SOUTH SIOUX CITY, Neb. (AP) - Three South Sioux City High School students didn’t dog it in their school-to-work class this past quarter.
As a result, dogs will be able to get a workout at South Sioux City’s dog park for years to come.
At the city’s request, the three students of career and technical education teacher Todd Arens completed obstacles that will be installed later this spring in the park, which currently has no features other than a covered shelter and a couple picnic tables and benches for dog owners, the Sioux City Journal (https://bit.ly/2mVFrF2 ) reported.
“I thought it was pretty cool. They had nothing over there. We’re just giving back to the community,” sophomore Christian Sun said.
Sun, senior Elias Cruz and freshman Keegan Robinson used their construction skills to build a ramp, tunnel, ring jump and a series of jumping obstacles for the park, located at Siouxland Freedom Park at Riverview Drive and Foundry Road.
“Years down the road they can drive past the dog park and say ’I had something to do with that,’” Arens said.
South Sioux City parks director Gene Maffit said the city has hosted several dog shows in recent years and has made its ball fields available for contestants to exercise their dogs and practice running through portable obstacle courses.
“With that in mind, we began thinking the dog park would be a good place for an obstacle course,” Maffit said.
In past years, students at the school’s Gateway to Learning center, an alternative setting to high school, have done community service projects such as planting trees. One class also built picnic tables for the city’s parks. This spring, they’ll be making name plates to identify trees at the city’s Community Orchard.
Maffit called assistant principal Tom Luxford about the possibility of the GTL students doing another project.
“He said would your kids be interested in doing something like this, and I said absolutely,” Luxford said. “We always like to pay forward or pay back to our city.”
In January, Arens presented the project to his class. They did some research online and sorted through brochures to get ideas for the types of obstacles they’d like to build.
“We just found ones we liked and went with them,” Arens said.
Arens and Maffit utilized some old city equipment - a piece of a playground slide, a stainless steel railing from a diving board, a piece of culvert and some old lightposts - plus some old cedar siding Arens had at his home. The students brought those old items to life as they designed and built the obstacles before painting them in bright colors.
“I thought it was pretty cool,” Robinson said of the project.
So cool, Cruz said, that he might take his own dog to the park to try out the obstacles. It would be a way to further enjoy what he knew would be a good project when it was presented to the class.
“I thought it was going to be a good experience,” he said.
It won’t be the only experience the class has with the dog park. This quarter, students will be building benches for the park.
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Information from: Sioux City Journal, https://www.siouxcityjournal.com
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