South Side High School Students Build a House on Wheels

JACKSON, Tenn. - Here at South Side High School students are learning how to build a house, but not just any house, a house on wheels.

“To be able to come out here every day, you know what I’m saying, put work in, it’s a great feeling... graduate high school, be able to tell my kids in 30 years I built a house.”

Not many high school students can say they’ve built a house, but these South Side High School students are building a solar powered house from scratch.

Welding, automotive, and carpentry students are coming together to build a mobile home.

Thanks to a grant from the Department of Innovation, the students are learning skills they believe will help them for the rest of their lives.

“We worked anywhere from working with wood, working with plumbing, working with wiring, like how I was talking about our welding shop, we take a piece to them and they’ll weld it for us, bring it back, we’ll install it, that sort of thing. And eventually we’re going to start putting in appliances too so that’s something even when we get older and we get new appliances for our houses and stuff, we’ll know how to put that kind of stuff in, like a dishwasher, fridge, and stuff like that… so we won’t have to call on somebody to do it we’ll know how to do it ourselves.”

When the mobile house is completed, the house will be auctioned off, and the funds will go back to the school for the students to begin their next project: a home built from a truck storage container.

The students express a special thank you to their teacher, Bob Gordon, for the life skills he has taught them.

“He’s taught us pretty much how to do everything here, you know a lot of that stuff, the skills he’s teaching us, we’ll be able to carry that on maybe pass it on to our kids one day, and stuff like that.”

The students are working hard to finish the self-sufficient mobile home by the end of the year.