Three students from the Crookston High School’s Community Projects Class have created another project for the High School as part of the class’s work to create projects that help the community and the school. Seniors Ryan Abeld, Hunter Kresl, and junior Evin Trudeau have built an addition to the main desk at the High School’s Guidance Office to make it look like the front admissions desk at the entrance of the school and the admissions desk for the Crookston Sports Center.
The High School has been looking to change nearly all of the main desks to have a Pirate ship look to the school, but rather than create the whole desk from scratch, the students decided to add the “Pirate Ship” around the desk. “It started out as just a plain desk. Was very generic, almost gross and ugly, and Travis (Oliver) decided to make it more spiced up if you would,” Senior Hunter Kresl explained. “We resided it, made it look fancy, put a new top on it, and turned it from an old, crusty desk to something brand new and will be used forever.” To complete the project, the students worked closely with the guidance counselors to learn what additions they wanted to have added to their desk. Such as what kind of stain and wood they wanted, along with other requests to make the desk look the way they wanted.
Kresl then went into the process of adding the attachment to the desk and how they improved it over the original desk. “We started by cutting all of the boards to fit and puzzle-pieced them together with different sizes and lengths,” Kresl explained. “Then we put a little glue on the back, and then we went into pin-nailing them on with a spacer in-between them to make it look like an old ship’s deck.” The students used hickory wood for the top of the desk and alder wood for its sides and front.
The three students agreed that the project came out well and are happy they got to share it with the school’s guidance counselors and are considering creating more projects for the office in the future. “I feel pretty good about this project. We did have some errors here and there, but my boss Morgan Terpstra told me once. You’re going to have mistakes in life, and you have to work around them,” Senior Ryan Abeld explained. “Hopefully, we can be back in here again because the counselors gave us chocolate bars, so hopefully, our next project is back in here, and we can stretch it out as long as we can,” Kresl joked.
We will continue to check back in with the Community Projects class and its students when they have the latest projects completed.
Pictures of the students and the desk can be seen below-
