Rise to Success Program Helps Chattooga High Graduate Excel

The Rise to Success program at Atrium Health Floyd is not the reason Bray Mosley is succeeding, but it is most definitely helping her achieve her goals.

She is one of 35 Rise to Success students at Atrium Health Floyd and was the first from Chattooga County. She graduated from Chattooga High School in 2023 with a goal of becoming a nurse.

Her career choice was not a life-long dream. She had her eyes set on law school until she walked by the health occupations lab at her school and saw the anatomy models and health care equipment. “When I saw the environment, that is when it all changed,” she said.

Mosley registered for those classes, earning certification as a nurse assistant, patient care technician and medical assistant while still in high school. It was in that same program that she first heard about the Rise to Success program.

“I remember the day specifically,” she said. “I was sitting in my high school nursing class. Our teacher was telling us that someone was going to come from Atrium Health and tell us about a program that could be beneficial to us after high school.”

That speaker was Sheila Rawlins, Atrium Health Human Resources Rise to Success program manager.

“She told us about all the options we could choose for a part-time job and the schools we could go to,” Mosley said. “I thought this is a really good opportunity. It fit with what I wanted to do after school.”

She said she had known she didn’t want to attend a large university, and she knew she didn’t want to have a lot of student debt once she graduated. It made practical sense, she said, to live at home and attend classes.

“I wanted to go to a two-year school and work part time while going to nursing school,” she said. “I love my family. I’m using my house as much as I can until I get financially stable. I can get the same education faster at a two-year school than I can at a big university, and it is affordable.”

The Rise to Success program gives graduating high school students a special and personal opportunity to pursue a career in health care. The program pays students’ tuition, books and fees, provides a part-time job that works with their class schedule and assigns them a mentor who checks in with them regularly.

In addition, there are Atrium Health-based seminars and classes on such topics as managing work-life-school balance and taking care of your emotional, physical and mental health.

Within a month of graduating high school, Mosley was working as a certified nurse assistant at Atrium Health Floyd. She started college fall semester of 2023. When the Chattooga County stand-alone emergency department opened, she asked to transfer to a position there. Today, she works part time at the Chattooga facility registering patients while taking both online and in-person classes at Georgia Highlands College.

That ability to work close to home is one of the things she likes most about Atrium Health Floyd.

“There are so many different jobs you can do, and they are flexible,” she said. “On top of that, they have different locations that you can go to that may be close to home. Now, I don’t have to worry about going all the way to Rome. That is what I really love about it.”

Mosley said she has found the mentoring component of Rise to Success to be particularly valuable. Her mentor is Lamar Davis, a scheduling specialist and care coordinator in the Contact Center.

“We meet every single month. He checks in about my grades, about work, how I’m managing life outside of work and about my mental health,” she said. “He’s makes it personal to me.”

Last year, Mosley, as the first Rise to Success participant from her school, felt a little pressure to do well.

“I was so excited. I felt like I was representing Chattooga and my little, small town,” she said. Now she has become something of an advocate for the program. “This past year, they came back to Chattooga and got two more for the program. I was so excited that people took advantage of it. It’s a really good program for after school.”

Atrium Health Floyd recently welcomed 16 additional students into the Rise to Success program:

• Cedartown High School – Andy Ortiz Perez, Deysi Segura
• Chattooga High School – Emma Elrod, Enivea London
• Coosa High School – Kiana Tapia
• Gaylesville School – Sieanna Hall and Tiffany Morris
• Model High School – Kiley Gordon, A’zyriasia Woolfork
• Rome High School – Journei Griffin, Samanta Moraga and Emylly Reyes
• Sand Rock School – Destiny Daniell, Madden DeParlier
• Trion High School – Hanny Morales-Citalan, Kinzleigh Turner

In 2023, 15 students, including Mosley, were accepted into the Rise to Success program. Atrium Health Floyd introduced the program in 2022, with four students.