Posted on Dec 29, 2022

Dozens of area high school students took part in a unique kind of competition today, which could turn into a building block for a career.

The Regional Masonry Showcase allows students to get hands-on experience with bricks and mortar.

"You get a bunch of high schoolers competing against each other, it's going to be successful," says Emiliano Aguilar, a junior at Medina Valley High School.

He got his hands dirty today, and loved every minute of it.

"This really is an interesting thing to do for me," he says.

Making it fun to learn a trade in the construction business is a new strategy.

"Rather than giving them a presentation about masonry, lets put a brick and trowel in their hand and see if they like it," says Tony Topping, executive director of the Texas Masonry Council.

Victoria Garcia, a junior from Harlingen, certainly does.

"The more I did, the more I started to like it," she says.

While most of the students working with bricks and mortar today were men, more women are finding their way into construction.

"I like to prove people wrong, and prove that girls can do things that guys can do too," she says.

It's not just masonry either. There are jobs available across the construction trade industry here, more than 20,000 added in the last three years. Click here for more information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"There's a lot of trades out there, whether its electrical, mechanical, masonry, there's a need across the board," says Derrick Stone, president of the San Antonio Masonry Contractors Association.

"A lot of these young guys, girls, can find plenty of work out there."

The effort to attract younger workers is an attempt to bring the average age of workers in the industry down from what experts estimate is the late 40s.

"We realize that over the past few years we haven't done the best job of reaching out to this younger generation," Stone says.

The jobs pay well too, starting at $15 an hour and reaching as high as $24 to $30 an hour once the students have gained experience.

They also can start in a hurry.

"They can graduate and be on the job site in the next week," Topping says.

School districts across the area, like Northside ISD, are expanding their Career Tech Education programs to help non-college bound students go directly into the work force. Approximately 35,000 students in the district take at least one CTE course, representing a third of the district's total enrollment.

"We believe that exposing kids to industry, real world experiences, whether they are going into a career that's going to require college or not, is an absolute must," says Deborah Ruel-Schaefer, NISD's CTE director.

"We are so fortunate that education and business work together to create this great partnership so it is an expectation that kids have experiences now. Partnerships and experiences are happening with intentionality where that didn't happen before.

Click here to check the original article