From now on, the CTE building at Heritage High School is going to look a little different for its students.
The building, which has been under $4.2 million worth of renovations since January 2023, just had its grand reopening Wednesday afternoon.
Director of Schools David Murrell spoke to a small crowd that gathered for the occasion, which included HHS staff, board of education members, and county commissioners.
“We’re really setting the course for the future,” Murrell told the crowd, “It really shows when the community comes together around a project, the kids win.”
HHS Principal Jed West spoke about the 18 months it took to complete the renovations and the importance of CTE classes. He brought up a group of CTE students who represented everything from Business to FFA classes.
“They are a representation of what this building means to our students, and they’re a representation of the decisions that you all made collectively for our community,” West said.
About 70% of the students at HHS will complete a CTE program of study, West explained. He also made it a point to tell the group that CTE was not just a pathway for trade jobs. It also allows students to test different career paths before college so that when enrolled, they aren’t wasting tuition dollars trying to figure out what they want to do.
Once the talks were complete, the crowd broke off into two small groups to tour the building.
HHS Assistant Principal Holly Whitehead led one of those groups. She first took the group to the Welding Advanced Manufacturing Shop, which boasted rows of new individual welding booths.
The group walked down a hallway with new restrooms and lockers and landed in the automotive collision repair classroom, where cars were set up on lifts with students working underneath them.
Whitehead showed off updated classrooms that were previously open. With the changes, they were able to close off the classrooms which will help with security, Whitehead told the group.
“There was no connection between the two sides of classrooms, and these were open classrooms, so there was no way to secure a class should you have any type of emergency,” she said.
The classrooms also had large windows that looked down into the construction and automotive shops. The group could look out and see students working on repairing and refinishing large picnic tables that will be used on their campus.
Whitehead led the group downstairs, where she invited the group into the updated cosmetology class where students were talking about proper language to use when working with a customer.
Included in the building renovation was new technology for the students to utilize. In the clinical education classes, students showed the group how to use an Anatomage table, which provides students with digitized pictures of real cadavers that can be rotated and moved around by touch screen. Students could “cut” into the body to see different layers of the human body.
The class also came equipped with a life-sized ambulance simulator.
From Clinical Education, the group stepped into a Robotics class and the tour ended with a stop in the new Culinary Arts kitchen, where the sweet smell of baked treats wafted through the air. Students were baking up cookies and chocolate molten lava cakes. The kitchen was no small undertaking, Whitehead said. The kitchen, she told the group, is up to par with the needs of Blackberry Farm.
“We’re very, very pleased,” Whitehead said.
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