ERIC DEGGANS, HOST:
According to Gallup, many teens say they find school less interesting than they did just last year, and that's a problem, which NPR's Cory Turner covered back in August. Then something strange happened. He was recently in Michigan reporting an unrelated story when he stumbled across a remarkable kind of school full of students who seemed to find it super interesting.
KELSEY: (Singing) It's time to start our day. We are here to work and play. Good morning, preschool friends. How are you?
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: I know, those are not high schoolers. That's because I went to small-town Allegan, Michigan, about an hour south of Grand Rapids, to do a preschool story.
KELSEY: Momallo (ph).
TURNER: But my preschool story got derailed when I was told that breakfast that morning was being baked from scratch down the hall by a bunch of teenagers. This, I had to see.
ANDREA DULAC: You're the first person with a beard.
TURNER: I am wearing a beard hairnet. This is the strangest sensation ever.
I'm standing in a massive industrial kitchen teeming with teenagers. The person who made me put on said hairnet, and who is laughing at me, is their teacher, Andrea Dulac.
DULAC: So what they're doing is making mother sauces, so we actually are going to pull beef femur bones out, and we're going to roast them and make our own beef stock.
TURNER: It turns out, the preschool and this kitchen are both part of something called the Allegan Tech Center. Here, high schoolers from all over the district can come for a few hours a day during their junior and senior years to learn one of more than a dozen trades from graphic design to criminal justice, robotics to cooking. Dulac's students manage the preschool menu, including today's breakfast special.
DULAC: These are cinnamon sugar pumpkin muffins - fresh pumpkin.
TURNER: Oh. That's a really good muffin.
DULAC: If you had hated it, I would have said those students made it (laughter).
TURNER: High school senior Dawn Degood helps manage the preschool menus here. And she tells me this program is a chance for her to get a jump start, doing something she loves.
DAWN DEGOOD: It's a great program. Like, my friend Mary, also in the classroom - we both want to study culinary arts in college. So having this helps us.
TURNER: Dawn wheels the muffins and oranges down to the preschool classroom and drops them off.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yummy, yummy.
TURNER: Back in the hallway, she asks if I want to follow her on another errand.
DEGOOD: All of our teachers and us hate, like, having leftover food and that stuff, so we're just going to give it to the pig.
TURNER: That's right. She said pig. Dawn grabs a huge pan of carrot shavings from the kitchen and leads me down the hallway.
I'm going to follow you, Dawn.
As we roll, we're joined by Carey Stolsonburg, whose job is to try to explain the tech center to people like me. For example, their building trades program - she apologizes that I won't see those students today because they're working.
CAREY STOLSONBURG: We bought some vacant property. They're building a house, and I think they're going to sell it off to a low-income family.
TURNER: The classrooms here are all radically different. The welding shop is doors closed and shields down. There's an engineering robotics class, nursing. A truck without wheels sits on a lift in the automotive classroom. And then there's the room for aspiring EMTs. It's huge, with a vaulted ceiling.
Right in the middle of this giant space is an actual ambulance with the doors open where the students can practice real-world situations. There's even a stretcher in the back, ready to go.
We hang a left into a veterinary tech classroom.
UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: We have to look for Daisy.
TURNER: And it seems normal, with a teacher up front and students at their desks, but then I notice several dogs are just roaming around the room. Dawn walks me by a wall of kennels with two small cats, named Peanut and Sunshine.
Hi.
DEGOOD: These can get adopted sometime.
TURNER: Hi. Are you Sunshine? Goodness.
DEGOOD: They're usually strays or something, and we take care of them.
TURNER: Hi.
DEGOOD: We groom them. They make sure that they - all their shots and all of that. Further in the year, there will be a lot more and, like, kittens.
CHRISTINA DALM: We just have to make sure when we leave that we close the door so none of the animals come out.
TURNER: That's Christina Dalm, a paraeducator in the culinary program. She and Dawn lead me outside, around the back, to a large shed next to a grassy pen. And inside is one of the biggest pigs I have ever seen.
DEGOOD: Yep, that's her. That's Daisy. She is really big, but she's so sweet. She won't do anything to you.
TURNER: Daisy is ironically colored like a cheetah, brownish-orange with black spots. The name plate by her pen says Daisy, the queen.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIG SNORTING)
KELSEY: All right, are we ready? (Singing) Eyes are watching. Ears are listening.
TURNER: We finish the tour full circle, back in the preschool room, only we're behind a wall of two-way glass. On one side, the kiddos play, and on the other, high schoolers with an interest in becoming teachers watch while their teacher, Jen Fuller, drops some knowledge.
JEN FULLER: What do we notice with Kelsey, the teacher that's on the floor?
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: She's smiling.
FULLER: Smiling, yeah - smiling is a huge thing when working with young kids.
TURNER: Senior Madison Bottrall now spends the first three hours of each school day working here in the preschool. Not only does she get school credit that counts towards graduation...
MADISON BOTTRALL: I do get paid. It's a regular job. And then when it comes to my time to go back to school, I just drive back to the school and do my normal school day from there on out.
TURNER: Madison says she has college plans, and the tech center has given her a chance to really try teaching and working with kids.
BOTTRALL: It makes my data be here, and then I go back to my regular school, and I'm like, can I just go back?
TURNER: Going back to that poll of high schoolers that we mentioned in the intro that found way too many teens losing interest in school - well, there's no one solution. But the teens at the Allegan Tech Center here in Michigan - Madison told me they want to be here.
BOTTRALL: Every day, I always hear people say, I don't want to go back to regular school. I want to stay at the Tech Center.
TURNER: I don't want to go back to regular school - because, of course, this place, this tech center, is also school, just with a pig and a kitchen and a preschool and an ambulance and, most importantly, a whole lot of teenagers who are very happy to be precisely where they are. Cory Turner, NPR News, Allegan, Michigan.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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