Dusty. Disorganized. Dangerous. These are the words students and staff would have used to describe the PE department’s shared equipment closet, were you to ask them three weeks ago. Basketballs and shuttlecocks littered the floor. Jump-ropes lay in tangled lumps. Various other sports paraphernalia was stacked and stuffed throughout the room’s measly 100 square-feet, filling almost all of the available space and putting a strain on gym classes and athletic teams.
“When we went in to look for stuff, things were all over the floor, not organized,” said gym teacher and swim coach Lyn Smith, who is one of the equipment closet’s primary users. “You didn’t know where things were, you just had to rifle through to try to find what you were looking for. It was really dusty and dirty, and no matter how many times I would try to clean it up, I’d come back the next day and things were just thrown everywhere.”
But thanks to senior Alex Parker and his helpers, senior Greyson Lynch, and junior Matthew Briggs, those problems are a thing of the past. The trio undertook the renovation and reorganization of the equipment closet as a community service project for SkillsUSA, and their work has had a marked effect.
“Everything has a place and now my classes can put things where they go,” Smith said. “I didn’t realize how nice it was going to be. The improvement was far more than I ever anticipated.”
The renovations included repairing cabinets and shelves as well as building pegs to hold various articles. Everything had to be cleared about before they could even begin the process.
“People had trouble getting in there and finding things—I’ve even seen people trip and fall trying,” said Parker. “It hadn’t been a safe environment for a long time, so we wanted to change that.”
Parker had initially noticed the problem when he went through gym his freshman year, so when he selected community service as one of his competitive events for SkillsUSA, he thought that this project was perfect. He said his group’s main goals were to “make the room a lot cleaner, more efficient, all-around safer, and put it within the fire code, because it was breaking it for a little while.”
Parker is the president of this year’s chapter of SkillsUSA, a nationwide organization that focuses first on teaching useful job and life skills, then fostering competition between schools in threm. The club’s supervisor, Garland Bray, who is also the Core and Sustainable Construction teacher, has been very impressed with Parker’s leadership and positive attitude, both in SkillsUSA and in the classroom.
“Alex is very responsible,” Bray said. “He helps everybody. He’s just a special individual. He’s mature beyond his years.”
Smith, too, is very thankful to have Parker around, though she’s never taught him herself.
“I really enjoyed getting to know him more, because I’ve never had him in a class,” Smith said. “Alex is not only a good student, but he’s also a class-act guy. He’s very nice and very respectful…. I really appreciate all that he did to help out the PE department.”
– By Chase Miller
