UNION — Union High School’s career and technical education center is set to soon expand.

Preliminary plans are in place to add a classroom, a robotics lab and a covered outdoor work area to Union High School’s CTE center. The additions will add 5,000 square feet of building space to the high school’s campus. The addition of the outdoor work area, which will have one or two walls open, will allow high school students to build larger items, including garden sheds, greenhouses and play structures.

“We want to expand the program so students can build things on a larger scale that can be sold in the community,” said Union School District Superintendent Carter Wells.

The classroom will be used for the Union High School’s new geometry construction program. Students in the program attend a geometry class and then immediately move to a woodshop to tackle projects applying geometric concepts they are learning. Currently, students in the high school geometry class have to walk across campus to reach the shop. Once the new classroom is built, geometry students would be adjacent to the woodshop, allowing them to make a quick transition, providing them with extra time to work on construction projects.

“Transition time will be reduced and the time students have to work in the woodshop will be increased,” Wells said.

The robotics lab will replace one now located in the high school gym. Wells said that having a robotics classroom in the CTE center will be a plus because the CTE center includes a metal shop, where there are many tools that are needed to create robots.

A timetable for the construction of the classroom, robotics lab and open-air work station has not been set yet because it has not been determined how much construction costs will be. The Union School District is now accepting proposals and bids from contractors for the construction. Wells said that if the amounts the contractors would charge for the projects is more than what the school district can pay, some of the work will be postponed until funding is available.

“We will see what we can afford,” Wells said. “I’m hopeful that we will receive an offer we cannot refuse.”

The school district has made the construction of the robotics lab and the classroom its top priority and the building of the outdoor work space its second priority.

Wells said it is very likely that construction of the classroom and robotics lab will begin in early March and could be finished by early fall.

Wells wants the Union School District’s CTE program to develop to the point that students, after graduating, will have the skills needed to begin working in the manufacturing industry for local firms, such as Woodgrain Lumber, Boise Cascade, Northwood Manufacturing and Barreto Manufacturing.

The planned additions come on the heels of a major boost the program received last summer when the school district’s former bus barn was renovated into a woodshop with money from a $140,000 state CTE grant. The grant was written by Karolyn Kelley, UHS’s agricultural sciences teacher.

The renovation of the bus barn was completed in the summer of 2021 and provides much needed space for the high school’s woodshop, which was revived in 2020 after being shut down for more than 25 years.