With the weather having warmed up, Windham Township began the process of installing their new street clock. Windham Historical Society contracted electrical students from Maplewood Career Center to run the power line underground. Great job all around.
“Some kids who never get the opportunity to make that kind of contribution, but they can see that giving back to the community is rewarding,” Maplewood Career Center Electrical Instructor Joe Svonavec told The Weekly Villager on April 16. “These kids are not going to stop just giving back to Windham, they will go into the industry giving back to the community wherever they are. It’s all about growing.”
As The Villager previously reported, the Windham Historical Society purchased a street clock from The Verdin Company, a Cincinnati-based manufacturer, for the Township to display on the lawn by the Gazebo to the right of Windham Township Hall.
WHS Founder/President Lynnea St. John said that she received a suggestion from a member of the WHS to reach out to the Maplewood Career Center to see if it could enlist some students to help with the electrical work.
Svonavec brought his senior class to Windham Township for the project and started work on April 6. He said that his class was available for the project by allocating the time they usually used for lab work to instead work on the trenching and electrical work for the street clock, usually working two hours a day since the initial start date. He added that the expectation is to have the job completed by the week of April 20.
According to Svonavec, the project has served as good practical work experience for the senior class.
“I know what their capability is, and I know how they work as a team and I know what they have been exposed to. For me this is a senior job,” he noted. “I usually give more of my pressing jobs requiring more expertise to my seniors.”
Svonoavec added that his students had to adjust their plans in trenching a power line. Their initial idea did not go according to plan because the trencher did not line up properly, requiring his students to manually dig a trench to run the electrical lines from the interior of Windham Township Hall.
“It has been a lot; we had to dig the whole trench, but it has been going smoothly. It is great to give back to the community,” said Maplewood senior Tyler Hamilton of Mogadore. “We started moving quickly. We had a couple of crews going and knocked it out.”
Svonavec said that the job of running the power line to teh street clock expanded to installing new electric lines to the gazebo, which required running a power line to teh electric panel which will power the street clock.
“It was slow-going at first because I was not too familiar with bending PVC, but we got around to it eventually,” said Maplewood senior Tyler Beatty from Waterloo. “They are still digging out the place where we are going to run the underground cable. That is going to go up and into the roof. I think we have been making progress so far.”
St. John said that the new electrical lines that the Maplewood Career Center students are installing will not only provide power for the street clock and gazebo, but also to the Township green, enabling food trucks to park there for social gatherings. The new power lines are 220-volt lines, which the Township did not previously have. This prevented allowing food trucks which need that power to set up on the Township’s green, the only 220-volt lines being in the back of the building.
“We ran power out, converted to PVC and ran our underground line through, which is finished all of the way over to the electrical box to the new panel that we are putting in,” Svonavec said. “The electrical panel will feed the street clock and will also re-feed the Gazebo.”
With the Maplewood Career Center students nearing the project’s completion, Svonavec said his seniors have also embraced the experience of working together as a team, something he has always emphasized in his electrical work program.
“We are going to have hard times and have good times, but we are going to do it all together,” he said. “They have been used to working together as teams. Yes, we are going to have times when they are going to work individually but for them to come here and work as a team was nothing new for them.”
