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I am a retired person who taught metal shop and automotive classes. When I left to get a higher paying job, my shop was turned into “academic” classrooms. This also happened to the electric shop. The school board’s view was industrial skills are obsolete and we need more computer programmers and sociology majors. All the equipment was sold to fund the multimedia classroom and advanced cheerleading.

Now after graduating non-college bound kids for 30 years, we are finding out that our society needs trained technical people to keep our infrastructure together. Have you found a good bricklayer or tree trimmer lately? Ask them where they learned their skills. This country had a good system of trade schools but they were eliminated due to the stigma of having a child in the school for kids who couldn’t handle college. Those kids are the ones making $80,000 a year while the sociology grads are living in your basement.

Let’s get behind programs like PTECH and support apprenticeships until our school systems realize that the only career path for an art history major is “Would you like fries with that?”

BARRY GAGE

Sandpoint