PRESQUE ISLE – Students at the Presque Isle Regional Career and Technical Center went live this fall.

They spent class time helping to build a garage for a local church.

The live project – as Jim Ouellette, building trades instructor at the center, called it – took his six students about 16 weeks in two-hour daily blocks to complete. They wrapped up work on the three-bay garage next to St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Presque Isle just before Christmas, he said Friday.

“The church asked us to do this project,” Ouellette said. “One member of the church is a parent of one of the students here. It was her idea, because she knows we do live projects whenever possible.”

The building trades program tries to provide students each year with construction projects that will be used upon completion, such as the playhouses they build for fundraisers or the cider processing building they spent two school years helping to construct at the school farm. That facility turned out about 1,856 gallons of cider this fall.

Ouellette pointed out that it is difficult to find a live project that fits in with the curriculum: It has to be a project at the students’ level, begin when school starts in August and be done by Christmas, and be close enough so travel is not an issue. This project fit the center’s needs, he said.

The earthwork and concrete slab for the building were prepared by a contractor, and plans were designed by a local engineering firm. Ouellette’s students spent their time rough framing, sheeting, siding and roofing the building, which is 30 by 38 feet and 11/2 stories high.

“We talked about it at length before they [the students] made the decision to do this project,” Ouellette said. “Right from the get-go, they said, ‘Yes, we want to do it.'”

The project gave students some experience with skills they weren’t able to develop last year with the cider building, such as framing and roof work. Ouellette said the garage roof was fairly standard, but “nothing we’d do in a high school shop.” Following safety guidelines, they used a crane to help set the roof trusses.

“They loved that part of it – because it was real-life,” Ouellette said. “On the job, you use a crane for safety, and they got to participate in that. … It was a great experience for them because instead of doing it in a shop, where trusses would never fall over from the wind, here you have to deal with the weather.”

Ouellette said he was most impressed with how students dealt with the weather during the project.

“I guess what amazed me is when it started to get real cold, they still wanted to do the work,” he said. “I thought they would opt not to put the siding on because it really got cold. But most of them said, no, they wanted the experience.”

In the end, Ouellette said, that’s the point.

“They’re really here for the experience,” he said. “I’m not going to say they don’t get something out of it, but that’s not why we do it. It’s for the student benefit.”

From the church’s point of view, though, the project is a benefit to more than these six students.

“I think the community, in many ways when they speak about it, it’s a sign of hope,” the Rev. Jean-Paul Labrie of St. Mary’s said Friday. “We have a tendency sometimes to criticize youth for things they don’t do or don’t get involved in. But this was just the opposite. It was a nice affirmation of the students involved.”