Camp teaches kids vital construction skills

HARLINGEN — Bricks and mortar spread across the workshop amid the sounds of scraping, pressing and teaching of skills.

“Pick up the mortar and lay it down,” said Victoria Garcia, 18, to the eighth graders in the SpawGlass Summer Construction Camp.

The three-day camp from June 12 to 14 at Harlingen High School South was sponsored by SpawGlass, a general contractor in Harlingen, in partnership with the Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District.

“We do this to give the kids an opportunity to grow their skills and kind of open their eyes to the construction industry and start practicing those skills,” said Martin Perez, assistant superintendent for SpawGlass.

“In the past three days, we’ve worked on concrete – how to pour concrete,” Perez said. “We worked on tape and float and paint. They learned how to install drywall as well as how to patch drywall.”

The construction of a house combines a set of specific and specialized skills. There’s a talent to each skill, and each skill – ventilation, the placing of drywall, the painting, the plumbing, the roofing – is a crucial part of the whole of a house.

The collaboration of those parts, like pieces of a puzzle, require communication within groups of workers performing the taping and floating of the drywall, the constructing of a roof, the use of mortar and brick, and they each serve as building blocks of the house.

Nathaniel Sanchez, 13, spoke to this very well.

“You have to have different sets of people working on things,” said Nathaniel. “You have to have certain people working at the roof, the base, the plumbing, the electrical systems, and it all comes together at the end.”

The camp brought experts from different specifics of that whole to teach the students. Victoria, a 2023 graduate of Harlingen High School, is an award-winning mason. She showed an admirable precision and focus in her demonstration and in her explanation; those qualities and her close proximity to the students’ ages commanded their attention and respect.

“There are different ways you can lay your mortar,” she said. “If it’s sticking to your trowel, obviously it’s going to make the job harder, so you want to keep laying it out and kneading it.”

The students crouched now over their mortar boards; trowels cut through mounds of mortar and spread it across bricks.

Victoria glanced at one student in his hard hat spreading mortar on a brick with his trowel.

“Right now, he’s buttering his brick,” Victoria explained.

And then, “Basically, we’re attaching our mortar to our trowels and placing it out on the brick. Next you would want to attach it to your other brick like he’s doing right now. They are building a pyramid. It’s one of the beginner projects that I did when I first started. So this is a good place to start.”

This was certainly the starting of something for each student, but for many the experiences of the three-day camp were also the continuation of prior knowledge.

Nathaniel for one had already done masonry at his grandparents’ house. Jared Hernandez, also 13, had built a room with his father, and Evelyn Saucedo, 13, had helped her father with constructions projects around her home. She thoroughly enjoyed the camp.

“It’s very fun and I got to experience new things,” she said. “I most enjoyed when we did the drywall, and we painted.”

Organizers hoped that camps like these would encourage more young people to pursue the constructions trades.

“The goal of this camp is to introduce trades to the students,” said Tracy Lopez, executive assistant for SpawGlass.

“There are a lot of trades out there that they may not be aware of or that they did not know they could go into as a career option,” Lopez said. “We’ve been introducing them in little increments all week.”

Later in the week, she said, the students would take a field trip to see a project site, to “see how each trade comes together, just to show how working as a team, communication, takes many many people to build a project.”

“I hope that the students will find something that maybe sparks their interest and puts that bug in their head,” Lopez said. “I hope they’ll want to continue educating themselves in whatever trade they were interested in this week.”

These days the skills of construction are in high demand, and there’s a shortage of people in those fields. Perhaps the students at the SpawGlass camp will pursue those skills and at the same time build lucrative careers. Perhaps they will become so skilled in their trades they’ll not only construct houses but provide fine places for families to build homes within those walls.