High School Students Given an Opportunity to Build Houses and Experience Through Zanesville Campus Career Program

MUSKINGUM COUNTY, Ohio- The high school students at Mid-East Career and Technology Centers on the Zanesville Campus have partnered with Habitat for Humanity by building a home located on Mead Street.

The carpentry program is a great way for the youth to gain leadership experience, but also provides more housing spaces for the Zanesville community, says Troy Balderson, United States Representative.

“Housing is an issue and it’s been an issue for many years and it’s becoming more of an issue now…We have a whole row here of Habitat for Humanity and it offers them a home and provides a roof over their head, but they participate,” Balderson stated.

Melissa Best, Director of Community Engagement for Habitat for Humanity of Southeast Ohio, backed up Balderson and said that the home owners are very much so participating and are doing a good job with financial literacy classes, and other neighborly aspects.

“We are very grateful for the partnership with Mid-East Career and Technology Centers. They help us build a home in Zanesville every year. The students come. They are on the build site and they are working on this house start to finish. So it’s excellent hands-on experience that would be very hard to obtain in a classroom,” Best said.

One of the students, Brenton Huffman, senior at Mid-East and Mike Hawley, Assistant Director with the program, both talked about their experiences.

“It’s been great. We started out putting the subfloor down and then basic framing and we built pretty much the whole house and putting the roof on right now. We’ve learned a lot so far,” Huffman said.

“I think this is the fifth house that we’ve helped build here and the students are getting a lot of experience and I know we got a good report from the people from Habitat saying that they would love to hire them because they’re doing a great job,” Hawley added.

Best says the lots to build the homes were donated by the Landbank and so far the they’ve been seeing a 2 percent mortgage default rate.