Last Spring, the STEM teachers of Penn-Trafford High School received a $50,000 grant from the state of Pennsylvania to be used on advancing STEM career awareness within the school district.
This grant comes at a time when manufacturing companies across the country are desperately looking for workers. Machinists, specifically, are retiring at a very high rate. The job forecast in that profession is very strong due to the average age of a machinist in this country being close to 50 years old. Many students are not even aware of what a machinist does. This grant money will go a long way to bringing this career to students' attention.
The grant money was spent on two different styles of CNC machines. A Haas TM-0P vertical CNC milling machine will give students experience using an industry standard that is found in several machine shops inside of the district. The other machine is a CNC Plasma table which is used to cut things like metal brackets, ductwork, and even detailed signage.
Learning to use the machines is not a simple task, and many local manufacturing companies, including Cleaveland/Price (Trafford), Data Machine (Irwin), Astley Precision (Irwin), and First Rate Metal Fab (Manor) have all reached out to help train the teachers and students and some even donated materials.
“Metal is very expensive, and we are in need of aluminum stock for the mill as well as sheet steel for the plasma cutter, ” commented Mr. Eric Crompton, a STEM teacher at Penn-Trafford High School who was instrumental in obtaining the grant. “We would love to develop further partnerships with local shops, both to provide future machinists and perhaps to obtain their scrap metals to use in the classroom.”
