Geneva High School woodworking teacher Rob Showalter said he was talking with Shonette Sims a few years ago and she asked, “Are you still building the same old table?”

Sims, then Geneva School District 304’s director of teaching and learning, is now the assistant superintendent for learning and teaching.

“It was hilarious,” Showalter said of her question. “It was great because it was incredibly challenging to me, personally, because I prefer – when changes are ready to be made – I work to just try make those changes as quickly as possible.”

Speaking at the District 304 school board meeting Monday night, Showalter and students Ben Bond and Sebastian Manning explained how applying real-world applications in woods classes expands their skills – and can open up possibilities for a career.

“After she made the comment, really, it pushed me past my reluctance to make the change that we needed to make,” Showalter said.

He showed a slide of what the “same old table” looked like to the mid-1990s when Showalter himself took woodworking at Geneva High School.

“That might not fit in families’ houses. I wanted families to be able to bring the table home, welcome it into their house and enjoy it – instead of bringing the table that doesn’t match the style of their home and not enjoy it, but have it because their kid made it,” Showalter said.

In reorganizing the class, Showalter gave students an opportunity to choose what they were building. The school didn’t buy new equipment, he said; they just changed the way it was organized to allow projects to get completed more quickly.

So students went from taking a full 18 weeks to make a table to completing it in about nine weeks, Showalter said.

There are 199 students enrolled in the high school’s woodworking classes and a waitlist of 80 students, officials said, attesting to the popularity of the courses.

Now woodworking partners with Jamie Dunlap’s business entrepreneur class, where her students design something for Showalter’s class to make – and then her class sells them.

The woodworking students now also fix furniture and do custom building of tables, dressers and bookshelves, Showalter said.

A real change-up to the woods class was the addition this year of a computer numerical control machine – an automated tool that does cutting and drilling. Assistant Superintendent for Business Todd Latham said the district bought it this summer for $34,775.

Latham said the machine is not only for the woods class but now allows the district to make signs in-house for whatever is needed – directional signs, for parking, for student performances and internal signs.

“This puts us ahead of other woodworking programs,” Latham said. “When we bought it, it’s for the whole district.”

The CNC machine is a tremendous boon for the woods class students.

Ben said he and Sebastian, both seniors, are also on the robotics team so they have prior knowledge for all the machines in woodworking.

“I did some research about job openings,” Ben said. “There are roughly 354,800 jobs for CNC operators in the U.S.”

Showalter said every full-scale furniture company uses a CNC machine. By the end of next school year, it will be fully integrated in all the woods classes.

The students’ furniture fix-it and building program will not start up again until March, Showalter said.