E-S HS holds Open House for their student-run business, 'Cardinal Manufacturing'

STRUM — Although Cardinal Manufacturing’s Open House event is a chance for the community to socialize and eat, Eleva-Strum High School students also say it is an opportunity to show what goes on with their business.

“A lot of times people from the community don’t really have a reason to come in here, so they don’t see the progress that is happening or the changes that are happening inside the shop. This is when we open it up for everyone to come inside,” said Brady Nichols, a senior at Eleva-Strum.

And as the Open House is an annual event, Cardinal Manufacturing has been able to show how much it has been growing since it first began 10 years ago.

Craig Cegielski, technical education teacher, founded the student-run business based on a model he has worked with to be replicated in any school.

“We teach a whole variety of courses like most high schools do,” he said. “We’re teaching welding, machining, woodworking, construction — It’s pretty typical of a lot of schools. What is unique about us is when you get to the Senior level, the students actually incorporate everything we’ve taught them over the years, from technical skills to employability skills, utilizing their professionalism… And then to get more experience, we actually run a student-run manufacturing company — we run a business.”

In manufacturing custom made small-volume parts for their clients and even sometimes shipping them, Cegielski said the students take on a real job that encourages them to problem solve, communicate and gain confidence in their own ability.

Although it does count as a class, students are still required to apply in order to be accepted into the course. Accepted seniors, and a few accepted juniors, are then assigned to their own role in making sure the operation goes smoothly.

“I am the production manager this year…” said Nichols. “What I do is I’m emailing, calling customers and overseeing all the jobs that are coming through and quoting jobs.”

Another senior, Evan Christenson, takes up the role as maintenance manager to make sure that everything is up to date and help around with general maintenance when needed.

When the program first started, Cegielski said that only 9 students made up the entire business. Now, there are 22 students.

With access to high tech equipment such as toolroom mills and 3D printers, learning how to operate machinery and use manufacturing programming like CAD, computer-aided design, gives them skills to take into apprenticeships.

“Especially if you want to do something related to this,” said Christenson. “Jared (Bohn), one of our (Computer Numerical Control) guys, he’s actually going on to be a technician, or something similar to that. The experience he gets down here is actually directly applicable to what he is planning on doing.”

But even if a manufacturing job does not interest the students, Nichols said the program and business really allows them to develop those soft skills when it comes to their future career.

“I am not going into any kind of related field to manufacturing specifically, I am going to a university for marketing,” said Nichols. “I still wanted to be down here, even when I was growing up, because you learn about the soft skills, the importance of a good handshake, you learn communication skills. There is not really going to be any other class in high school you take where you are going to be talking to customers… everything is real down here and those are skills you can’t usually build in a high school.”

Through their classroom learning and application, the students and Cegielski said they learn to be great workers by following guidelines which encourages the employees to “show up, work hard and make it happen.”

In that sense, joining their business and doing a good job is a method for students to reinforce their employability skills as they continue on into further education or the workforce.

On top of providing this opportunity for students, Cardinal Manufacturing also provides revenue for the school through its production of parts and services.

“That’s one of the struggles in most tech ed departments — in most schools is that budgets are tight. And now we have a business that has revenue coming in, so we can buy more things,” said Cegielski.

With upgrades to the facility over the years, adoption of higher end equipment, increase of technical skill and creating a culture around it, Cegielski said they are truly growing a company that is better than it was 10 years ago. Much like how a business can start out of a garage and grow up, he said that Cardinal Manufacturing is evolving every year.