High School Auto Shop Alive and Well

Bent attitudes about an outsourced future and disinterested youth can be straightened out with news like this. The following story praises Automotive Youth Educational Systems (AYES) for providing students a stepping stone from high school to auto technician jobs right out of high scool. AYES is working overtime to help auto dealers fill the current shortage in trained and tech savvy auto mechanics.

Auto Tech Classes Spurring Students, Filling Demand
By Gil Klein, Media Genera News Service
February 28, 2006

WASHINGTON – Auto mechanics classes, once a refuge for academically troubled high school students, now are an academic motivator for technologically savvy teens.

These days thousands of high school students are taking advantage of an apprenticeship program supported by auto manufacturers and dealers who are suffering from a shortage in trained mechanics.

Andrew Thompson, a 17-year-old senior described himself as a lackluster student before he began an Automotive Youth Educational Systems Program.

If he wanted to stay in the program at R.D. Anderson Technology Center in Moore, S.C., he knew he could get no grade lower than a C in any class After spending a summer working with a senior auto technician mentor at Ferrell Chevrolet and Kia in nearby Spartanburg, Thompson said, “I went from Cs and Bs to straight As.”

His teacher, David Sloan, says that often happens.

“When the students come back the second year after working during the summer with the technicians, their whole attitude changes, not only toward the automotive side but the academic side of education,” Sloan said.

They see the geometry of an alignment job, he said, and they understand they have to read well to understand the repair manuals. And motivating them is the assurance that if they are successful, they will get an auto technician job right out of high school.

“Demand outpaces the number of students,” said Larry Cummins, the AYES’ national director. “The day a student graduates from high school, the next day he’s employed at that dealership as an entry level technician.”

If he completes two years of advanced training at a technical college, Cummins said, that student will be well on his way to earning $70,000 a year in job that can never be outsourced.

A survey in January by Automotive Retailing Today, an auto dealer trade association, found 37,329 service jobs open in the United States, 8,461 of them in the Southeast.

And that’s just at auto dealerships, said Denise Patton-Pace, the association’s director. Many more jobs are open at independent auto repair shops and with companies operating fleets of cars and trucks.

“If you open the paper, you will see mechanic jobs advertised in probably half the dealerships,” said Carter Myers of Charlottesville, Va., who owns five dealerships and is the association’s incoming national chairman. “We found you almost have to train them and grow them yourself.”

To meet the demand, automakers and dealers have allied with high school vocational programs to create a European-style apprenticeship system that moves students back and forth from the classroom to the repair shop.

Now in 430 high schools in 46 states, Automotive Youth Education Systems provides equipment, teacher training, and, most important, apprenticeships. A high school student works with a senior auto technician mentor after school and during the summer between his junior and senior years.

Today’s technicians spend as much time working on a car’s advanced computer system as getting his hands dirty under the chassis. They are learning to fix technically advanced hybrid cars, and fuel cell cars are just over the horizon. The opportunities draw students who have an engineering bent.

“The automobile today is nothing more than a rolling physics lab with a lot of computers in it,” said Sloan at R.D. Anderson Applied Technology Center. “These kids are the computer generation. They grab the technology and go fast with it.”

What is key to the AYES program is the apprenticeship where high schools and auto dealerships work together. Some educators say it provides a model for how other trades and industries should be working with high schools.

Adam Thornburg, another senior in Sloan’s class, said he learned a lot working on cars with his father, a former mechanic. But apprenticing at the Ferrell dealership was something different.

“I got tons and tons of experience,” he said. “I watched everything my mentor did. By the second or third time, I was helping, and eventually I could do it myself with little supervision.”

Girls still make up a small percentage of the students, but they are in demand.

“They still think of auto service as a get-their-nail-dirty kind of thing,” said Ed Dellinger, supervisor for career and technical education for Lynchburg, Va. city schools.

But he is often “bombarded” by the automotive service schools offering women free tuition, a place to live and a guaranteed job after graduation.

“It’s embarrassing sometimes that we just don’t have enough students for the jobs,” said Bud Brueggeman, director of the automotive program at Tidewater Community College in Norfolk, Va., which is opening a new automotive building next year to expand the number of student from fewer than 300 to 500.

“If they want to work, they will work,” he said. “There are a lot of jobs that go begging.”