Major upgrades to the woodshop at Wichita Heights High School will support students looking to work in a professional shop someday.
The Wichita school district has approved a $280,000 renovation of the woodshop at Heights. Since 2024, students in that class have been able to get hands-on experience building equipment used in schools across the district.
The class teaches students how to use tools like saws and sanders — as well as the patience it takes to stick with a project from design to completion.
Blake Gilliand, a sophomore at Heights, hopes to be a carpenter some day. He said the skills learned in woodshop go beyond the specific craft.
“Nothing's ever perfect, so you always have to problem-solve: ‘This doesn't fit. Okay, let's go cut it. The cutting board has holes in it. Okay, how do we fix that?’” Gilliand said. “Stuff here helps you with real-life problems.”
Gilliand and other Heights students can take their interest in woodworking beyond the classroom by working in the district’s nearby service center. There, they help build things like cabinets to be used in schools.
Robert Hall teaches the woodshop class at Heights. He helped bring the work program together and said he hopes to see it at other high schools in the future.
“I mean, the district’s already paying for that shop to run and build cabinets for the district to put in their schools, so we just thought it was a great idea,” he said.
“Teaching our kids those valuable skills, it helps when they get out. And maybe that’s a trade that they want to pursue.”
Students in Hall’s class have built a meeting room from scratch and a storage shed for the Heights science department. They also made a conference table for the Sedgwick County Commission.
Soon, the woodshop space will be modernized with new equipment, work stations and concrete floors. The space currently has decades-old wooden floors, which Hall said swell under humidity and create a tripping hazard.
The woodshop program is just one example of the push for more career and technical education in Wichita and the rest of the state.
And that effort is reflected across many other potential career paths. Students can get on-the-job experience in fields like health, culinary arts and manufacturing.
The goal is to get students who may not go to college interested in earning other forms of qualification or experience. They can usually leverage that experience into a well paying job, often right out of high school.
Jasmine “Tommy” Shrestha is a senior at Heights. They discovered their love for woodworking as a freshman.
“I really love just being able to work with my hands because sitting at a desk all day is really taxing on me,” Shrestha said. “Being able to move around and actually make things and be able to take stuff home.”
“I never expected that I would enjoy woodworking as much as I did.”
Tommy said the class sparked their interest in a career working with computer-assisted equipment, called CNC machines. The machines can make custom cuts and molds from materials like wood, plastic and metal.
As part of the woodshop renovation, Heights will install its own CNC equipment through a grant.
That will help teach future students like Tommy how to use the machines, which is exactly the kind of specialized training many employers in the region are looking for.
