HEAVY METAL SUMMER ROCKS BOSTON & ST. LOUIS

Students from diverse backgrounds graduated from the Boston Heavy Metal Summer Experience camp in 2022. SMACNA St. Louis and Local 23 are already planning a camp for 2023.

By Sheralyun Belyeu

Paul Heimann, vice president and controller of Welsch Heating and Cooling, has his eye on the future. “We’ve all heard that thousands of people are ready to retire out of the trades,” Heimann says. “We have to actively recruit young people to replace the workers we’re losing, and we have to get them quickly so they can receive training and mentoring from those leaving the workforce. We only have a small window of opportunity.”

Bob Butler, president of SMART Northeast Regional Council in Boston, agrees. “Recruitment work is crucial for the future,” he says. “If we don’t have the best people out there, we’re going to miss the boat.”

Welsch Heating and Cooling in St. Louis and J.C. Cannistraro Mechanical in Boston piloted Heavy Metal Summer Experience camps this year to give high school students real-life experience in sheet metal. “At first, I thought it might be a disruption to our operations to host this camp,” says Matthew Cannistraro, J.C. Cannistraro’s operations manager of manufacturing and fabrication. “But actually, the people who work in our fabrication facility were excited to work with the campers. It was received as a tremendous opportunity to pass down some of their knowledge and experience to the next generation.”

It didn’t take long for the contractors to organize solid camp experiences. “We were ready less than two months from the time we got the go-ahead,” Heimann says.

SMACNA made it easy to succeed by providing a detailed HMSE Playbook with suggested schedules, permission forms, and releases. “Everything we needed was in there,” says J.C. Cannistraro sheet metal mechanic Shamaiah Turner of Local 17.

Cannistraro relied on Turner to pull the camp together quickly. “In addition to my job in the field, I help J.C. Cannistraro with some diversity and equity inclusion projects, as well as perform outreach work to schools,” says Turner, who is also recording secretary for the SMART International Women’s Committee and a trustee on the SMART Recruitment and Retention Council. After just five days of camp, she saw student attitudes changing.

“They could see a viable path for their future,” she says. “One student invited a relative to the graduation. He wanted me to explain that he could make money working in the trades. This relative was adamant that he would have to go to college. I pressed upon the family that the student can go as far as he wants in the trades. And if he wants to go to college later, he will actually be able to afford it.”

Finding Campers

Locals and SMACNA used community connections to advertise the HMSE camp. Local 36 Director of Marketing Jeff Bradley is on the St. Louis School Business Partnership Board. “We reached out to different area high schools to get a good cross section of the St. Louis metro area,” he says. “As a Local, we dove in and did whatever we could to make sure Heavy Metal Summer Experience was a success.”

In Boston, J.C. Cannistraro has a corporate partnership with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Massachusetts. “We recruited students from Madison Park Vocational Technical High School, which is in Boston,” Cannistraro says. “We also worked with MASS Girls in Trades, which has a network of vocational technical schools around the region. The organization was able to get the word out to a broader audience.”

The result was a diverse group of campers. “One of the inspiring things about the camp was watching the students interact with each other,” Cannistraro says. “They had different educational experiences, different family backgrounds, different neighborhoods. And they all came together to have fun for a week.”

Future Years

After seeing HMSE in action, the participants are thinking about the future. Three campers from this year have texted Cannistraro’s Diversity and Community Outreach Manager, Amy Cannistraro about working for the company next summer. She is exploring wider work options for teens.

“We would bring them on as paid employees,” she says. “We have had high school interns over the years, and we want to formalize and strengthen our high school internship opportunities. We want to ensure that there are opportunities in all areas of the company, not just the office but also in the shop.”

Heimann and Bradley have already started planning for the 2023 HMSE camp because they want enough time to add new projects and ideas. The planning committee will include the Local business manager and SMACNA executive, any contractors that want students to tour their shops or worksites, and the JATC. “We can’t operate without SMACNA, and SMACNA would have a hard time operating without us,” Bradley says, “especially with the quality of training that our instructors can provide in the JATC.”

The objective is to include a welding activity in the next camp. “I’ve started reaching out to vendors to ask if they would donate the proper PPE for the student campers,” Bradley says. “We’re also going to add a field day and take students out to a job site.”

Bradley contributed to the HMSE Playbook with feedback based on his experiences this summer, even adding the instructions for a simple clock project he designed for the 2022 camp. “The Playbook is a live document, so the process was quick and easy,” he says. “We just submitted feedback to Angie Simon, and she updated it.”

Heimann’s ideal HMSE graduation ceremony would include a job announcement. “I want to bring a contractor on stage to say he’s hired a camper to do a little work and introduce a student who is starting his placement,” Heimann says. “I think I can get that on the news and get people asking about what’s happening here.”

Local 36 hosted the St. Louis graduation ceremony at the union hall this year, and in 2023 Heimann wants to add a tour of the JATC for parents. “I think it would be an eye-opening experience for people to visit the school and see what our capabilities are,” he says.

Heimann is considering ways to offer camp-type experiences to adults. “There are some great nonprofit organizations that help people get their lives back on the right track,” he says. “I think we ought to partner with rehabilitation centers and see if we can recoup some of those we missed the first time. With wages starting at $25 an hour, it’s a pretty good start to changing a life.”

See hmse.org to view video highlights of some past camps.▪

The HMSE Playbook

The HMSE Playbook is a 125-page manual developed to share with interested contractors or JATCs to aid them in hosting camps at their facilities. It provides sample applications, permission releases, and video and media releases, as well as sample schedules, projects, and lessons learned.

“We tried to think of everything they might need to run the camp,” says Angie Simon, co-founder of HMSE. “I have received feedback from numerous camps last summer that the playbook was very valuable to help them plan their camp—it is designed to be a ‘Easy Button’ for the camp hosts.”

The Playbook details the curriculum and sample itineraries based on Western Allied Mechanical’s and Hermanson Company’s inaugural camps, and includes several photos of classroom and shop activities, projects, and exceptionally happy-looking students.

“We anticipate HMSE camps in about 30 locations around the nation next summer ,” Simon says. “Last summer we had about 170 students, and next summer I anticipate 425!”

Learn more at hmse.org 

A Colorado native, Sheralyn Belyeu lives and writes deep in the woods of Alabama. When she’s not writing, she grows organic blueberries and corrects misspellings of her name.