Kevin Hackett and Craig Williams got a VIP tour of The Den, the career and technology education campus for Montgomery ISD, and superintendent Mark Ruffin walked them through it. The Den stands for Discover, Explore, Navigate. It is a standalone campus that serves students from Montgomery High School and Lake Creek High School, who either drive over or ride a shuttle, and most of the programs run two years and finish with a certification a student can take straight into a job.
They go program by program. Law enforcement has situational shooting simulators. Automotive services the district's fleet vehicles and teachers' cars, and it is open to the public for basic work like oil changes and tire rotations. The construction and architecture shop has SawStop table saws and a four by eight CNC, and Ruffin talked about eventually building a small home start to finish. Welding students were running TIG and MIG while the guys were there. The health services wing looks like an emergency room, with about twelve beds, a full size ambulance box, programmable patient dummies, and certifications in phlebotomy, CNA work and even running a gurney. Audio and video production has a full soundstage with wraparound green screens, an isolation room, a news desk with teleprompters and two podcast studios. Engineering and robotics has rows of 3D printers, metal fabrication, a programmable robot arm and three arenas built for robot battles, with camera positions above and a second floor balcony for spectators. Culinary arts is a teaching kitchen with roughly twelve individual stations, each with its own grill, stove and oven, tied to the chef's station by closed circuit TV, and connected through service and dish lines to a restaurant inside the school. Cosmetology has around 30 haircutting stations plus nails and facials, is open to the public on Thursdays and Saturdays, and places students in internships where many start building a client base before they graduate. Every lab has its own dedicated classroom attached to it, and the animal science and agriculture program sits at a separate facility they have not toured yet.
Before all of that, the two of them go through the college football weekend, including Texas Tech, Oklahoma's loss to Michigan, Alabama's close call at Kentucky, the Wake Forest and Purdue double overtime, Utah beating Arkansas 43 to 10, and former Texas Tech linebacker Jacob Rodriguez recording 14 tackles in his Miami Dolphins debut while wearing the green dot.
They finish with the Lindsay Clancy trial, the single juror who would not convict, the mistrial that followed, and a conversation about what an insanity finding should mean now that state hospitals are largely gone. That turns into bears, Anthony Hopkins, and a recommendation for the 1997 movie The Edge.
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