The Crookston High School’s Community Projects Class is back for another year of projects for students that took woodworking and metalworking classes and use the lessons they’re taught to complete various projects for the school or the community.
The class was introduced last year and is taught by Industrial Education Teacher Travis Oliver. Who takes students who have been in his starting courses for woodworking and metalworking classes and brings them into the class to utilize the skills they were taught to create projects. “Community projects is a class where I talk to different people within our community and school district about some projects they’ve wanted to get done but haven’t gotten done,” Oliver explained. “Maybe there’s something they said they could do, but they couldn’t. So, I take the students, we design it, and we march forward and try to get that project completed.” Oliver usually creates small teams of students to create the projects, with some of them having some relation to the project.
The first project the class has that’s near completion is a new scorekeeper and ticket booth for the Crookston High School soccer field being made by Hunter Knutson, Hunter Kresl, Evin Trudeau, Ryan Abeld, Jackson Demarais, and Jaren Bailey. The team began the project by building the booth’s base, framing it with a few 2×4 pieces of wood, and adding some ¾ inch plywood to build up the frame of the booth. “There’s not too much left to it. We just need to put the plexiglass in and the roof, then chip her off with some paint, and she is good to go,” senior Hunter Kresl explained. The final additions to the booth should be complete by today, and they will add paint next week before they install it on the field by Wednesday.
The second project the class has near completion is a set of benches for the football team to use for future games being made by Koda Donarski, Chase Proulx, Johnna Porter, Javen Lund, and Jamie Brown. “We used old benches from the Crookston arena, so we’re not wasting material,” junior Javen Lund explained. “We had to get new frames for them and put them on the bottom to make them useable.” The students currently have created two benches and are planning on finishing two more for the football team to use.
Along with those projects, Oliver said they still have some projects left over from the previous year that they are looking to finish, mainly at the Crookston Sports Center. The main one he’s looking to complete is finishing some new lockers for the girl’s locker room that a group of students had started, and is hoping to finish and install them later this year. We will continue to check back with the Community Projects class and its students when they’ve completed their latest projects. More information from the students about these projects can be heard on this week’s rendition of Focus on Education. You can listen to the latest rendition on Saturday, October 8, at 8:35 a.m. on 105.7 FM and 1260 AM, or 92.1 FM in East Grand Forks on KROX.
Pictures of the students and their projects can be seen below.
