Riverside Makes A Seat

It took a few splinters.

That didn’t stop students at Riverside Opportunity High School, the district’s last remaining alternative school, from finishing a months-long project: a giant Adirondack chair.

As students created the permanent fixture that will travel with them to a new campus next year, a volunteer instructor from the Eli Whitney Museum taught them vocational skills that could transfer over to any construction job.

Riverside, the district’s smallest high school with just over 125 students, has educated the district’s neediest students with a limited budget.

Shuffled between aging buildings (including a controversial move back to Hallock Avenue next year), students have decorated the hallways with posters and murals. Given a minimal budget for part-time help, staff have enlisted support from foundations and volunteers.

Earlier this year, those cuts ended another wood-working program, the Pallet Project, that tried to cover its operational costs by selling benches, planters and storefronts — all made from salvaged shipping platforms — to local businesses.

(It was able to keep another social enterprise business, Maniacs Bike Shop, which for the last two years has taught students how to refurbish bikes with motorized engines and program arcade games onto deconstructed computers.)

Since then, as it scrambled to bring back more vocational training, Riverside found Mike Dunn, a volunteer from the Eli Whitney Museum, who led the students in constructing their own giant adirondack chair.

Dunn said he wanted students, like him, to know that working in the trades can be a ​“good career.” He said people are willing to pay quite a bit to make sure their lights stay on and their toilets flush — jobs that can’t be outsourced.

“Some people think with these,” Dunn said, splaying his hands. He would know, he said, because he’s one of them. ​“In ninth-grade shop class, I found out what I was good at. I already knew what I wasn’t good at.”

After he finished school, he got a job at the Eli Whitney Museum, where he taught busloads of kids on field trips how to construct kayaks and chairs.

Nearing retiring, he took the chair project to Riverside — with one difference. The students are older, so he figured he’d nearly triple the scale.

Over the prior weeks, students had built their own sawhorses and cut out the wood pieces for the chair. On a recent Wednesday morning, Dunn walked Sonimar Colon, a junior, and several classmates through the steps they’d have to do to finally put it all together.

Along the way, Dunn threw in math and science lessons.

He taught them the physics of rudimentary machines. To do that, he bet students that he could lift them up with just two fingers. Placing a wooden plank atop other boards, he asked a student to stand on one end, while he pressed down. The student rose up a foot into the air, leading to cries that he’d cheated.

“It’s not cheating. It’s a simple machine,” Dunn said. ​“Now you know what a lever is.”

He asked the students to figure out how to scale up a normal-sized chair’s dimensions. He pointed out that the height and length of its arms double, but the angle of its seat does not.

He also taught them how to pick out the right drill size, how to follow the grain of the wood and how to level out canted angles.

Throughout, teachers peeked in the sawdust-filled room to see how it was coming along.

“It was a process,” said Ryan Klauder, a freshman. ​“I was trying to picture what it would look like at the end. I didn’t think it was going to be that big. I think people will recognize how much hard work it took when they look at it.”

This summer, Klauder will be working at the Eli Whitney Museum, helping initially with tasks like watering the flowers and mowing the lawn, before he starts taking on bigger projects.

After the chair looked complete, Klauder helped Dunn pull the screws out of the arms and back. ​“Wait, we just built this!” some kids said. Isn’t it done? Dunn told them it was the only way to get the chair outside without leaving a big hole where the door once was. With the parts disassembled, Dunn and Klauder lugged it out and drilled in the permanent screws.

On Thursday, Akasha Rodriguez, another freshman, took over on the chair’s finishing touches.

With her classmates, she had spent the previous week layering it with coats of paint, putting down a base of baby blue that would make her illustrations pop. Once those dried, she spent the morning painting on a gray silhouette, out of whose head showered a splattered rainbow of paint and hearts.

“It’s somebody, really anybody, letting their imagination overflow to the point where their head explodes and the colors emerge from it,” Rodriguez explained. ​“It’s about letting imagination and creativity flow. It’s an idea I’ve had for a very long time.”

Rodriguez said she hopes to eventually open her own business, where she can sell her artwork — making a living from a creative pursuit, just like her mother, who runs a bakery. ​“If I can get my hands on anything, if I can find different ways to create something new, I want to do it,” she said.

Rodriguez arrived a Riverside just a few months ago. Already, she said feels like the school’s a better fit for her. At a larger high school, she said she felt ​“limited,” ​“pushed” into one way of approaching her education.

“Before, everything was so stressful for me to handle, especially since I can’t really cope with things very easily due to my past,” Rodriguez said. ​“But being able to express myself, I’ve seen I can also be productive. I felt a lot safer to be able to take my time with things. I’ve had more motivation to get my work done, to push forward through tough times in my life.

“It’s made me a lot happier as a person,” she added. ​“I used to be very closed off, but I’ve been more open, more energetic, more optimistic about things.”

At the alternative school, she said there’s just ​“more freedom to do the things I enjoy and experiment with things I never thought I would do in my lifetime.” Rodriguez, who spontaneously hugged her classmates and teachers as the Independent interviewed them, said she feels like she’s found a family.

The school put the giant chair out for Friday morning’s graduation ceremony, giving its soon-to-be-alums a chance to hop onto it for pictures with their families.

After that, as the lease for the current space on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard expires, they plan to transport the giant chair over to Hallock Avenue, the first piece of furniture in what they hope will be a new home.