When Samiyah Moss first learned about a pilot health institute program at Hardy Williams High School last year, the 12th grader wasn’t interested. “My original thoughts were: I don’t want to go! It’s my senior year of high school! I want to be in the building. I want to be with my friends. I want to still get my last-year-of-high-school experience,” Moss recalls. The program would require her to leave the school for half of the year for an externship — a daunting prospect for a student who had attended Hardy since kindergarten.

Despite her reluctance, Moss eventually applied. She had always dreamed of becoming a nurse and hoped the program might serve as a first step toward that goal. “It’s an opportunity that we might not ever get again once we graduate,” she says.

Hardy Williams Elementary and High School is a Mastery public charter school in Kingsessing, where, according to Pew’s 2025 state of the city report, the median household income is less than $48,000, more than 80 percent of students are considered low-income, and more than 96 percent of the students are Black.

Although the school’s grades three through eight have substantially lower than average scores on PA standardized tests, grades seven through twelve tested higher than the state average in algebra, reading, and on their own standardized tests. (Hardy Williams High School students tested 7.9 percent higher than the state average in algebra, 13.4 percent higher in reading, 6.3 percent higher on the math PSSA, and 2.7 percent higher on the reading PSSA, according to a Mastery representative). What’s more, the high school’s graduation rate is an impressive 90 percent, according to Mastery’s own report (and rates at 95 percent, according to Great Schools).

Last year, representatives from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) approached Hardy Principal Justin Meltzer about launching a Health Institute there — a part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ $250 million effort to transition 10 schools across the country into health-focused career pipelines.