As winter weather arrives in Rockbridge County, Career and Technical Education (CTE) classes are forced to adapt to keep students safe and warm. The CTE classes were forced to operate outside in tents due to the school renovations, but they have had to add extra measures to keep students safe while they work. Students are reminded to wear warm clothing and to bring extra clothing for their classes that occur outside, but more measures have been taken to keep the classes functional.
CTE teacher Mr. Colter Bennett talked about how his classes have adapted to the winter conditions.
“Adding heat and electricity to our tents for our lab setting assignments has been a key part of continuing on as normal as possible,” said Bennett.
However, many of the machines and technology have been affected by the renovations. Some machines need maintenance from when they were moved to the tents, and others are not meant to be out in extreme weather. These machines need to be in climate controlled areas, so they are kept in other heated structures behind the school. The moisture in the fall and the recent cold temperatures have damaged some of the technology, causing more repairs to be needed than usual.
Mr. Paige Owens, the CTE director for RCHS, spoke about some of the problems that the CTE classes have encountered due to the weather.
“The snow that we had last week actually caused three of the four tents to collapse, so we had to work to clean them up and get them back to being functional,” said Owens.
Three of the four tents are currently functional. The fourth tent was taken down because it was not being used.
Owens also explained how they would deal with snow in the future to keep the tents standing.
“Moving forward, we will keep the heat going when we know that it will snow in order to prevent this from happening again,” said Owens.
The maintenance, IT, and CTE departments have been working together, along with the RCHS administration, in order to keep these classes running.
