Nicole Horn
Since April, students taking shop class have had to take extra steps to learn about safety before working with any machinery.
“There have been no new regulations added to the safety of the machinery. However, there has been a slight change in the way that the procedures in the shop classes are enforced,” said school shop teacher Kent Kowalski.
Before, all students really had to do was show that they could work the machine in the way they were shown by their teacher.
Now, however, they must follow four steps involving filling out documents that must be completed before proceeding to the machinery.
This all came to be after an incident in May 2011 when a student at Mother Teresa High School in Ottawa brought a barrel from home to work on as a project.
This student did not get approval from his teacher to work on the barrel but proceeded to anyway. The student worked on the barrel with a torch not knowing that the barrel he was using had been washed out with a flammable cleaner.
The barrel had been stored with its caps closed prior to the class project, allowing flammable cleaning vapours to accumulate inside the barrel.
The outcome was an explosion that killed the student.
After this incident happened, shop class safety came under scrutiny. In the end, the school board in Ottawa came up with a way to try and prevent this from happening with in the future.
There needed to be a better explanation of the procedures for the students, so extra steps were added to the learning process to help shop class students better understand the machinery they utilize.
When asked if he agreed or disagreed with the extra steps added to the curriculum, Kowalski responded: “It may seem ridiculous to do all these little extra steps, but these are the things that make a difference.”
From a student’s point of view, these extra steps may be seem like extra work especially when they are eager to get their projects done, but these steps are what keeps everyone properly informed and in the end helps prevent an accident from occurring.
