Student-Run Spartan Manufacturing Is Not Your Average High School Shop Class
High school is a challenging time. Aside from navigating the ups and downs of turbulent friendships, physical changes, grades, sports and everything else, a young person is expected to start having ideas about what they want to do with their lives when their lives are still just beginning to come into focus. It’s tough to know which way to turn when the goal can seem so abstract and distant.
This is why hands-on experience is such a vital component of education – it’s one thing to talk about being a carpenter, say, but it’s another thing to actually pick up a hammer and saw and try to build a birdhouse. In Superior High School, a relatively new program has been demonstrating just how vital real-world work experience can be to helping kids decide what career path to choose.
Spartan Manufacturing is a student-run business in which kids use in-house CNC machines, welding equipment and other machine-shop staples to help local Superior businesses get projects done. It’s a way for students to get the skills they need to work in manufacturing, but also to get experience in dealing with customer needs. The program has already produced graduates who trumpet its value, and the people who run it say it’s been a joy to be a part of.
Technology Education teacher Adam Kuhlman has been deeply involved with the program, and he said it was sparked by the fact that kids would get deep into shop classes and then not have anywhere to progress past a certain point. “
What we found,” Kuhlman said, “was that students could take Woods 1 as a freshman and Woods 2 as a 10th-grader, or they could do Metals 1 and Metals 2, and, a lot of times, these kids that just love tech-ed would run out of course options by their 11th-grade year if they were moving through things pretty efficiently, and they didn’t have that capstone experience to polish up their skills before they got out into the community.”
The solution was to create Spartan Manufacturing.
“We proposed starting a student-based enterprise, which is what Spartan Manufacturing is,” Kuhlman said. “We’ve got students that step up and kind of take on different leadership roles within the classroom, whether it’s communicating with clients, coming up with plans or quoting the cost of jobs. And then we’ve also got students that like being out in the shop and doing the hands-on work and making the actual products for us. It’s a good chance for the students to just kind of practice those real-life skills. We’re not reading out of a textbook or making small projects that are just going home to mom and dad or grandma and grandpa – the things they’re doing are real. They’re out in the community. So kids gotta do a good job and step up their workmanship.”
Fellow Technology Education teacher Spike Gralewski is involved with the metal shop, engineering and robotics at Superior High School, and he’s also a former student who was involved with the formation of Spartan Manufacturing.
“District budgets aren’t going up,” he said, “and by working with industry and the community to create products and bring ideas to reality, the students are getting the opportunity to complete projects that are much bigger than our school budget would allow.”
“For instance,” Gralewski continued, “right now, the students are working on a trash can receptacle project with the City of Superior, where they’re fabricating 26 trash can recycling receptacles that are going to go in city parks. If we hadn’t started Spartan Manufacturing, I’m not sure the general coursework alone would have supported doing a project like that. Having Spartan Manufacturing and building relationships with the community and the city and industry has allowed us to, I would say, go further faster and give the students a chance to do much larger-scale projects.”
Sam Meller of Meller Property Services LLC only recently graduated, but he already is proof that Spartan Manufacturing is working.
“When I was a junior in high school, Mr. G. and Mr. Kuhlman and I were really starting to propose the idea of starting a student-based business,” Meller said. “We went to another school in Wisconsin that had a similar program, and that was when we decided to give it a shot. By my senior year in 2023-2024, we had opened up the program.”
“I liked and still like how the program gets young people ready for the world in a work-related sense,” Meller said. “The program really shows that college is not the right path for everyone and that blue-collar or other similar industries may be. I also like how it builds connections with students and local business. It teaches students how to communicate and work in a business. It teaches how connections are everything. I also like how it gives the students independence – instead of having a task to do given by a teacher, the students are the ones making the tasks.”
“For me, it absolutely helped me in the workplace,” Meller said. “Immediately after high school, I started my small business, which I do full-time. The program showed me connections mean everything and standing up for yourself and knowing your own value means everything. It really taught me to never sell yourself short, and that hard work pays off. Eighty percent of profits are due to connections – not the actual work getting done. Obviously, you have to go out and do the work, but you have to get the work in order to be able to do it. Spartan Manufacturing translated into me growing my business and building a close connection with another local landscaping business in the area.”
Meller said Spartan Manufacturing provides a sense of self-worth that can only come from achieving real-world tasks.
“It allows the students to run the business, and it shows the true struggles of running a business,” he said. “It is never easy, even if everything is going perfect. I think it helps people realize that there will always be a hurdle or a problem that you have to overcome. It also helps the city of Superior, with the program making parts and other things for those businesses. It absolutely helps more than just the students and it shows businesses in the area that our generation is still ready to learn and grow and work hard.”
“We’re kind of following a job-shop model, where community members can reach out to us via our Facebook or webpage or e-mail – or maybe they just happen to know one of the teachers in the program,” Kuhlman said of how local businesses might get involved with Spartan Manufacturing. We’ve got the ability to plasma-cut metal and powder-coat. So we do signs and fire pits and things like that.”
The 22 students currently involved in the program aren’t quite able to be paid for their work as yet, but there have been profits that have helped make the program better. “We’re reinvesting,” Kuhlman said. “A lot of the profits are going right back into the Tech Ed program, whether for machinery or tooling or supplies.”
“A couple of years ago, we had a student that came in — he was interested in welding and Exodus in town had a ‘sponsor a scholar’ program. Through his connections with our program, he was able to go off to Northwood Tech. Exodus sponsored him, so they paid for his schooling. They gave him a job. Now he’s working as a welder at Exodus,” Kulhman said. “We’ve got another student who’s going up to Cirrus in the afternoons and doing an internship, and then he’s going to get his aviation maintenance certificate through LSC, and I think he’s hoping to get on at Cirrus.
We’re starting to kind of leverage those relationships for our students’ benefit too, trying to get them into spots they want to be and help get them some education after high school as well.”
Wherever the future takes Spartan Manufacturing, it’s all for the benefit of the kids and Superior. “Spike and I have always said we want this to be the community’s program, not the Mr. Gralewski and Mr. Kuhlman program,” Kuhlman said. So far, so good.
Tony Bennett is a freelance writer based in Duluth.
