The $385,000 home off Dhu Varren on the city’s north side was the forty-sixth built by AASBIP students since the program started in 1970. It fills out a street named for the late Earl Shaffer, who ran career and technical programs for Ann Arbor Public Schools for thirty years. AASBIP students built it themselves with guidance from skilled trades instructors.
According to Frank McVeigh, board member for AASBIP since 1989 and a sales manager for Reinhart real estate, “the finished home is sold as a product,” with the profits reinvested to buy land and materials and distributed as scholarships to students pursing construction-related education.
Four hundred students have gone through the program since its inception, and interest is growing. According to 2008 alum Nagi Kahala, only fourteen students were enrolled when he started the course in 2008. “I helped spread the popularity of the program with other students because I saw the value in learning a skill and using my brain,” recalls Kahala, who went on to get a degree in construction management and works as a manager for Superior Landscaping. “I told students they could earn twenty bucks per hour and learn a skill instead of flipping burgers.” Last year, seventy-eight students applied for thirty available slots.
Kahala, who’s continued to volunteer with AASBIP, has deep appreciation for instructor John Birko, who retired at the end of the school year. “John was a father figure, and the man I leaned on. He knew my potential, kept me in line and focused.” Jason Watson, 2009 grad and AASBIP board member, says Birko “taught us respect, responsibility, and leadership in addition to hands-on skills.” Watson, who knew nothing about the building trades when he entered the program, went on to get a degree in construction management from Ferris State and has worked for Walbridge Construction ever since.
“We do a very good job in Ann Arbor teaching our students educational subjects,” says Birko, who ran the program for ten years. “We don’t always do a good job, and need to do a better job, helping them understand how this relates to their future lives and how it will enable them to work. The algebra and geometry the students come to me already knowing conceptually suddenly makes sense when they apply it to laying stairs or roof and rafter framing.”
“Coming into the program, I pretty much only knew how to read a tape measure and hold a hammer,” says 2016 grad Mitchell Irvine. “But Coach Birko was an excellent instructor, teaching us everything we needed to know.”
Birko stresses that grads don’t necessarily end up in construction. “One of the things we are most proud of is that the program has given our young people the traction and confidence to pursue whatever they decide to do moving forward.”
John U. Bacon, a 1982 Huron High grad, emails that he took “Homebuilding in the morning, and Humanities–an AP level class–and Physics in the afternoon. Not sure anyone’s done that before or since, but it made for a great senior year … I made good money during my college summers building walls, decks and roofs. In fact, I suspect it was several years before I made more money with my honors history degree from U-M than I did from my homebuilding skills.” He’s now a New York Times best-selling author.
Mark Valchine, who previously ran a home construction program at the William D. Ford Career-Technical Center in Westland, succeeds Birko this month. He’ll oversee construction of AASBIP’s first home on Sedgewood Ln. in Scio Twp.
