ESSEXVILLE, MI – Students at Garber High School can trade their textbooks in for tools and safety glasses when they sign up for the school’s new home maintenance elective.
The new class, led by Garber teacher Nick Hugo, teaches the nuts and bolts of home maintenance projects as well as a level of self sufficiency that comes with being able to tackle problems on your own by learning and developing skills.
“Kids need to know basic skills,” Hugo said. “You have a broken outlet, you have a plugged toilet…you’re going to need to know all these things. I know there’s YouTube and that’s great to always be on, but to have these basic set of skills so that you know and you can be safe and you can fix some things (is important).”
The class came about through the involvement of a few moving parts. Hugo said a former student had the idea of a life skills class, and Hugo wanted to incorporate an industrial arts aspect to that.
Together, the ideas helped develop elective life skills that might be lacking in the educational system.
“This class is an ever-growing class of just basic necessities of owning a home or an apartment or anything that you can do,” Hugo said.
Any high school student from freshmen to seniors can enroll in the course. It covers their industrial arts credit as well, Hugo noted, which is required for graduation from Garber High School.
“It seems like a lot of people are excited about it,” Hugo said, noting there has been great community support and the students enjoy it.
“They get to do a lot of different things in this class and learn a lot of different skills.”
Hugo described the class as working twofold. One aspect involves learning how to safely use tools and how to fix things around the home. As such, in the first marking period, he said, students in the class learned basic hand tools, power tools, safety measures and how to use basic items.
The other is community involvement. Hugo said the final portion of the class involves building something for the community, particularly the school community. In the past, industrial arts classes have helped build playground equipment for kids, benches and other things needed around the school.
In the spring, students will use the tools they learned in the classroom to build a shed for a district preschool.
Nick Stravopoulos, a senior at Garber, is taking the class for the first time. He’s developed many of the skills by working with his dad growing up, but said it’s “just nice to help.”
“This is teaching people how to troubleshoot and figure out how to actually wire something up if they ever need to do that in their lifetime,” he said. “It just helps everybody figure out what to do in life when something burns up, and not just going straight to the phone to call a contractor.”
Junior Ethan Pett is taking the class a second time to further hone his skills while also helping others learn.
“It helps kids understand how to do basic home repairs instead of calling people,” he said. “It saves them money in the long term just to learn basic electrical and carpentry and plumbing.
“Everybody has to kind of learn this stuff, potentially,” he added. “It’s good to know.”
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