This is part one in a two-part series about shop classes in the Burnaby school district and the history behind conditions one retired local tech ed teacher calls “deplorable.”
"Are you kidding me?"
If the B.C. government is serious about trades training, it should do more to fund school shop classes, according to one Burnaby dad.
Keith Pinchin is unimpressed by the projects his Grade 11 son is working on in his Burnaby South senior woodworking class.
In a recent letter to the editor, Pinchin said the projects compare to work he was doing in junior high in Vancouver in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Last year, his son – who wants to be an architect – made a clock.
“It was nice,” Pinchin told the NOW. “He gave it to me as a gift, but I’m thinking, ‘A clock? That’s a Grade 9 project,’ and there aren’t a lot of other projects offered.”
A fan of the wood lathe, Pinchin recently asked his son if he enjoyed working on the machine too.
Turns out the shop’s only lathe has been broken for a while.
“I don’t think he’s ever seen it work,” Pinchin said. “I’m like, are you kidding me? In my wood shop class in high school, there were two walls that had a row of wood lathes on each wall.”
A tradesman, with 25 years experience as an auto mechanic and eight as an elevator mechanic, Pinchin said he still uses the woodworking skills he learned in high school for projects around the house.
His son’s school, meanwhile, has no auto shop, and Pinchin said he’s been told the metal shop is as poorly equipped as the wood shop.
The local dad supports Grade 11 and 12 apprenticeship programs like ACE-IT, but he doesn’t get how kids are supposed to get excited about the hands-on courses without exposure to decent tools and meaningful projects in the younger grades.
“At the rate we are going, it will be impossible to get students interested in the trades, and Canada will continue to be short of skilled tradesmen and (trades)women,” Pinchin said.
Trades gap
Just one in 29 B.C. high school graduates enters the trades, according to the B.C. Construction Association.
That figure has to jump to one in five in a hurry, the organization says, if the province is to fill a looming labour shortage projected for 2021.
Schools will have to step up if that’s going to happen, according to Abigail Fulton, executive director of the Construction Foundation of B.C., the charitable arm of the association.
Generations ago, she said, most kids learned applied skills at home – on farms and from family members who worked with their hands.
“Well, now they’re not getting it at home,” she said. “It’s such an urban society. …Most kids now will never have an introduction to the trades outside of school, so it’s critical that they be introduced to those sorts of things earlier than high school, frankly. In middle school, they should already have an introduction and an opportunity.”
Burnaby Technology Education Teachers Association vice-president Russell Evanisky agrees better resourced shop programs would steer more kids into the trades.
“100 per cent it would,” said the Alpha tech ed teacher. “If I had the resources to add equipment, add materials, add things to inspire them, of course it would.”
Once upon a time, Alpha used to have auto and metal shops; today, woodworking, electronics and drafting remain.
“You have students that’ll come up to you and they’re like, ‘I wish we had metal work here,’ and you actually have to tell them to go to another location,” Evanisky told the NOW.
For the courses that remain, he considers the budget for materials adequate, but any tools that break down have to be paid for out of the same funds.
“Replacement of equipment is very hard to come by,” he said.
Still, Alpha is lucky to be equipped with solid – if vintage – machinery, he said.
Not all Burnaby schools are so fortunate.
“Some schools are more prosperous,” Evanisky said. “It’s not consistent.”
Ironically, it’s the district’s newer schools that often have the most meagerly supplied shops, according to the Alpha teacher.
“Whenever they build a new school, they reduce what they get,” he said.
Burnaby school board chair Ron Burton told the NOW there just isn’t enough funding from the provincial government to do more.
“There’s a real push for trades but they’re not willing to fund it,” he said of the province. “The same with technology – there’s a real push for technology, but they’re not willing to specifically fund it, which is unfortunate.”
A provincial problem
Burnaby is not alone when it comes to crowded, poorly equipped shop classes, according to Randy Grey, president of the B.C. Technology Education Association, a specialist association of the B.C. teachers’ union.
The last major investment in school shop equipment was a federal initiative in the 1960s.
“I would say in just about all school districts, that equipment is outdated, worn out,” he told the NOW.
The problem, he said, is the way tech ed is funded in B.C.
“The ministry doesn’t allocate any targeted funds toward shop programs,” he said. “The only provisions for replacements or upgrades is from existing school district budgets. If a school district has a tough time balancing their budget, the top priority goes to teachers’ salaries and kids in classrooms.”
That being said, districts and individual schools ultimately decide how to divvy up their limited funds, according to Grey.
“Some districts do fund their shop programs differently,” he said. “It depends on the priorities, so if it happens to be an individual principal that decides and says, ‘Shop classes are important in my school,’ they will put the money into it, and they may not put money into, say, dance or band.”
Parents, who for decades have fixated on their kids going to university, also have to shoulder part of the responsibility for languishing shop programs, according to Fulton.
“What we need is more of a culture shift and a recognition that going into a trade is equal or better, frankly, than going for an undergraduate degree,” she said.
Despite the current state of high school shop programs, both Grey and Fulton are optimistic about talks now taking place at a provincial level between the ministry of education, the Industry Training Authority and other interested provincial bodies, which they expect will result in significant changes soon.
Education Minister Peter Fassbender was unavailable for comment, but ministry spokesperson Scott Sutherland told the NOW total funding to school districts has increased 31 percent since 2001 despite a 75,000-student decline in enrolment.
He said it’s up to districts to manage their grant money.
“The boards have the discretion, the autonomy to make those choices,” he said.
For Pinchin and his sons, meanwhile, any change would be too little, too late.
“Hopefully they’ll still do OK without the head start in that stuff,” Pinchin said.
