File:Auto Shop, Junior Dane Hall from the Frederick News Post April 28, 2018. Photo by Graham Cullen.jpg

Brunswick School: Brunswick High School

In the Classroom: Students at Brunswick High get experience fixing cars

   By Allen Etzler

In the four garage bays at Brunswick High School’s auto shop, one car is lifted on jacks, two have the hood popped and the fourth is missing an engine.

Dane Hall, a junior, is working on his own car. Two students are changing valve cover gaskets on a Nissan truck that belongs to one of the teachers at the high school. A small group of students are working on replacing the fuel intake system on another teacher’s car.

Carlos Lopez, the class’s most advanced student, is working on a semester-long project in which he tore a motor completely down and is rebuilding it from scratch to see if he can make it run.

“The kids get a lot out of this class, I think,” auto shop teacher Vince Carey said. “A lot of the cars are donated so that they can work on them, but during the year, we get quite a few people who ask us if we can do work for them.

“We don’t charge anyone because [the students] get the real-world experience from it.”

Brunswick is the only high school in Frederick County to still offer an on-site auto shop class. Other students who want to take shop are required to apply to the Career and Technology Center, which some of Carey’s students have also done.

CTC offers limited enrollment for students, so sometimes not all students are able to get into those programs. So Brunswick is able to fill a need for its students that other schools can’t.

“Not every student is going to be great at academics,” Carey said. “But they do well here. And we need people who can do this work.”

Lopez, for instance, was one of those kids. Before he started taking auto shop classes, he struggled academically — which he attributed to apathy toward school.

But something clicked for Lopez when he started tinkering with cars. It’s something he’s good at, and likes doing.

“It makes me feel so proud,” Lopez says, pointing to the motor he’s rebuilding. “To work this hard and see that you’re able to fix something and make it run.”

Lopez, who hopes to join the Marines after high school and work as a mechanic, realizes he may not be alone.

“I think there’s probably a lot of kids like me who just didn’t care about school,” he said. “But then you find something you like doing ... it changes everything.”

In Carey’s class Wednesday, Hall spent the entire period working on his own car. Two bolts that connect the catalytic converter to the muffler had rusted, and Hall wanted to replace them.

But the heat that is placed on those bolts is so high that the bolts harden. When Hall went to replace them, the ends of the bolts broke off, breaking the connection of the converter to the muffler. The car is drivable, but it will probably lead to him having a leak, he said.

Meanwhile, Matt Watson and Bailey Drake completed work on a teacher’s vehicle. The class, along with fixing valve cover gaskets and intake gaskets, completed a 27-point inspection, performed an oil change, put in new spark plugs and changed a window switch — work that would likely cost more than $2,000 in a professional shop.

The work took more than four days, but that’s mostly due to the limited time students have in the class. Students in the auto shop class get about an hour of work in the shop each day, Carey said.

“The only thing I wish is that we had more time,” Watson said. “It’d be nice to get two and a half hours like students at CTC.”