ABOVE: Danville High School welding instructor Joe Wernert. Behind him: state qualifiers Matthew Sherman, Seth Jameson, Revan Bailey, Jeryn Jumps; and DHS SkillsUSA chapter president Austin Brown.
Four Danville High School students participating in Career and Technical Education are getting ready for a chance to be state champions in SkillsUSA competition. Recently, in regional competition at Lincoln Land College in Springfield, a three-person DHS welding team of sophomore Jeryn Jumps, junior Matthew Sherman, and senior Seth Jameson earned a first place finish to qualify for state competition at the Peoria Civic Center.
Their welding instructor at the high school, Joe Wernert, has taken ten years of experience at Watchfire Signs, and put it to work teaching youngsters. He says the students are challenged to be young adults and to work in an adult environment. And when it comes to the state competition in Peoria, it will be a case of “figure it out, now.”
AUDIO: They’ll go in blind. They will get a blueprint the day they show up. And they’ve got to finish as much as they can within the time allotted, so it’s a time management test. And then they also have to finish with accuracy. So it’s not just “slop something together as quickly as you can.” It’s “can you make something timely, and as high quality as humanly possible?”
Wernert says the regional competition in Springfield was a new routine for all of them. And they know improvements can be made in Peoria, on April 24th through 26th.
AUDIO: We didn’t know what to prep them for, outside of the technical skills that the kids should know going in. And they learned some things; they made some mistakes. And they definitely didn’t get the most done. But what they got done was of high enough quality that they placed really high.
The fourth Danville High School student scheduled to compete at the SkillsUSA state finals in Peoria is junior Revan Bailey. He qualified for state in Technical Drafting by taking the virtual test at DHS.
