sustainable cte
Construction students build Culinary Arts facility in Wayne County By Kristen Dechert
For Wayne County Career and Technical Center Director Bobby Jones, being as self-sufficient as possible is paramount to his school’s success and his students’ development. "Anything we can do for ourselves, we do," said Jones. That mindset was the genesis for a unique collaborative project. This year, about 20 students began construction of a brand new Culinary Arts lab for their peers. When the school decided to replace Home Economics with Culinary Arts, a program that places more emphasis on commercial kitchen use and cooking, teacher Sarah Waller needed a new, commercial-grade facility. Currently, Waller can divide her classes of 15 into just two groups because there are only two stations. The new lab will double that capability, allowing for four stations and four groups. Each station will include a sink, range, oven, counter space and other standard kitchen components. Not only will these improvements bring the culinary facility up to required specifications, they will provide students more hands-on experience that mimics the type of work they might do in a commercial kitchen, a restaurant or other food-service facility. Rather than hire private contractors to do the renovation work, Jones saw the opportunity for Construction teacher Drew Miller’s students to participate in the effort. Tearing out an old computer lab and home economics kitchen, the students started the project in January 2012 and worked all year to finish in time for Culinary Arts students to use the facility in the spring of 2013. From hand-mixing and pouring cement, hanging sheet rock and wiring lighting and outlets to installing plumbing fixtures, shingling a roof and laying tile, the students are completing
every task on the project except installing the air-conditioning unit, range hood and walk-in freezer, which must be professionally installed due to regulations. In other words, the work these students are doing is not a simulation, not a test run. The facility they are building will be a permanent part of the school and will be used by actual students. Therefore, it must meet proper building codes and engineering specifications. Although Miller admitted that the students have had to “tear something down and start over a couple of times,” he carefully monitors their progress and is able to catch most mistakes early on. Through this project, Miller’s students are mastering the competencies of the state Construction curriculum, but they are doing much more. For example, while hanging sheet rock is not in the curriculum, the students have mastered that skill for this project, and the same is the case for a number of other tasks they have completed. "It's hard to run a program where you're teaching plumbing, electricity, carpentry and masonry, but in this project, they’re doing all four,” said Miller. Most important, Miller said, these students are learning valuable hands-on skills that they wouldn’t learn on a smaller project. “After you use the tools every day for a year, you actually learn a lot about the tools and how to use the tools a lot better. Experience is sometimes a better teacher than just [me] teaching [the students] how to do something.” Although the Construction students are doing most of the work, the Culinary Arts students have helped with planning the layout of the kitchen. Waller has let them determine which areas will be preparatory space, where they would like to place certain appliances, and the color of the tile and walls.
"It's hard to run a program where you're teaching plumbing, electricity, carpentry and masonry, but in this project, they’re doing all four.”
16 Connections Fall 2012