Two recent stories in the Baker City Herald highlighted innovative ways that two local high schools are helping students not only learn, but acquire skills that could lead directly to lucrative careers.

Both Baker High School and Pine Eagle High School, in Halfway in eastern Baker County, have classes in which students learn how to build.

Not sentences or equations.

Real structures.

Bathrooms.

Entire homes, even, in Pine Eagle’s case.

Powder Valley High School offers a similar course, Geometry in Construction.

All of these classes give students valuable, and realistic, experience.

Conventional classes in language arts and history and science are also important, to be sure, helping students construct a foundation of knowledge.

But classes such as Bill Markgraf’s construction course at BHS allow students to acquire practical skills they can use to qualify for jobs following graduation, whether from high school or college.

BHS students also benefit from access to the heavy equipment simulators at Baker Technical Institute, which is adjacent to the high school.

Markgraf said students from Powder Valley, Pine Eagle and Huntington have also traveled to BHS to participate in some lessons.

In Halfway, the Pine Eagle School District recently received a $250,000 grant from the Oregon Department of Education for the district’s building trades program.

Pine Eagle students designed, built and sold a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in Halfway several years ago. The district’s future plans are equally ambitious, including building two duplexes and six homes.

Baker County students are fortunate to have these opportunities available. There’s considerable demand nationwide for workers in construction and heavy equipment operation, and local teenagers have a chance to enter the workforce with an advantage.