LEWISTON – Katrina St. Claire never doubted she would go to college. Now a freshman at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., she says Lewiston programs and mentors helped her get there.

The first-generation college student is one of the many beneficiaries of an initiative at Lewiston High School to get all students ready for college.

Her mother, Louise St. Claire, didn’t go. A legal secretary, she began working at a law firm at 17 and stayed with it. But times have changed, she said. “You have to have some sort of degree or certificate.”

Encouraging Katrina to attend college wasn’t difficult, she said. Katrina has known what she wanted to be since she was little: a nurse. “I like people and I like to help people,” she said.

She and her mother credit the Lewiston Regional Technical Center for helping students plan for careers.

“Each child with any initiative, there’s a program there for them,” Louise St. Claire said.

As a sophomore, Katrina was given the opportunity to go into hospitals and check out different careers. And she gained a mentor – health science teacher Pamela Abzan. “The best teacher I ever had. She’d say, ‘What do you want to do when you’re a nurse?’ I said pediatrics, and she put me on pediatrics. She was very good at making sure we were doing what we wanted to do.”

At the technical center, Katrina studied health science, taking classes in everything from nursing to anatomy. At the high school she took honors biology and advanced placement statistics, and participated in Early College her senior year, taking a college class at Central Maine Community College. The tough classes gave her an advantage in college, and allowed her to get college credit, saving time and money. “It was definitely a good experience.”

The high school’s aspirations lab helps students figure out which careers may be good for them. And the lab “has tons of books with colleges and numbers” to help students decide where to apply. “There’s tons of help. It’s open all the time,” Katrina said.

She said students get frequent reminders about college application deadlines. Aspirations lab coordinator Joan Macri “goes classroom to classroom. She peeks in and says, ‘I haven’t see a lot of your faces …’ “