Episode 77: Superintendent Joins South Valley Student in the Shop Framing Pictures and Engraving Rolling Pins

Anthony Godfrey:
Welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. Valuable hands-on learning is leading to success for students at the South Valley School in West Jordan. On this episode of the Supercast, find out how middle and high school, Special Education students, as well as South Valley students are getting early work opportunities in a school-based shop, focused on engraving, everything from footballs and rolling pins and key chains. It's also a place where students provide framing work for the public. Let's start by heading into the shop with a student intern where I get a little help framing my own cherished pictures and mementos from the past. and get perhaps a little too close to the framing cutter.

Dallen Nelson:
My name is Dallen Nelson. I intern here at the engraving shop.

Anthony Godfrey:
And Dallen, you're not just an intern here. You're a student here as well, correct?

Dallen Nelson:
Correct. I am in the Program for Life Design.

Anthony Godfrey:
And tell me about Life Design.

Dallen Nelson:
It's a program where people like me can get a better chance out there in the world.

Anthony Godfrey:
I'd say you have a great chance after talking with you.

Dallen Nelson:
Thank you, sir.

Anthony Godfrey:
And what does interning at the engraving shop mean?

Dallen Nelson:
I help around with any orders that might come through, be it engraving, laser, cutting.

Anthony Godfrey:
What are some of the machines that you work on? And tell me a little bit about some of the things that you do.

Dallen Nelson:
Over there we have have some of the laser machines. These two are the mainly the machines we work with, for the most part.  The rotary and the laser.

Anthony Godfrey:
And what types of material can you engrave on in here?

Dallen Nelson:
We can engrave on metal, plastic and glass.

Anthony Godfrey:
That's kryptonite work in the machine or no?

Dallen Nelson:
Sure.

Anthony Godfrey:
Okay. Yeah, it probably could actually. It looks like a pretty sturdy machine. It looks like we have a whole cart full of footballs that you've been customizing. Tell me about that.

Dallen Nelson:
So these are the game balls that we engrave and give back to the players as they're reward, trophy pretty much.

Anthony Godfrey:
And who has ordered these?

Dallen Nelson:
Grantsville.

Anthony Godfrey:
So from how far away do you take orders? This is pretty exciting.

Dallen Nelson:
From my time here, we have taken a few orders from quite far over the area.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah. Grantsville, that's pretty impressive.

Dallen Nelson:
This is a result of both the laser and the rotary.

Anthony Godfrey:
So the laser, you did these are name tags? It looks like for some sergeants and detectives.

Dallen Nelson:
Yes.

Anthony Godfrey:
And you said that you use the rotary and the engraver for this. What are those two machines?

Dallen:
This was used to etch the image that you see on the nameplates.

Anthony Godfrey:
Oh, so the images are done separate from the letter?

Dallen:
Yes.

Anthony:
And is it the rotary that is not capable of doing pictures?

Dallen:
Yes:

Anthony Godfrey:
I see. So the rotary does the does the letters?

Dallen Nelson:
Yes. And the engraver does the photos.

Anthony Godfrey:
What are some of the other projects you've been engraving?

Dallen:
Footballs, glass, plastic, wood. We have some rolling pins for Nutrition Services.

Anthony Godfrey:
So you can engrave just about anything.

Dallen Nelson:
Pretty much.

Anthony Godfrey:
That's impressive. So does it comes with a little holder too? Is that from South Valley?

Dallen Nelson:
Yes. These were machined here in the woodshop, just next door.

Anthony Godfrey:
And so does this take longer than doing plastic? Is wood more difficult to engrave?

Dallen Nelson:
Sometimes it can be.  Sometimes types of wood burn differently than others.

Anthony Godfrey:
How did you get the opportunity to be an intern here at South Valley?

Dallen Nelson:
One of my main goals is to be in graphic design later on, and this is a pretty big step, although I still may carry this work with me to the future.

Anthony Godfrey:
Did you have to qualify to be in this position?

Dallen Nelson:
I did receive some qualifications for this in the past.

Anthony Godfrey:
Okay, great. Well, congratulations on getting the spot and based on what I see already with footballs and rolling pins and such, you've got a great future.

Dallen Nelson:
So this is what we use mainly to make some name tags. Some magnetics like traditional clips.

