04/22/2006
Coventry students put their skills to the test
By: Jessica Selby , Kent County Daily Times

Some students of the Career and Technical Center at Coventry High School have something special to show for what they've learned -medals.
In the classroom, the students study their trade, but at Skills USA, an annual occupational and leadership competition, they must demonstrate their knowledge in a competitive setting.
The select group of students, hand-picked by their teachers to compete in the event, go up against others from around the state in trades such as carpentry, automotive, precision machining, advertising design, electronics and technical math. The competitions are held at various trade schools and universities around the state and are judged by professional tradesmen and women.
Students entered in each trade are given a different task and then guidelines to complete it. This year, students from Coventry fared well, returning from the competition earlier this month with five medals in three different trades.
Ryan Partridge, a senior, placed second and Christopher DeMello, also a senior, placed third in the automotive competition held at New England Technical School. ?Contestants in the automotive section, the boys explained, were asked to complete 10 different tasks, each one with a specific time limit.
They were asked to take a tire off the rim, mount it back on and then balance it. They were also asked to use a scan tool to read the brain of the vehicle, determine which cylinder on the vehicle they were working on kept misfiring, and perform an alignment change, Partridge said.
As a professional mechanic, the boy's automotive instructor, Thom Cook, said that the tasks his students were assigned were not easy, but he said, it was a fair competition.
"Because there was the 10 minute time period per station, it made it more challenging for the kids," Cook said. ?"If you knew what you were doing going in, 10 minutes would be enough time, but 10 minutes doesn't allow you time to waste trying to figure out the problem - you have got to either know it and be able to fix it or you'd lose because of the time limit."
Cook and the other trade instructors were allowed to select only three contestants from their group of students. Cook said he handpicked his, Partridge and DeMello, based upon their attendance, hands-on and in-class performance and the results of their written pre-test (part of the Skills USA requirement).
All of the Coventry students that were selected by their teachers to go said they were honored, excited and nervous about the competition.
"Our instructor teaches us the stuff that we were asked to do in the competition in class so we had a good understanding going into it," DeMello said. "But, it was still real challenging - not impossible, but challenging."
Christina Ruzzo, a senior, placed second and David Bougeois, also a senior, placed third in the precision machining competition.
The contestants in this competition, Ruzzo said, were given a blueprint and asked to make a plate with holes and slots in it. ?They were also asked to "turn down diameters and put a radius on it," Ruzzo said.
The only tools they were allowed to use, other than the blueprint, were a milling machine and a lathe, both large metal cutting machines Ruzzo said she and her fellow students use regularly in their precision machining classroom.
"Our teacher Mr. [Jim] Kiley has us do assignments like this all the time so it was pretty typical for us," Ruzzo said. "We only had an hour and a half time limit, though, and that put the pressure on us to complete the project."
Daniel Tracey, a senior, placed third in the advertising and design category. Students in this competition, Tracey explained, were given the task of creating an advertisement for the annual report cover for Cox Communications.
"They told us that using the little man character of theirs was mandatory but everything else was up to us," Tracey said. "All they wanted us to do was make an advertisement that gave a good representation of all three of their services."
Tracey said he wasted no time drawing thumbnails of a few ideas that popped into his head as soon as the task was explained.
"We had no idea what they were going to ask us to do for the competition when we first arrived," Tracey said. "The only thing we knew is that we were going to be making some sort of an ad."
Once the task was assigned, Tracey said, he used the illustrator program on his computer, some of the clip art that was available and began to draw. His completed ad depicted the Cox man known as "Your friend in the digital age," with the three services Cox provides -digital cable, phone and Internet - briefly described visually in balloons over his head.
"I had done a lot of practice ads for other competitions and classroom assignments so this was not too tough to do," Tracey said. "The hardest part is in the beginning, just to come up with something for an idea to start with."
There was one other group from Coventry that entered the skills competition and just barely missed a medal. Tammie Clements, Ashley Taylor, Ryan Lampinski, Kayla Boyer and Timothy Killea placed fourth in the Promotional Bulletin Board competition. The team of five seniors used a three-panel cardboard poster board to create their bulletin board image, which depicted the theme "Champions at Work."
The large board showed a city skyline with skyscrapers made of foam core in different shapes and sizes, which stood against a crisp blue sky. Below the skyline were a series of small cubicles each one with a character and occupation represented inside of it.
"After several group discussions, we came up with the idea to focus on employment," said Taylor. "We thought we would use some of the different occupations in this school as the employment opportunities that we would represent and we thought the best way to do it would be to put them in cubicles."
Coventry High School 's Career and Technical Center is a 100-percent Chapter school, Lynn Swain, co-advisor, said. This she explained means that everyone that participates in the vocational school is eligible to participate in the Skills USA competitions. ?
Skills USA, Swain said, is a program that she and her fellow trade teachers promote among their students because it is a great source of preparation for the next wave of America's high performance workers. The competitions, she said, provide quality education experiences for students in leadership, teamwork, citizenship and character development. They also give the students the self-confidence, work attitudes and communications skills to be successful job applicants in a very competitive job market.
All of the second and third place winners from Coventry High School's Career and Technical Center at this year's Skill's USA competition received a medal and either a scholarship opportunity or a set of tools applicable to their particular trade. ?