FARMINGTON – “No, go ahead,” Foster Regional Applied Technology Center Director Glenn Kapiloff said. “It won’t be the first time I had a chainsaw in my office.”
Indeed. As one makes their way through the FRATC’s maze-like corridors, classrooms and labs, dodging a group of crawling, would-be firefighters hauling a hose and wearing gas masks and air tanks, their first thought will likely be that one of the most sophisticated education programs in the state really could use a little more space.
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Following that: “Why wasn’t this stuff around when I was in high school?”
In an area of the state plagued with plunging enrollment numbers and dire economic forecasts, the success of the technology center has been nothing short of amazing. Currently touring the facility are eighth graders from local area schools, not just Mt. Blue Regional School District but also MSAD 58, Jay and Livermore Falls students.
“I’m really opposed to just bringing in the kids interested in the tech center,” Kapiloff said. “I don’t want to stereotype them into categories.”
The tours represent a first look for the middle school students, the active interview process won’t begin until they’re in high school. The vast majority of Foster Tech’s students are in their third or fourth year of high school. Classes at the center are held every other day, for the first three periods, with academic classes being held during the fourth period, and on the off days. Students from other districts are bused in and back to their respective schools, often spending long stretches of time on a bus in order to catch the late-day classes.
It’s for the programs offered at Foster Tech that students suffer the bus. Fortified with the center’s mantra of hands-on learning, the center offers a variety of programs. While John MacDonald’s composites program is perhaps the most widely known example of this, the center also offers early childhood and infant care classes, featuring a small day care center, a certified nursing assistant program, which sends students to hospitals and nursing homes and culminates with them being able to take the state CNA exam, and a business education course, making use of the Mt. Blue High School’s local branch of Franklin Savings Bank.
“We want to promote that this isn’t just hands-on,” Kapiloff told a group of visiting middle school teachers, “it’s also real.”
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The center’s artistic side comes out in a whole different part of the program. Commercial arts and photography courses introduce students to a wide variety of mediums, from silkscreening to video editing to digital art to recording music. Students, currently churning out “Foster Tech Center Tour” T-shirts, had to work around piles of posters the FRATC was producing for a Franklin County Chamber of Commerce car show.
Meanwhile, the center’s famed Rainbow Cafe continues to be the centerpiece of the culinary arts program. That program is continuing to branch out, with a recent addition being a garden planting course. The grow-lights for that addition, donated to the center like much of their equipment, came from evidence seized by the Farmington Police Department.
Science-based curriculum remains extremely popular. Kapiloff highlighted the diverse nature of the center’s programming with a story about a student at Mt. Blue who wanted to build a snowboard. A coincidence, the student happened to meet a man who worked for Cianbro. That man, after hearing about the student’s plan, offered to donate a pair of I-beams to create a press.
The student took the beams to the welding department, only to be told be the students there that they needed a schematic to work with first. So the student went to the drafting department, working out of their computer lab, who agreed to design a mold for the press. That design was then taken back to the welding program, who crafted the press with the help of the department’s arc-welder. Commercial arts students then helped the student come up with a design for the snowboard.
“When you talk about an interactive education,” Kapiloff said, “forget the teachers for a moment, this was kids teaching kids. We just stepped back.”
MacDonald’s composites program, in the meantime, is rapidly gaining statewide and even national attention. A Lockheed-Martin representative, having read about the course, recently visited the school to take a look at the program. Composites, a relatively new field in Maine, has recently taken off with the advent of composite hulls for ships, ranging from luxury yachts to SEAL insertion boats.
“This is the classic example of building a class around a person,” Kapiloff said, noting that Franklin County itself could benefit from the composites industry.
The building trades, forestry program and firefighter programs continue to expand, offering immediate hands-on training.
“Now if we had to break this window,” Firefighting Program teacher John Churchill told five eighth graders outside of the center, talking over the hiss of air tanks and masks. “Not that we couldn’t take the door, we could rip that right off, but if we had to break this window….”
“Uh, John,” Kapiloff said, “this is a simulation….”
“Right, sure,” Churchill said, hefting an enormous instrument which appears to be a cross between a crowbar and a medieval battleaxe. “Now, which window?”
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The school has both a working wood lot and a fire engine, while the building trades students most recently helped build an entire house in Jay. These courses offer students more than just critical safety information and career-building skills. In many cases it offers confidence.
“This is something you just can’t measure on SATs,” Kapiloff said. “How do you measure someone with a fear of heights getting up on a ladder in 50 pounds of turnout gear with a chainsaw, cutting out a vent hole in a roof?”
Integrating students’ tech center courses with academic classroom work is one of the many challenges the administration deals with on a daily basis. A student may be a genius with car engines, but not a strong reader. Or a student may be able to design a house, but still struggles with basic math. Playing to a student’s strengths, while continuing to teach them and develop a unique education is a major challenge.
There is, for those who have not visited Mt. Blue, a glass corridor which connects the standard, high school academic classrooms with the Foster tech center. In many ways the corridor might be considered a wall; traditional high school student stay at one end, and tech center students stay at the other. Finding a way around that corridor, Kapiloff said, has been surprisingly difficult.
“We have kids who use chainsaws out here on a daily basis,” he noted, “but if they walk down that corridor with a pocketknife they could be suspended. It’s a challenge.”
Much of the administration’s hope rests with the upcoming high school construction project, which will likely go to referendum in September. That project, which would cost $63.5 million to complete but only $3.5 million locally, would consist of a complete overhaul to both the school and the education mindset. Forty percent of the building would be completely new construction, dramatically altering the shape and flow of the building.
Instead of a tech center and high school, the facility would function as a single entity, with greater access to the community itself as a resource. The opposite of this would be true as well, one plan calls for an “incubation room” where new businesses could come in and call upon an enormous resource: the talent and energy of students.
Other exciting possibilities lie with the building’s three alternative energy systems; solar, wind and geothermal, which could be monitored by students involved in MacDonald’s new alternative energy program. The wood chip heating system will be accessible as well, equipped with transparent walls so students can watch the process in action.
The state, who is considering this design the wave of the future, has agreed to include two new programs as well; pre-engineering and an electrical and plumbing addition to the building trades program. In the meantime, Richard Wilde wants to morph his computer technology course into one focused on robotics.
“You won’t have two institutions joined at the hip, which is what you have now,” PDT Architects’ Lyndon Keck told the school board on June 2,“ with a glass corridor that runs between the two. This is a new way to think about learning and a new way to think about thinking.”
That project faces a non-binding straw poll at the high school gym on June 16 at 6 p.m. That poll, similar in format to the earlier one held on Dec. 10 regarding the site location for the project, would ask voters if they approved of the plan or not.
“It’s a great opportunity,” Kapiloff said. “It’s not just a change of floor plans, but a paradigm change in how education is taught.”
