Sara Weidenbach’s child development students are getting hands-on experience and all they have to do is walk down the hall at White River High School each day to the daycare.

They’re changing diapers, serving meals, cradling colicky infants and reading to toddlers.

The licensed daycare snugs into the classrooms on the Buckley campus. It has been serving White River School District staff and occasionally community members for years. It is self-supporting and employs a director and a number of assistants and aides.

“It keeps growing and improving and growing and improving,” director Mischelle Minninger said. She along with a number of assistants and the students take care of 14 toddlers and four infants from 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. They are licensed for 19 children, from infants to 5-year-olds.

Openings are rare and school district staff are given priority. Weidenbach’s own children are in the daycare.

“The staff is the best around and I’m not kidding,” she said. “They treat these kids like they were their own.”

Weidenbach’s first-year students work with toddlers on age-appropriate activities. Her second- and third-year students are assigned to the daycare. The classes, part of the school’s career and technical education program, are popular.

“They get an eye-opener, it’s not just holding a baby,” Minninger said.

But it’s exactly what they need, especially if they are looking at childcare as a career.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of childcare workers is projected to increase by 18 percent between 2006 and 2016, faster than the average for all occupations. Childcare workers will have a large number of new jobs arise, almost 248,000 during the next decade.

That is why Assistant Principal Greg Borgerding and the CTE staff are excited about the grant the district recently landed to start an apprentice program in the fall. White River High is one of three schools in the state that have daycares in the school that qualified for a grant.

“It’s an opportunity for high school students to get ahead on future plans with the hours they earn at the daycare here,” Weidenbach said.

Students work part-time during the school year and continue the apprenticeship through local community or technical college. Coursework in the family and consumer sciences program is articulated with a community or technical college. After work-based learning of 2,000 hours and related classroom instruction of 144 hours a year, students are awarded a state certificate and eligible to apply for nationally recognized Child Development Associate credential.

Sophomore Sarah McDaniel hopes to be one of the first in the program.

“I feel like I’m really blessed with this,” she said. “If they’re giving it, I want to act on it.”

McDaniel, who currently works in the daycare on a daily basis, would like to work with children in the future. She’s exploring careers in medicine, teaching and daycare. Working in the daycare, she said, has given her that experience. In addition to the childcare basics she’s learned, as the youngest in her family she enjoys watching the children develop and building bonds with them. She’s hoping to use her newfound skills to find babysitting jobs this summer.