Kingston construction school gives students real-world experience

Published 11:08 am Friday, May 22, 2009

KINGSTON — Her career-development classroom is anything but traditional, there’s only one wall: a cliff face.

Cassy Birkeland spends her day at school hanging some 45 to 80 feet above the ground.

“I just love hanging off the cliff,” Birkeland says. “It’s really nice and peaceful. Rock faces are beautiful, below is beautiful.”

Birkeland — an Enumclaw native — is attending a two-week high-scaling construction class at the Northwest Laborers-Employers Training Trust Fund, located on a hill overlooking Kingston.

The school provides skill and safety training courses for construction laborers — how to lay concrete, build bridges, build scaffolding, high-scaling, and hazardous waste and environmental clean up.

Classes range from an eight-hour forklift safety session to the two-week high-scaling course in which Birkeland is enrolled.

“We’re the ones building your roads. We place concrete, we know how to maximize structural integrity,” NWLETTF director Mike Warren said, explaining just who a laborer is. “When you drive by a bridge and see scaffolding, that’s what we do. We build scaffolding.”

The Kingston property, formerly an old Nike military base, is the headquarter location for the Trust, which has facilities in Pasco, Spokane, Satsop and Utah.

The Trust was formed in 1968 and moved its headquarters to Kingston in 1981. About 40 to 45 individuals attend classes in Kingston each week. The school has a dormitory, classrooms, a kitchen and a lounge area. It’s a nonprofit, so students don’t pay tuition.

While in town, the students also help spruce up the local area, as getting their hands dirty on projects is part of the classroom curriculum.

NWLETTF students built the concrete picnic tables in Mike Wallace Park; they helped with the grating for Kola Kole Park; did some concrete replacement work for the community center; poured the graffiti wall at the Billy Johnson Skate Park; and installed some playground equipment at Wolfle Elementary and some fencing at Gordon Elementary.

“We’ve done lots and lots of little projects,” said Warren, who has been a laborer since 1975 and a teacher for the Trust since 1988. “We only do small stuff. We don’t do anything that will take work away from contractors and working people.”

Over the years Trust laborers helped build and demolish the Kingdome in Seattle, helped build both Qwest and Safeco fields, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and assisted in the Hanford Nuclear site clean up, among hundreds of other projects nationwide. Trust graduates are currently helping with the Hood Canal Bridge project and will be working on Seattle’s 520 bridge enhancements as well as the viaduct.

Hard hats, gloves and orange safety vests adorn the indoor classrooms, while scattered around the Kingston grounds are evidence of the hands-on learning sites: slabs of concrete, a room with mock asbestos and lead paint, ditches, 40-foot concrete walls and even an authentic looking hazardous waste site complete with leaking buckets.

Students come from across the state to develop job-securing trades.

“They’re trying to upgrade their current skills to stay more employable and marketable,” Warren said.

Birkeland, whose great grandfather on her mother’s side was a high scaler and her father a laborer of 32 years, is in town for just such a reason, and is grateful an opportunity is offered in Kingston.

“Oh yeah, I’m in it for the long haul. It’s just really awesome life experience,” said Birkeland, 27. “I think it’s just a blessing. It’s a really special opportunity.”

Birkeland recently finished a job supervising all the clean-up efforts for the 45-story Bellevue Towers, a job she loved, but would enjoy finding work as a high-scaler so she can get outside. She’s heard there may be work on I-90 or Chinook Pass.

“I worked a lot of jobs before I started here, and once I got in the union I felt for the first time in my life my work was appreciated by other people,” Birkeland said. “It makes for a good life.”

In the last year, 5,774 students went through training at one of NWLETT’s locations.

To learn more about the trust visit, www.nwlett.org.