Vincent Fittante, the automotive instructor at Mascenic Regional High School, called his students over to his office in the middle of class on a recent Thursday afternoon.
“Not too close; I’m not in love with you,” Fittante joked as the students dropped what they were doing to gather around. The 16 high school students enrolled in the Automotive 2 program formed a semicircle.
“How many of you plan on doing this as a career?” Fittante asked the class.
Every single hand in the group went up.
“So quite a few,” Fittante said.
Of those students, he said, 13 are enrolled in the Running Start Program, which allows students to receive college credits while in high school.
The automotive program draws students from Mascenic and other nearby high schools, including ConVal, Conant, Wilton-Lyndeborough and Hollis Brookline. It is one of a number of Career and Technical Education, or CTE, programs offered to students interested in pursuing vocational professions.
This year, there is an Automotive 1 class and an Automotive 2 class. Each class caps out at about 19, or in rare circumstances, 20 students.
Mascenic is allocated the most slots for its students, and the remaining availability is divvied up between the other districts. If one district isn’t able to fill all of its slots the spaces can be used by another school.
Fittante said some years the program is so popular the slots become competitive. The program proved to be so effective that in 2010 a new building was constructed on Mascenic’s campus.
“I remember when they interviewed me I said, ‘Where is the shop?’ and they said, ‘Well, we are going to take you off campus down to the town garage,’” Fittante said. “It was an old dumpy building, dilapidated. They showed it to me and anybody in their right mind would have turned it down.”
Instead, Fittante said, he saw its potential.
“I saw an opportunity there to create something, so I did it and it ended up being good,” he said.
Now the program is housed in a state-of-the-art building that Fittante helped design.
Students spend much of their first year in the classroom, accumulating a basic understanding of auto mechanics.
The majority of the second year is spent in the shop where students receive “quite a bit of hands-on experience,” Fittante said.
Students work on the town’s police fleet and vehicles brought in for repair by community members.
Will Crosby, a senior, said he enrolled in the Auto 1 class when he was a junior.
“I have heard a lot of good things from it and I’ve always had an interest it was kind of a no-brainer to try it,” Crosby said.
He said he liked it enough to enroll in the Auto 2 class as a senior. Now, he’s looking at pursuing auto mechanics at a community college.
Aidan Smith said he has been interested in mechanics long before he enrolled in the class.
He said he has learned the majority of what is taught at school in his own time.
“I want to try to find a college that has heavy diesel mechanics,” Smith said, adding that he knows there is a program in Vermont that offers the course and others in Florida.
Both students said they will likely end up working in the field upon completion of college-level courses.
“There is a shortage of automotive technicians, and if you don’t believe me you can check the statistics and you can call places. It’s hard to find good techs,” Fittante said. “And so what we’re trying to do is fill that gap, or reduce that gap, by building our own.”
He said this pocket of New Hampshire has done its due diligence in investing money to give students the opportunity to get a good foundation to be able to continue in the field in the future.
Abby Kessler can be reached at 924-7172, ext. 234 or akessler@ledgertranscript.com.