Carpentry students take center stage

What had become warped and weathered will be made smooth and safe as the outdoor performing arts stage at North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene gets a much-needed renovation.

Through almost 20 years of concerts, dancers and a variety of other performers, the stage had taken quite a beating, but the most damage appeared to have come from a seeping water pipe that ran beneath the center of the stage. Now, with the help of Coeur d’Alene’s Citizens Council for the Arts and some donated materials from Stock Building Supply, students in NIC’s carpentry program have removed the old stage and made way for the new platform.

“It was in pretty bad shape,” said Clark Lusk, a member of the arts council.

A groove a few inches deep had formed in the middle of the covered stage and become something of a performance hazard, with some of the dancers from the recent Art on the Green festival saying they wouldn’t return next year unless it was fixed. As the organizers behind the city’s lakeside art festival, the nonprofit citizens council listened to the complaints and decided, with the help of NIC, it was time to do something.

“The college has been working great with us for years, and this is just another good example of that,” Lusk said. “We are going to rebuild it so that, hopefully, it will last quite a while.”

With $3,000 from the council, the carpentry program began the demolition of the stage on the first day of classes on Aug. 28. Located behind the college’s Children’s Center, the stage is being built under the guidance of Dave McRae, the head of the carpentry program, and 13 students.

“This stage has been in need of repair for a long, long time,” McRae said.

The rebuilding is a great introduction for carpentry students before the class’s major project gets under way, McRae said. The program will soon begin work on the Raffle House – a project in which 5,000 $100 tickets for a new Post Falls home will be raffled off in July 2007.

“This is kind of a warm-up; (the Raffle House) forms the real structure of the program,” McRae said as he and several students recently prepared to install a beam under the new stage. “We’ve got a good thing going. The students learn better by actually physically doing this.”

Andrew Rockwell, 17, just started his first year in the carpentry program and agrees: “Actually having a hands-on job is 10 times better than being in a classroom.”

The two-week-long stage project is just one of the many construction jobs the program has undertaken on the NIC campus over the years. Benches, shelves and other work have been early semester projects during the 11 years McRae has been a carpentry instructor at NIC.

“This time of year it’s always nice to have side projects,” he said. “Something like this gets us out of the class with real tools, where you can see real results.”