Picture, if you will, walking into your boring, Thanksgiving-decorated house. You look around and see turkey motif after turkey motif, and the orange blisters your eyes. You know what you need? You need a little Christmas cheer, and Lodi High School has just the thing for you!
Blue Devil Manufacturing is a student operated business that teaches its workers how to use power tools, cooperate with peers, and work under pressure. First, students are assigned a group and a project, which becomes their semester-long responsibility. They must collaborate with the other members of their group to fill any orders, which can range from engraved keychains to painted wooden Christmas trees to customizable boxes and family name signs to large or small snowflakes. One of the workers explains what she does: “Basically, another group cuts wood and glues or nails it together to make a tree. Then they give the tree to me, and I paint it to the best of my abilities. So far, I’ve painted, what, thirteen trees? Anyway, it’s a fun class and easy points in the gradebook, and Mr. Licht found a way to allow me to do what I love, which is anything artsy. Mr. Licht found a way to produce money for the school, showed us how to use heavy machinery, and assigned each of us to tasks that we can do best.”
Mr. Licht, the head of the company, agrees, saying, “The purpose of our company is for students to experience how a company functions, and to give them the experience of working in (kind of) a production facility so they would understand different positions, like Production Manager, assembly line, quality control, etc.” When asked how this teaches his students responsibility, he replies, “Great question. So each person will have a responsibility of whatever product they’re on, and they will be in charge of: quality, [it must be good quality] otherwise that item will be recalled or thrown away; a timeline, because we have orders that are due at certain time, so that responsibility [of having it done in time] is on them; and also safety, which is huge.”
Liam Johnson, the president of the company, states, “This is a great group of people, and they’ve all worked very, very hard.”
With the Christmas season coming up, the students are working hard to fill orders and work together productively. What else do we do? One of Buddy the Elf’s quotes says it well: “[We] treat every day like Christmas!”
