LAURENS COUNTY, Ga. — West Laurens High School construction teacher Jeff Johnson and his students are putting the finishing touches on their latest project.
"We built from the bottom up on the boat. We made what they call relief cuts where it makes the wood bend easier, so that it can make it bend more like a boat," sophomore Tucker Burney said.
"We just went through and carefully sanded each of these bent pieces and all of these and burning the wood and making it look like this," junior Cameron Arsenault said.
It's not a boat you can take on the water. That's the design they chose after a district employee asked them to build a serving tray for a country boil they're hosting for their bus drivers.
"We filled up the marker board in the classroom with ideas and we drew and we sketched and we measured and we finally came up with what you see here," Johnson said.
It took the group three weeks to build the boat-shaped serving tray, and they say it turned out better than they expected.
"I'm happy. It came out a lot better than I thought it was going to for something that we were just going into it and not knowing how it was going to work out," Arsenault said.
"I just feel very accomplished that I had the opportunity to build this great boat," Burney said.
Students who worked on the project are in the construction career pathway through the school's Career, Technical, and Agricultural Education program, known as CTAE.
The district is hosting the country boil for the bus drivers in on June 8.