SOUTH SALT LAKE — The first time Rebecca Lopez assisted a real dental patient, rather than a fellow student or a dummy, she was so nervous that she squirted water in the young girl's eye.

Luckily, Lopez has seen at least a dozen other patients since then and has found that her confidence has improved greatly. In fact, the 18-year-old high school student already has an internship at a private dental office, which will hopefully turn into a full-time job when she graduates later this year.

"I've wanted to be a dentist my whole life, so this is my first step," said Lopez, one of 60 students enrolled in Granite Technical Institute's dental-assistant program.

The program recently forged a one-of-a-kind partnership with the Utah Department of Health to provide a full range of dental services to low-income Utahns. The Granite clinic is the seventh in the state's Family Dental Plan program, which serves Utahns enrolled in Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Plan and Primary Care Network.

It is the first, however, that also operates as a teaching lab for students. Each day, students from all nine high schools in the Granite School District take a bus to the South Salt Lake campus to work under the supervision of a Family Dental Plan dentist.

"This gets them over that first hurdle of working with real doctors and real patients," said Carma Varas, dental assisting instructor.

The clinic serves two very important purposes, said Bruce Murray, program manager for the Family Dental Plan. First, it gives students the unique experience to sit chairside with a dentist and perform tasks on actual patients. Secondly, it gives low-income folks, who often have a difficult time finding adequate dental care, somewhere to go for services.

"It's just an exciting venture, in my opinion," Murray said.

The dental clinic is the brainchild of Varas, who has taught dental assisting at the school district for the past 20 years. She's had the idea in the back of her mind since the technical institute moved into the Granite Education Center, 2500 S. State, in late 2005. The clinic wasn't an option before, when Varas' students used a janitorial closet as their sterilization area, but the former hospital was perfect to set up a state-of-the-art clinic and lab.

"It's just heaven," said Varas, who contacted health officials last fall to start moving things along. After jumping through all the "regulatory hoops" required by the school district and the health department, the clinic started taking patients in mid-February.

Under the tutelage of Dr. Kimel Fisher, a retired private dentist who now works with the state program, students do everything from teeth cleanings and exams to assisting with extractions and root canals. Like Lopez, Fisher said he has seen each student's confidence grow exponentially just in the past month.