PENDLETON — The sounds of hammers banging and paintbrushes swiping against wood filled the halls at Pendleton Heights Middle School Friday morning.
Instead of opening their textbooks, about 350 seventh graders donned hardhats and goggles to learn about career opportunities in the trades.
The school held its second Build Your Future Trades Day, a day-long event designed to give students information about different trade programs and the chance to receive hands-on training from 90 trade workers, as well as 40 student volunteers from D26 Career Center and Pendleton Heights High School.
Activities during the day included include laying down concrete, building and painting birdhouses and building picnic tables, as well as staining ones built last year.
Karen Shreves, who runs the event through the Madison County Builders Association and is an owner of Midwest Remodeling, said when her son was young, she knew he was meant for the trades. At around two years old, he would find pieces of string to link his toy tractors and trucks into a line to tow them.
“That is who we want to reach. Even if they are a strong student, there are more things than just test scores. There are different measurements in life, and here are all these available options.”
Many states are facing a decline in workers joining the trade. According to an Associated Builders and Contractors press release, the construction unemployment rate was 5.4% for March 2025, the same rate as last year. Nineteen states had lower construction unemployment rates, while 25 had higher unemployment rates and six states remained the same.
Build Your Future is a program backed by the Indiana Construction Roundtable.
Shreves said Build Your Future originally held the event as a six-week club, but Shreves and her sister, Beth Carey, wanted to turn it into a one-day event. They were able to do that through state funding.
“BYF got the funds to be able to hire some teachers who then created this curriculum,” Shreves said. “That is where state funds really matter, because we did not even know where to start, and once they created that, we were like, ‘We can totally modify this and make it a day, and we can make it a day with every single student.’ ”
Mark Hall, superintendent at South Madison Community School Corp., said there is great value in introducing students “to different opportunities they might have after they graduate.”
“I think a lot of times, the focus is too much on four-year colleges,” Hall said. “Although a four-year college degree can oftentimes also end up in a job in the trades, I think it is really important to show them there are a lot of opportunities out there to make a really good living that do not necessarily require a four-year degree.”
T.J. Price, a seventh-grade health and wellness teacher, said it is good to get students exposed to the trades.
“There are some that are more hands-on than others that you can tell this is for them,” Price said, “but even some of the kids that would surprise you that I have in class, they are still participating and learning. They are definitely enjoying it.”
Hall said his district has seen more students go to D26 Career Center in the last two or three years.
“We have always tried to make our program a comprehensive program,” Hall said. “We try to provide the opportunity for kids to be college- or career-ready when they leave, but in the last couple years, one thing we have seen is an increase in the number of students going to the area career center.
“I think part of that is because, even though we have always tried to make our students aware of the trades, I think it has been a more concerted effort in the last few years.”
In the future, Shreves hopes to bring more trades to participate in the event, as well as bringing the program to more seventh grade students in different schools.