Bringing Hope and Bridging the Gap: A New Opportunity to Weld
Located at the confluence of the Rio Grande River and the Gulf of Mexico and at the United States and Mexico border, the city of Brownsville, Texas is in the midst of one of the poorest regions of the country. Los Fresnos High School, situated just outside of Brownsville has not been exempt from the area’s economic woes. Roughly 90 percent of the school’s 2,400 students qualify for free meals and, because of language barriers and other obstacles, many have little hope of escaping the cycle of poverty that they’ve known their entire lives.
Despite these economic hardships, the school and the district are both known to provide a strong academic foundation enhanced by innovative career-focused programs.Adding to that foundation is George Baldree and a new program that’s training juniors and seniors to become certified welders by the time they graduate high school.
A Bold Vision
Baldree, a welding engineer at Keppel AmFels, a leading yard in the United States for the construction, upgrade and repair of offshore drilling rigs, has seen his fair share of entry level welders. Putting it nicely, he said most “are not industry-ready.” For Baldree, a man for whom the word enthusiastic is far too mild, welding is more than a useful skill or a good career. It’s his passion, and when it comes to improving the state of the industry, Baldree is one of its most ardent evangelists — literally! “I’m on a holy crusade,” he says, only half-joking.
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Students at Los Fresnos High School learn FCAW or |
Determined to make a difference in the national welder shortage and in the lives of poverty-stricken teenagers, Baldree, on his own time and of his own initiative, approached any and every school that would listen to his proposal for a high quality welding program.Such a program would provide Keppel Amfels and other area companies with access to highly skilled entry-level welders. The students would have hope for a financially successful future and the schools would get the satisfaction of seeing their students go on to rewarding careers.In fact, there are already several Los Fresnos students who, according to Baldree, have begun welding at the Keppel AmFels training center and are making their way through the training program with flying colors.
At first, Baldree received a cool reception from the technical colleges he visited, but persistence paid off when he met Shannon Milum at a career fair. Milum, the Career Technology Director at Los Fresnos High School, told him she was looking to launch some type of industrial training program, and Baldree had just the thing in mind.Baldree recommended adopting the American Welding Society’s SENSE (Schools Excelling through National Skills Education) program, which offers a broad based certification curriculum and is an accepted standard for most states and employers. Milum loved the idea and shortly thereafter, Baldree visited an agricultural sciences class to see if the students would be interested in taking a welding course.
“I was up there in front of 25 kids explaining what welding is,” Baldree recalls. “I told them about the jobs that are available and how much you can make as a welder, and those kids just sat there in complete silence. At the end, I asked if they would like to take a class to become welders and nearly every one of them said they would. ”The school’s principal, Dr. Virginia Miller, was equally enthused and decided to start the course immediately, beginning with the spring semester rather than the fall semester of the next school year as Baldree had expected.
Edwin Rivera, a teacher in the Agricultural Sciences department at the school, agreed to teach the class. Without any formal welding training, Rivera went through a whirlwind two-week crash course on teaching welding over winter vacation 2006.
Impressed with Baldree and the Los Fresnos High School’s efforts, filler metal manufacturer, Hobart Brothers Company, assisted with stick electrodes and tubular wire supplies to the upstart program. Keppel AmFels also donated 500 lbs. of stick electrodes to the program. The school purchased 15 new welding machines from Miller Electric Mfg. Co. to add to their three existing welders and when the kids arrived for the start of the second semester in early January, the class was off and running.
A Great Start
Limited only by the number of available welding units and teacher time, the school offered three classes of 18 students per class for the first semester. Priority was given to seniors, and then to juniors. The course was so popular, the school had to turn away nearly 50 students because of a
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A student practices stick welding during class. |
lack of space.The welding class met every day for 90 minutes, which Rivera said gave them time for both classroom instruction and time in the lab to practice what they just learned in the classroom. Students were graded at the end of each day on the visual quality of their welds.Rivera continued his education once the class was underway, getting certified in plate welding through a five-week course at the Allied Skills Training Center in Brownsville.
The students started off learning stick welding, simply running beads along the surface of a plate. Once their beads were looking proficient, they began flat groove welds and by their mid-term exams, they were expected to perform horizontal welds. For the final exam, students were required to properly set up the machine and complete a satisfactory stick weld in each position — flat, horizontal, vertical and overhead.
“We had no idea what to expect,” Rivera said. “A lot of the kids had never touched a welder before, and by the end of the semester, most of them were welding in the overhead position.”
A Bright Future
Starting the course in the spring semester provided somewhat of a test run for the school, allowing them to identify and resolve any unforeseen problems and determine a good pace for the instruction.
Knowing what they do now, Rivera said he is even more excited for the class’ future potential. “We definitely want to take it further,” he said. “Now that we know how far we can go in 18 weeks and what types of instruction takes the most time, we’ll be able to structure the full-year class so that we can spend extra time on certain techniques and processes and a little less time on those that the students pick up right away.”
The full-year class will begin with instruction on stick welding and will move on to flux-cored welding once that unit is complete. Having already learned the hard stuff in the stick unit, the students should be able to pick up flux-cored welding very quickly, Rivera said.
More instruction time isn’t the only thing planned for the course’s future. “We’re going to get a bending machine and some other machines and tools so that we can conduct destructive tests on the students welds,” Rivera said. “Basically, the only thing holding us back from expanding the program is space.”If the popularity of the program continues, however, that too could be a temporary condition. The district is building a new high school, and Rivera has high hopes for a new welding lab being created for the crop of incoming freshman.
And if Baldree has his way, Los Fresnos will be the first in a long line of high schools with a renewed emphasis on welding and skilled trades education. “I want this to be a prototype program,” Baldree explained. “We set it up so that it can be repeated in any high school anywhere in the country. I’ve already got two other high schools that are interested and a third and fourth that I think are ripe for a program like this.”
With the success of the Los Fresnos program as a model, it’s not difficult to believe Baldree will succeed in spreading his welding gospel.