I watched Mike Rowe — you know, “Dirty Jobs” Mike — on Bill Maher the other night. He said everything would be great if only there were shop class again. As a retired Greenfield High School technology teacher who also taught at Franklin County Technical School, I think he’s onto something. But the answer isn’t a $260 million new campus, and it isn’t rebuilding shops in every high school, either.
Shop programs cost more. Consumables and replacement tools can easily run $10,000 a year, before technology upgrades. That’s exactly why every high school can’t have its own. What’s hard to put a price tag on is the curiosity that hands-on learning wakes up in otherwise unengaged students. A project that brings in physics, math and history gives a student a kind of success the passive-learner model rarely offers. There is dropout prevention hidden among the equipment. In the words of a former student, “If I’m here, I’ll be in your class.”
Now the Tech is seeking to fill that void with a new school carrying a price tag of more than $236.6 million — a bit tone-deaf to the state of the valley’s economy. The greatest growth in career opportunities is in fields that use certifications and licenses to ensure expertise. Those credentials are earned through written exams and in-field practicums, not by graduating from a particular high school. GCC has offered a free 15-week computer-aided machining course, taught right at the Tech, with a placement rate above 90 percent. It’s the hidden employment gem of the valley.
Perhaps there’s a better model: a centrally located technical center that teaches only the technical classes and leaves academics to the sending schools. Students would spend part of the day in the shop and the rest at their home high school for English, math and science. The county pays for the expensive equipment once, and no one pays for a second set of academic classrooms.
It’s been done. When the Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative needed a new home, it chose the former Western Mass Electric offices on Brush Hill Road in West Springfield. The building needed minimal alteration and was centrally located. Morning and afternoon students came for technical training, while their sending schools kept the academics — and even served them lunch, so no cafeteria or lunch staff was needed.
Could we find a building like that here? Perhaps minutes, or even seconds, off the interstate? Maybe near the rotary, with parking and space, vacant and available? And with a price tag a lot less than $236.6 million?
There must have been a good reason to put the Tech at the rear of the industrial park in 1976; conceivably, it helped pay to extend roads and services into the park. But for the rest of the communities it serves, it sits in the least accessible corner of the county.
The contribution from sending communities is going to double — to more than $2 million a year for Greenfield. Where does that money come from? How many special education paraprofessionals get laid off to make that work — all of them?
Chapter 74 vocational funding is the pot of gold in education. A former Tech superintendent told me he started saving for a new roof the week the building opened, as required by law. If the current administration hasn’t kept up its replacement reserve, it should seek relief somewhere other than from taxpayers who already provided the means.
Greenfield already pays $1 million a year. If 40 Greenfield students attend the Tech, that’s $25,000 each, roughly three times the state reimbursement. Put another way, what Greenfield pays for one Tech student would cover the state’s reimbursement for three. What are the other two students going without?
That is what shop class can do. It doesn’t take a $236.6 million building — just a central, accessible place to do the hands-on work, with academics left to the schools that already teach them. The Tech was put in place to serve the needs of the county, not the other way around.
Mark Leonard is a Greenfield resident who taught technology at Greenfield High School and carpentry at Franklin County Technical School.