Photos courtesy Palisades Charter High School, except where noted.
On his first day of work at Palisades Charter High School, Dave Riccardi could smell something coming from behind a locked door while touring the campus. It smelled like old oil and grease, shop rags, and car parts, but the odors came from a storage room where school administrators tossed boxes of graded SAT exams, mops, and miscellaneous office supplies. After he found out that the room once hosted the school’s auto shop class, Dave decided then and there to resurrect the program after 30-plus years of dormancy.
“When I first stepped into that room, there was this sadness that came over me that the shop class was gone and that nobody cared about it,” he said. “I started going through the room and found all these old parts – pistons, carburetors, 1967 Mustang parts – along with stacks of awards the students in the shop class won. They were all forgotten for so long.”
The high school offered shop class from its opening in 1961 until 1980, when it pulled the plug on the program and sold or gave away the equipment and tools used for the class. According to Dave, who serves as the school’s director of operations, the decision to shut the program down came amid a nationwide effort to direct more students toward preparing for college and away from vocational programs like auto shop class.
“So as the years went on, there was less interest for these types of shop classes and the school concentrated on offering more AP classes,” Dave said. “But not everybody has a trust fund or wants to be $85,000 in debt once they get out of college. They want to do something they can connect with, and we want to reactivate those critical thinking skills that they lost from not working with their hands on something.”
Dave is not the only observer to point out how American schools have by and large failed their students over the last few decades by diverting resources from vocational programs to focus solely on academics. Author Matthew Crawford made many of those points and more in his 2009 book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, claiming that the transformation of American schools has contributed to the increase of Americans’ anxiety about their place in the world. And that anxiety, in part, has a lot to do with the founding and growth of the Maker movement, which aims to re-introduce Americans – adults and children alike – to creative handiwork.
Still from Return of Pali High Automotive fundraising video.
Before he could bring back Palisades High’s shop program, though, Dave spent the next year surveying students at the school to see if they even had any interest in participating in such a program. He found that the saturation of automotive programming on television nowadays, along with the easy access to automotive information on the Internet, has created an unfulfilled desire to learn more about cars among kids and teenagers.
“About 50 or 60 students said they’d sign up for a class like that,” he said. “And they come from all walks of life. We’ve got freshmen through seniors. We have 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girls interested in designing cars and working on old-school cars. They’re not the bananaheads that got thrown into auto shop class back when I was a kid. It fills me with a lot of joy and excitement to see these kids so enthused.”
He then took his ideas to the school administration, which allowed him to clean up the former auto shop classroom and start a club. However, with almost nothing useable left over from the defunct auto shop program save for some shelving, Dave had to start from scratch, spending his own money to buy starter toolsets and supplying his own floorjacks for the students to use. Donations from the community have started to come in to the program: He’s so far received a 1966 Ford Mustang, a 1968 Ford Mustang, a 1977 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, and a 1986 Chevrolet Blazer, along with some old manuals and some additional tools. The plan, as Dave sees it, is to make the program self-sustaining. Starting with the 1966 Mustang, the students will restore a car, sell it, and then use the proceeds to keep the program going.
This past September, after three years of planning, Dave threw open the doors of the new auto shop classroom to about 30 students who meet twice a week. “They’re all pretty novice,” he said. “Some of them can tell you all the specs and speeds for the new cars, stuff they read on the Internet, but they don’t know how to work on the cars, so I’m showing them the basics – how to put the wheels on, what the radiator fluid is for, what to look for when buying a car. And when the class is over at 3 p.m., the kids don’t want to leave. We’ll hang out until 4:30 some afternoons, just talking about cars and what they like about ‘em.”
With such a response, Dave said the school has decided to integrate the shop program into its curriculum next year, led by an accredited shop class teacher. In the meantime, Dave continues to stump for donations to the program and has tasked the students with figuring out how to raise money to purchase equipment, tools, and supplies. “Maybe through Kickstarter, maybe through hosting a car show,” he said. “I’ll let them decide.”
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