PLEASANT HILL — Dust replaced sawdust in the eight years that Valley View Middle School’s woodshop sat dormant.
After a search to replace a retiring instructor proved fruitless, power tools were given away to other schools, and electricity, air conditioning and heat to the industrial space were eventually cut. It fell right in line with a larger trend that dates back to the 1980s — as state policymakers started slashing public school budgets, shifting academic requirements and reshaping public perceptions about higher education, woodworking was slowly carved out of generations of Californians’ studies.
That’s why it took a grassroots campaign by Valley View teacher Nicole Manasewitsch to revitalize the school’s once-popular elective. Despite leading English and history classes last year, she wanted to offer an alternative, more active subject that would help connect youth to the trades within the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, where she herself went to school and has spent her entire 17-year teaching career.
Manasewitsch spent months networking with local woodworking clubs, rotary groups, retired teachers and even supply stores to collect enough tools, funding and mentorship to revive the program by the first day of school this past August, when roughly 100 students enrolled in the four inaugural woodshop “sections.”
“The kids just love it — these kinds of hands-on programs are really where I can see them just light up with excitement,” Manasewitsch said. “I feel like the way that we’re doing school now isn’t working for kids — this generation that’s all about screens — but we’re not changing anything.”
Only six months in, the class already has finished a coat peg rack, moved onto a charcuterie platter and is currently tackling a cutting board — with students operating everything from industrial bandsaws and drill presses, to a lathe and an oscillating spindle sander. Members of the Diablo Woodworkers, Pleasant Hill Rotary and Lamorinda Sunrise Rotary gathered at the middle school last week to dedicate their latest donation, one worth thousands of dollars: a SawStop Table Saw that uses sensors to prevent accidental collisions with students’ fingers.
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Woodshop was a new experience for eighth grader Aaron Ledbetter, but he’s already started helping his dad create a domino board for weekly game nights and gifted his mom a serving tray. The 14-year-old said he enjoys how much he can physically move and connect with other students that he might not otherwise meet in core classes.
“Usually in (math and English) classes, we just sit down and read a lot of books, which can be boring because it gets repetitive sometimes. But in woodshop, you have to move a lot, make sure you stay safe and a lot of other stuff,” Ledbetter said. “After quarantine, a lot of us are shy now, and it’s hard to make friends. I think woodshop is a cool way to do that and make cool projects.”
These tools will allow Valley View Middle School to equip students with hands-on technical skills, especially as more young people grow skeptical of increasingly expensive college degrees, Manasewitsch said. While many students may primarily use their newfound woodworking skills at home or as a hobby, carpenters in California earned nearly $70,000 annually on average in 2022. Moreover, carpenters in the Bay Area secured three of the top 10 highest paying metro areas across the country at nearly $80,000.
“Not everyone’s successful in the standards that the academic world thinks about, and there’s all this need in general for the trades to come back and kids to be focused on industry, too,” Manasewitsch said. “That’s a huge part of our society, and it’s a huge void in our world that is losing bodies — they are desperate for employees, and it’s a great paying career in life.” Employers have been a vital source of program funding.
By the time Valley View Principal Aurelia Buscemi walked through the empty woodshop during her first-year orientation in 2022, she said she immediately wanted to figure out a way to revamp the space — serendipitously around the same time Manasewitsch vocalized her interest in leading a future class.
“Ms. Manasewitsch is an absolute force to be reckoned with,” Buscemi said, praising her ability to quickly cobble together enough community support to revamp the program without any district funding. “I just felt like it was a huge, wasted opportunity for us not to take advantage of getting the woodshop. Nobody had used it for so long, it was just forgotten about.”
Students listen during a dedication ceremony for a new donated table saw in Nicole Manasewitsch’s shop class at Valley View Middle School in Pleasant Hill, Calif., on Thursday, February 15, 2024. To the left is principal Aurelia Buscemi. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
But even when space and tools are secured, administrators still struggled to find qualified teachers to cover a vocational curriculum.
So Manasewitsch signed up for adult education courses on woodworking and switched classroom assignments, which allowed her to teach with her existing credentials within the district. She credits her classes’ current success to mentorship that poured in from community leaders such as Don Dupont, who owned a cabinet shop for two decades before teaching woodshop for 16 years at Campolindo High School in Moraga, as well as a wealth of support from local clubs such as the Diablo Woodworkers.
In the summer of 1986, the Los Angeles Times reported that shop class had started rapidly disappearing from Californian curricula — largely chopped by budget cuts, technological advancements, stricter academic graduation requirements and teacher shortages. By 1999, a state task force on industrial and technology education published a report saying the “hemorrhaging of industrial education” would eventually lead to “no programs remaining in the state” within six years if the trend was left unchecked. Between 1990 and 2009, the number of vocational education credits in high schools dropped by roughly 14%, according to the National Center for Education.
While researchers at the Brookings Institution have pointed to a resurgence in career and technical education since the 2010s, teachers have still spearheaded similar crowd-sourced trades programming.
In 2016, a different Valley View Middle School educator was awarded Contra Costa County’s Teacher of the Year for her efforts to boost a STEM curriculum to replace the recently shuttered vocational class, while a middle school in Washington partially funded a new woodshop in 2017 using $120,000 from a voter-approved levy.
Ever since Manasewitsch helped reopen the woodshop, her students haven’t looked back. While Jaxen Velez had no prior experience working with wood before eighth grade, the Martinez 13-year-old said he’s already surprised himself with the quality and speed of his projects.
“Woodshop wasn’t even a thing last year, so I just feel lucky to be able to have the opportunity to be in this class,” Velez said. “It’s taught me a lot about how to use my hands and how to be precise and patient with the process.”