Some Vermilion County high school juniors and seniors in a welding class at Danville Area Community College have completed work on a large, new barbeque smoker. Others displayed skills Thursday in graphic design, culinary arts and other areas at a College Express show at Danville Area Community College.
Nick Chatterton is (shown standing next to the cooker) Director of the Vermilion Vocational Education Delivery System. He He explained what the high school students did to create the new grill.
‘’What they did was they took an old LP tank…fabricated it…cleaned it up…painted it…put it on a trailer, did all the welding and all the engineering that had to be done with it to create the smoker. And then the really cool thing is it is then traveling over to the Culinary Art Department where they’re going to teach their curriculum on it on food sanitation and meat handling and the different methods on meat handling such as barbequing and smoking,’’ said Chatterton.
Some of the other displays were prepared by high school students enrolled in the Early Childhood Education Program at DACC.
‘’That class is trying to trying to prepare our students to become either daycare providers or paraprofessionals or maybe even teachers someday. And so our curriculum – a couple of the big items we’re trying to infuse into it is reading and reading instruction at an early level. And so we have displays here that represent children’s stories and what is involved in creating a children’s book,’’ said Chatterton.
The students in the College Express Dual Enrollment Program learn job skills required by local and national employers. They also earn high school and college credits for the courses they complete.
