On a recent morning at the St. George School in Tenants Harbor, 9-year-old Gilbert Boynton showed off some designs he’d made on an app for 3D printing: rockets, a store, a nametag.
Surrounded by 3D printers, laser cutters and parts of school projects, Gilbert said that — when he’s not playing hockey — he loves to create things. In fact, it’s his favorite part of school. To demonstrate his skills, he then used the app to design a door, complete with a window and a doorknob, in less than 30 seconds.
“Since the start of the school year, ‘create’ has been my goal,” Gilbert said. “I love creating. I love brain twisters. I love doing stuff like this.”
He’s in the right place: the St. George School is unique for the way it uses hands-on learning in all aspects of the education received by its 200 elementary and middle school students. It’s recently been getting national attention for that model, including a prestigious $500,000 prize and a writeup in the Wall Street Journal.
It’s been almost a decade since St. George — a fishing community with many seasonal residents as well — decided to strike out on its own with a new local school district centered on career and technical education, according to Superintendent Mike Felton. Now, the school is poised to take that model even further, breaking ground next week on a $3.5 million building to house a makerspace program that it originally launched in 2016.
It’s part of a larger movement to reinvigorate the vocational training that students receive, so that they might have a solid career path upon graduating. Maine has been pushing to expand its career and tech programs in recent years, especially after they contracted during the early part of the COVID pandemic.
However, while much of that education happens in high school, what distinguishes the St. George School is that it brings it to kids who aren’t old enough to attend one of the technical schools located across the state.
That $500,000 prize it recently received from Forbes and the Center for Education Reform was meant to reward its educational innovation and help fund the construction of the makerspace building.
The makerspace is currently housed in the main school building, in a room stocked with eight 3D printers, Legos and other tools students can use for their projects. But that space is not big enough for the school’s goals.
For instance, the school has a CNC machine — which stands for computer numerical control — that can take directions from a computer to do advanced manufacturing, but the room doesn’t have enough space for it to operate safely, said Paul Meinersmann, the school’s technology and makerspace director.
The new 5,000-square-foot building will include a traditional classroom space, sewing machines, 3D printers, CNC machines and a shop for boatbuilding, woodwork and metalwork, among other amenities, Felton said.
The building reflects the fact that technical education isn’t part of some separate class at St. George, but rather, is embedded throughout the curriculum. For example, the foundations of modeling, building and technology are woven into other subjects such as math and history, to teach students about perseverance and to introduce them to the trades, Felton said.
“We don’t want them to be on screen all the time. We want them to be able to use their hands as well as doing the digital piece of it,” Felton said.
That’s apparent to 4th grade teacher Jaime MacCaffray, who said that students set goals at the beginning of the year, and then start designing things on their own once they’ve learned how to 3D model or code.
“[All] everybody talks about now is how it’s so hard to get kids to do their work. And yes, it’s true. It’s hard to keep kids engaged, but when they have the opportunity to build and to just dig deeper, they have a little bit more enthusiasm,” MacCaffray said.
Students will soon work on a project focused on animal evolution, in which they’ll design fictional animals that have specific adaptations to Maine’s climate, MacCaffray said. The students will either sew the animals, or design them on their 3D modeling and printing app, which is called Tinkercad.
The district has had to raise considerable funding from the community for its new building. One resident, Wickham Skinner, a former Harvard University professor who worked on the Manhattan Project and died in 2019, helped the school secure a grant to pay for much of its technology. Some contributors paid thousands in an auction for a birdhouse made by a first-grade student.
“I think one of the beauties of this community is, at its heart, it’s a traditional working class fishing community that’s always valued hands-on work,” Felton said.
While engineering isn’t for everyone, school officials said that introducing students to hands-on learning helps them understand their options for careers before they graduate. That holds true whether they go to a technical school and become a welder, or start an apprenticeship to become an electrician or plumber, or attain any other level of higher education before going onto a different type of career.
“As long as they understand their options, are doing work that they love and they can make a good enough living to support themselves and their family, we’ve done our job,” Felton said.
