Students Doing Good Work
By John Earp
Jal High School’s summer student work program has been very active since school was let out for the summer. Coach “Bubba” Ross has been heading up the summer program for the district, leading two separate groups. Each custodian who works for Jal Schools is being assisted by two student workers this summer, and the Maintenance Department has two student workers assisting them this summer. In addition, Ross leads a group that does things like painting and pulling weeds. After a recent windstorm blew many tree limbs down in town, the crew helped clear the broken limbs, many of them quite large. Ross says, “We went around Jal and picked up like six trailers full of limbs and went and put them out there on the bonfire.” The students work anywhere from 25 to 30 hours per week, according to Ross, Monday through Thursday, from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. Ross says that with all the rain that Jal has received lately, keeping up with grass and weeds has been an ongoing project. He said, “I was walking around the campus today and I was like, oh my gosh. I said, how in the world did we miss that? I mean, it’s like one-foot weeds out there. I’m like, how did we miss that?
The student workers are also helping get classrooms in shape for the fall. Ross says, “Mainly right now it’s classrooms. So, we’re doing like doing a lot of drywall repair. And then, of course, we’re going to paint over the top of that. And then, right now it’s like, you got kids that are sanitizing, cleaning, we take furniture out of the classrooms, so they get in there and shampoo the carpets, and then if they need painting, we’ll start painting them, and then we’ll move the furniture back into the classrooms and get it ready for our first day of school.”
Ross took over as shop teacher for Jal Schools last year, and will be continuing in that role. The Jal Junior High Shop Program starts in 8th grade with woodworking and introduction to machines and tools. By the time shop students get into the high school level, they progress onto mechanics and welding. Ross says the basic auto shop things the students do is oil changes and rotating tires. The students usually work on their own vehicles. Ross says due to time and manpower constraints, the program isn’t really capable of expanding beyond working on just the students’ vehicles or in some cases, Ross will bring in one of his own vehicles for the students to get experience on.
Mr. Ross has five shop classes scheduled every day during the school year, four high school classes and one junior high one. Class sizes have varied between 6 and 18 students in size.
Ross taught vocational classes nearly 20 years ago when he taught in Sierra Blanca, Texas. He says, “It was just an FFA kind of thing, teaching farming and ranching and welding. Here, welding is different, being oilfield related.”
Ross says his goal is to expand the welding classes similar to other high school and junior college programs in the area, to where a student can take two years of welding classes and become a welder right out of high school.
Another part of the shop classes Ross is hoping to significantly expand in the future is on the construction side. He says, “When it comes to the woodworking, one goal would be, you know, can I build a wall if I need to? Can I build a flooring? Can I do some framing where I can eventually, if I want to add on a room in my house, you know, basic like that. Ross says the kinds of machinery available in the Jal High School Shop has been a huge help for the students. He says, “Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, we didn’t have a planer. You, we didn’t know what a joiner was back then. It was a drill press and a band saw, and a table saw.”
Recently, Ross’s shop class learned of a wheelchair-bound student who was having to store his wheelchair under a barbecue cover, because his wheelchair wouldn’t fit in the RV his family lives in. The shop students took on the project to help their fellow student, Sebastian, by building a shed that he could put his wheelchair in. Prior to taking on that project, the shop students had just completed construction of a storage shed for athletic equipment for the school.