Photo courtesy of Amy Lee.
At Girls Can Camp, the campers learn alongside professional women who specialize in careers in carpentry, pipefitting, construction, welding and electrical fields. Pictured is the camp from summer 2017 at the Shelby County Schools Career Technical Education Center.
Girls Can Camp organizer Amy Lee said since they started the camp 10 years ago, the goal has stayed the same: to introduce girls to construction skills and trades they might never have had a chance to learn about.
Lee, also the secretary at Shelby County Schools’ Career Technical Educational Center, where the camp is hosted, said each year they do the camp, more and more girls apply to participate.
“Girls — typically, I won’t say all of them — like to create and do things with their hands. It’s just that fulfillment and satisfaction you see with the end product,” Lee said. “So that’s what you get here. You’re learning skills, but you’re also building your own projects, and then at the end of the week, you get to take them home.”
The Girls Can Camp 2019 was held June 10-14 at the Shelby County Schools Career Technical Educational Center, a place where students go to develop tools to prepare them for opportunities in the workforce. Each summer, the camp offers this opportunity for eighth through 10th graders in Shelby County Schools.
Girls interested in attending the camp sent in an application in spring explaining their interest or passion to learn more or be engineers, Lee said. Then Alabama Power, one of the sponsors for the camp, chose 15 girls to participate based on their essay.
The girls learn alongside local professional women who specialize in careers in carpentry, pipefitting, construction, welding and electrical work. Each day, Lee said, they work on different projects like using power tools and other equipment safely, and they do activities like creating small bookshelves, installing wall outlets and cutting copper pipes.
“Welding is the day they get to be the most creative. They’ll actually use scrap metal pieces and will create anything they want to create. We’ve got some really amazing, creative girls,” Lee said.
Welding is also the day the girls get to play with fire, which Lee quickly learned that they love.
“The goal is just to open girls up to these opportunities to see if they like them,” Lee said.
Currently, she added, there are still so few women in the construction workforce that companies like Alabama Power are trying to change that. If the girls really like some of the skills they learn through the camp, they can sign up for classes at the Shelby County Schools Career Technical Educational Center, where they are offered each year.
“[The girls] light up because they think that’s something that only boys do, but they see that it’s not rocket science, it’s something that anybody can do,” Lee said. “It’s just learning the skills to do it and learning them safely so that you can safely operate those tools.”
For more information about the Career Technical Educational Center or about participating in the camp, go to shelbyed.k12.al.us/schools/CTEC/index.htm or call 682-6650.
