For the first two weeks of November, students in CRLS’ RSTA carpentry program spent every class period at the Foundry site, located in East Cambridge near Kendall Square. At the Foundry building, students got the unique opportunity to use the building as a worksite, applying the skills they’ve learned in class.

A few months ago, the Cambridge Police Department contacted the RSTA program asking it to build “mock-up rooms” in the Foundry building. These full-scale models would be used by the Cambridge Fire Department and Cambridge Police Department when teaching new recruits breaching, as well as search and rescue techniques.

The previously vacant Foundry building is owned by the city of Cambridge and is dedicated to community use. While there were many different ideas and development plans for the building, Cambridge’s fire and police departments decided to create this new training facility for firefighters.

With the help of the two carpentry teachers, Mr. Carey and Mr. Horne, a group of twenty-two students from Level 2 and Level 3 carpentry classes were randomly split up into small groups.

The groups did everything from installing wall partitions to building door panels in the Foundry building. Mr. Horne commented, “We are fortunate enough because all of the Level 2s and 3s can do any of the jobs that they needed to do there and they could handle them all.”

Before the students started working on the project, Mr. Carey designed a blueprint for the students to refer to. Then, on the first day, all of the students got to go in and work together to lay out the floor. From there, they started building the walls. To do this, the CRLS carpentry program collaborated with the Nashoba Valley Technical High School. The Nashoba Valley students built the wall partitions so that the RSTA students could build the interior walls for the training site. CRLS junior Kalkidan Mamo described the experience as “a great hands on activity. It puts you in the real life situation as a carpenter or architect.”

After the project was finished, the Cambridge Police Department and Cambridge Fire Department invited the students back to the building to watch recruits training in the new space. According to Mr. Horne, the Cambridge Police Department and Cambridge Fire Department even said that students might get the chance to try some of the training as well.

Mr. Horne described the experience, saying, “I think the students enjoyed it a lot. They were all smiling, they were working together, everyone was always busy, and no one was goofing off. You could tell they were really engaged in the project, and they all couldn’t wait to go back the next day.”

This piece also appears in our November print edition.