Three Henderson High School Career and Technical Education students are stick-welding on a metal plate in their CTE unit shop on July 3rd, glaring light sputtering across the table.
This is to demonstrate to WNIN and other gathered media a common and frequent style of welding that these students and professionals have to do.
But these students aren’t common — they’re among the best in the nation at welding, having beat every other high school in Kentucky and placing fifth nationally in Atlanta in the Skills Competition.
“Skills Competition is pretty important,” said team member Tyler Schinault. “It measures how good you can work with other people, and how much you really know about what you're doing.”
Other members are Harrison Shaw and Quinn Butler.
The goal of course is to build skills they can use beyond high school. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the career area of welders and cutters are expected to remain steady for the next eight years.
The median income is about $23 an hour with moderate on-the-job training beyond a high school diploma.
Harrison Shaw, 18, competed as state champion twice. He graduated last year.
“… I want to be a high pressure pipe fitter, and primarily like new killer plants, pressure stations, stuff like that.”
He’ll first need to complete a local six-month welding school. Quinn Butler said he’s been focusing on tig welding, technically called gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW). This was his largest area of focus at the competition. “We worked really hard as a team,” he said. “We came in even after school, we are coming in three days a week.”
That competition began with a substantial written test, teacher Brad Ralph said, followed by a job interview and hands-on work.
“They have to produce something of a future project to build on their own, they draw the print, they do everything with their future project. Then they do the hands on part of a pile of steel. They get the prints and they fabricate what is on the print and that's the biggest part of the competition.”
He said students many times truly start at the beginning of the trade.
“I've got some kids that can know absolutely nothing, they can't turn the machine on. They don't know how to set the torches. They barely know how to spell ‘weld.’”
Yet they can end up state champions like Harrison Shaw. Ralph said it is important to celebrate such victories alongside traditional sports competitions.
“The trades that we teach here at our in our tech unit, it's their future … I'm not taking anything away from sports, but how many kids are going to be in the NFL? These guys are going to do this possibly the rest of their lives, and then they win, they're winers forever.”
Schinault said it’s up to the youth to carry on these trades.
“If the youth don't learn it, then who else is (going to) when the older generation goes away? Who else is going to do it if the youth don't? So somebody has to come in and take their place.”
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