This team of news professionals includes Rapelje High School graduate Brenda Erfle. What makes Brenda unique is that she is a sophomore in college taking a full load of courses and making excellent grades.

How can a woman in her second year out of high school gain the experience and skill required for a demanding job like this? As a high school senior, Brenda participated in Rapelje High School's School-to-Work program. As part of the program, she spent one day each week at KULR 8 where she learned many aspects of the television business.

The station, obviously pleased with Brenda's efforts, asked her to work part time while she attended college. As a communications major, part of Brenda's college program is to serve an internship in a media-related business. KULR 8 offered her a paid internship with a daily job as morning cameraman for the early news. Without the experience she got from School-to-Work, Brenda might not have gained such a head start in her chosen career.

Across town in the "medical" section of Billings, another School-to-Work student, Matt Doely, works in orthopedics. If you are a patient at Orthopedic Associates on Thursdays, you might meet him -- a handsome, personable young man who observes and assists doctors and therapists, prepares splints for use, learns some of the demands of diagnosis and treatment, attends professional meetings, puts labels on charts and helps take inventory.

Matt is a Rapelje High School junior whose own experience with broken bones and interest in sports medicine led him to Orthopedic Associates.

Until this year, School-To-Work at Rapelje School had been limited to seniors. As an experiment we extended the opportunity to juniors so that students could have a more varied experience in the workplace and try out more than one field of endeavor. Matt is proof that the experiment works.

Each Thursday, Matt reports at 8 a.m. to Orthopedic Associates for a full day of work. He drives over 50 miles to get there from Rapelje. During his work day, Matt experiences as many of the aspects of Orthopedic Associates as his mentors can squeeze in. When he returns to school on Friday, Matt is always full of interesting stories from his School-to-Work job.

Matt and Brenda are two of many success stories from School-to-Work. This program is not limited to Rapelje but has found a home at other rural schools as well: Broadview, Reedpoint and Absarokee to name a few. It is a program, individualized to the needs of the particular school, that puts students in the workplace for a portion of their high school career. Students have been placed in dozens of businesses, including Big Sky Collision, KCTR Radio, New York Life Insurance, Juvenile Court Services, Alberta Bair Theater, U.S. Army Reserve, Hagen Printing and Hi-Tech Yamaha. Many students have called School-to-Work the best part of their high school experience.

Governors' Summit on Youth Held in Billings

Helping young people gain skills and confidence is one of the goals of the Governors' Summit on Youth: Montana's Promise. The Summit will be held June 14 - 16, 1998 at the Holiday Inn Conference Center in Billings.