Vo-tech students plane, sand planks for restoration project
A Butler County commissioner teamed up with his old alma mater to give a big boost to a Foltz School restoration project.
Scott McKee, the carpentry instructor at the Butler County Vocational-Technical School, said Commissioner Kevin Boozel dropped a huge pile of rough-cut lumber off at the school just before the Christmas break.
When students came back from Christmas vacation, McKee said he put all of his carpentry classes to work preparing the material.
“It was 30 to 35 students,” said McKee. “They planed it and sanded it and did the tongue and groove. It took five days.”
Boozel said, “Foltz School had asked for help.”
“They wanted to replace their ceiling but I had priced it out and it would have been $8,000 to $12,000 for the wood alone,” he said.
“I managed to work out a deal with the lumberyard I use, Bylers Lumberyard, for the wood for $800. That was wet wood,” he said.
The deal was struck at the end of October. Boozel said he stored the wood in his barn to dry out before taking it to the vo-tech school to be worked.
“I had gone to the vo-tech for four years for carpentry, house building and cabinet making,” said Boozel. “I brought it in my trailer and dropped it off.”
After the planks were finished and reloaded on the trailer, Boozel drove the wood to Jennings Environmental Center, 2951 Prospect Road, in Brady Township.
The wood is being stored at the center until it can be installed in the old school house at Jennings.
Boozel said the idea is to have the ceiling installed by union apprentices.
Boozel said McKee and his students were great to work with.He said, “I was blessed to take carpentry and cabinet making at this school, just a few years ago ... and still use those skills in my own home and business.”The Foltz Schoolhouse is under the direction of the Jennings Environmental Center.The one-room, township school was built in 1880, on the site of a former log school. After 83 years of classes, the school closed in 1963. Foltz School was one of the last five public, one-room schools to close in Pennsylvania.The Moraine McConnells Mill Jennings Commission, a nonprofit organization that assists local nature parks, has renewed plans to bring the Foltz Schoolhouse back to life.Made almost entirely of wood, the frame, roof and floor of the school succumbed to rot.A team of volunteers worked on the school, replacing all the rotten structural pieces. Then, they fabricated a replica bell tower made to resemble the building's 1920s appearance and replaced the broken windows with imitations made of wood, not glass.The building has new bones, but the guts are still missing: no desks, no windows, no chalkboard. Visitors would see only an empty room. There's even still scorch marks from the fire that destroyed the original bell tower.Inside, plans call for replacing the floor and ceiling boards, plastering the walls and adding some minor electrical and heating elements without greatly compromising the historical accuracy.
