alternatively, to oversee recreational therapy in a nursing home, she said.

The Young Gerontologists’ Career Program began in the 2003-4 school year as part of a larger, 20-year-old program, the Intergenerational Work Study Program.

In the larger program, up to 400 high school students a year work up to 15 hours a week in nursing homes or senior citizen centers, said Theresa Knox, who is both field director for the intergenerational program and facilitator for the gerontologists’ program.

The students in the intergenerational program, most of them young women, work from October to May, she said, earning the minimum wage ($7.15 an hour in New York), or academic or community service credits.

“They work in group activities and with individuals one on one, visiting them and bonding with them,” doing things like polishing their nails and discussing the day’s news, Ms. Knox said.

But until 2003, the Intergenerational Work Study Program did not seek to identify people who might be interested in working with the elderly as a career, Ms. Knox said.

That year, the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging and Longevity of Hunter College and the Consortium of New York Geriatric Education Centers suggested that the program adopt that function.

The reason was that the need to find and train people to work with the elderly was becoming more urgent as the baby boom generation aged and people lived longer than ever. The Social Security Administration estimates that the number of Americans 65 and older will double during the first three decades of this century, to 70 million, while the nation’s overall population will grow only about 25 percent, to 360 million.

The Young Gerontologists learn about the career opportunities created by these trends, along with the educational and training requirements. They attend monthly seminars not available to those in the Intergenerational Work Study Program.

Some seminars take place at the Department for the Aging; others occur at nursing schools, where the high school students meet with nursing students and admissions officers. Still other seminars are given at hospitals, where students speak with nurses, therapists and other staff members who deal with older patients.

The program also makes students aware that elder care specialties extend beyond medicine and medical-related therapy, to fields like social work, financial and legal counseling, nutrition, adult education, architecture and institutional administration.

A total of 51 students completed the career program since 2003. Ms. Knox said she hoped it would grow after it had existed long enough to show its effectiveness.

At this point, Ms. Knox said, most of the students who have completed the program are still in college. She said that some of them were in prenursing or occupational therapy studies, but that she did not yet know how many intended to specialize in working with older people.

Linda Newby, director of therapeutic recreation at the Queens Boulevard center, said that even if the students took a different path, their time at the nursing home would not have been in vain, because the internships were teaching them “responsibility and good work ethics and commitment.”

E-mail: homefront@nytimes.com.

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