Construction class at Jefferson High School connects traditional curriculum with real-world application to build future careers

This is the third and final installment in an occasional series about career and technical education in Cedar Rapids schools.

CEDAR RAPIDS — Applying math principles to real-life scenarios, Jefferson High School students will be pouring concrete at the Lower Kingston Soccer Field as a part of a Geometry in Construction course.

The students will be doing “backbreaking digging,” preparing the space for King’s Material Inc. to come in with concrete and act as their supervisors, said Tom Trausch, a math, engineering and computer science teacher at Jefferson.

“It’s really cool because it’ll be here forever. We can come back to watch our kids play here one day and we know that we laid the cement down,” said Cole Fisher, 15, a sophomore in the class.

As a part of the class, students also designed and built boxes that fold for the cheer teams to more easily take on the road to away games. Later this semester, they will be framing a house for Habitat for Humanity.

Classes like Geometry in Construction — which requires a teacher who specializes in geometry and a teacher who specializes in career and technical education — need higher student enrollment to “justify” offering the class because it occupies the classroom time of two teachers instead of just one, Trausch said. This also means more classroom space is needed to accommodate those students.

Jefferson High, however, is an “old building,” with classrooms not built for 21st Century equipment. Trausch’s classes have blown fuses in the building because of the amount of electricity some of the tools require.

Alex Pelzel, an industrial technology teacher at Jefferson High, said he hates his classroom. “It’s tiny, it’s unpleasant to be in, it’s not well laid out to where I can easily circulate around the room to get to kids if they have questions,” he said.

“When I look at my lab space where I have saws and drills, I feel like both the luckiest person in Eastern Iowa and the most frustrated,“ Pelzel said. ”My classroom was built in 1958 for 1958 tools and equipment and methodologies.“

When students are working on projects, the space gets crowded really quickly, which means it’s not available to other students also working on projects.

The small classroom sizes also mean students are often put on a waiting list for a class. Pelzel said he has double the number of students requesting enrollment in his class than seats available. Demand is “through the roof.”

Pelzel is new to teaching. He graduated from Jefferson High in 1993. “The expectation was to go to college, but I had no money and I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Pelzel said.

He started working in construction, even going back to school to earn an associate degree to go into construction management. But after 14 years, he felt burned out and wanted a change.

That’s when Pelzel went back to school again — this time to become a teacher in career and technical education.

“There’s a lot of interest from kids to go into careers that don’t necessarily require college degrees for a lot of the same reasons I didn’t go to college right out of high school,” Pelzel said.

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Classes like Geometry in Engineering — which is a new course offering this year — is called “contextual learning,” and connects traditional classes required to graduate high school to a real-world application, Pelzel said.

“We send kids to English class to talk about books, to science class to talk about science and to math class to talk about math, but why are those things important? The reality is you need to understand the science, you need math for science, in many skilled trades,” Pelzel said.

This is the third and last article in a series in which The Gazette has explored career and technical education programs in the Cedar Rapids district — and the infrastructure needed for the programs to keep up in the 21st century.

Additions to Cedar Rapids high schools for career and technical education is one priority of the district’s facility plan that would be funded by a $220 million general obligation bond issue heading to district voters Nov. 7.

A renewed focus on career and technical education also is a part of the district’s strategic plan, approved last month by the school board. District leaders have set a goal of improving graduation rates by 10 percent and ensuring every graduate leaves with college credit or industry certification by May 2027.

Trausch said Jefferson High had a pretty robust career and technical education program until about the 1980s, when there was a push for more students to go to college.

“It was at that point we lost auto shop and metals manufacturing. We’re still rebuilding some of that now,” said Traush, adding that welding and manufacturing classes still are not offered at Jefferson High.

Welding is offered at Kennedy High School, but the limited space and equipment for the program means many students who want to take the class don’t get to until their senior year of high school.

Many career and technical education classes offered in the Cedar Rapids Community School District also are introductory classes. Trausch encourages his students to enroll in programs through Kirkwood Community College, but many don’t have access to transportation to get them from the high school campus to Kirkwood, he said.

Only 14 percent of students in the Cedar Rapids Community School District receive college credit while in high school. But about 34 percent of students in Iowa receive college credit while in high school.

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Traush believes the new boom of career and technical education will last this time.

“A lot of high-paying, high-skill jobs in Cedar Rapids don’ require a four-year college degree. They require a certification or training program. We could feasibly do a lot of that at the high school,” Traush said.

“Manufacturers here in town are begging for certified employees,” he said. “We’re not advertising all the cool opportunities students can do right here in our community. There’s a lot of open jobs that pay well.”

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