Anthony Godfrey:
I got to tell you, my mind is racing with all of the name tags I can have you make for me to set on my desk to see if people are paying attention.

So the cutter, tell me about the cutter.

Dallen Nelson:
This is used in conjunction with the vacuum.

Anthony Godfrey:
Let's fire it up. All right. So there's the vacuum pull off, whatever you're cutting around? That's pretty loud. Okay. So what do you track along here?

Dallen Nelson:
We also use this to cut that stuff that would be engraved in the future.

Anthony Godfrey:
What are your plans? Do you like this type of work? Is this something that you can see yourself doing long term?

Dallen Nelson:
Definitely.

Anthony Godfrey:
And what do you enjoy about it?

Dallen Nelson:
I like to imagine the happy thoughts of the people receiving the awards. When the rest might just like light up.

Anthony Godfrey:
Well, great. Now thanks for giving me a tour. It's a thrill to meet you and congratulations on the great work you're doing here.

Dallen Nelson:
Thank you for having me on your show, sir.

Anthony Godfrey:
You bet. We're here with the South Valley School Principal, Rita Bouillion. Rita, thanks for taking time with us this afternoon.

Rita:
It was our pleasure.  We're glad to have you.

Anthony Godfrey:
For those who may not be familiar with South Valley, can you just describe what you're about and what goes on here?

Rita:
Yes, we have students from all over Jordan School District. They come from all of the high schools and our job is to help them transition into adulthood. So when they're finished with their high school, if they haven't received their diploma, they come to us. For some students, we help them achieve their diploma, but for all students, we help them achieve independence. And we connect them with the community through jobs, through community-based activities, where we go to the grocery stores in their area, or we go bowling in their area. So ways that they learn to access the community so that they'll continue to do that when they are completely finished with school.

Anthony Godfrey:
I know one of the classes is Life Design. Tell me about the Life Design class.

Rita:
So we have a unique cooperation with Jordan Applied Tech Center, the North campus. We have two classrooms there, and those are design classrooms. All of the students that are there are getting jobs, getting their diploma and working towards using UTA independently for their transportation. And for those students, it just feels more special to them because they're on a college campus. So they liked the fact that they're at SLCC. For some students, it's hard to transition from high school and then continue school here. But those students are really pleased to be able to say, we're at the SLCC campus. You know, we go to school at SLCC.

Anthony Godfrey:
One thing I love about South Valley School is just the resources that are brought together and the number of different plans that can be developed based on the student's individual needs.

Rita:
All of our students have an IEP. We individualize their educational plan just for them. So we include developing resumes, learning UTA, if it's possible. We also have students who are getting their Driver License. We have students who come for six months and just finalize their diploma. Or we have students that come for four or five years to get all of the things that they need in order to transition successfully into the community. When I first started here, the thing that struck me the most was after coming from a huge high school where they were just one little piece of that school community, they come here and everywhere they look, there's a friend, a potential friend. So the friendships and relationships that develop here between among the students is really something to experience.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah, it's only one of the things that makes South Valley such a great place. And you offer a lot of services to the public. We're going to talk about those in future Supercast episodes and can you outline some of those for me.

Rita:
We have a wood shop here. And the students that work in the wood shop are middle school and high school students from throughout the District that are also in Special Ed Programs. When they come here, they learn one important thing. They learn pre-employment skills. They learn to be on time for a job, how to dress appropriately, the safety things that are required for any job, how to respond to your boss, but they get to do it in a wood shop atmosphere. They get to take projects home. They take pride in building, for example, new tables for South Jordan Middle. And when they finished that project, our bus took the kids to South Jordan, Middle. The truck delivered the tables there and the students were able to take the things that they had just made into the school and set them up. It was awesome.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah. That's a sense of accomplishment that many of us don't get in a normal workday.

Rita:
And then those kids who would go to school there, they get to go back and see that every day and can say, I helped build that. I made those table legs. You know, that's exciting.

Anthony Godfrey:
What are some of the other services offered to the public?

Rita:
This year, because of COVID, we haven't been able to have our students go out into the community and to do job experiences as intensely as we have in the past. So some of our teachers have gotten creative about developing an enterprise here within the school. One of our classes makes pins. We sent you some that kind of helped you deal with wearing a mask, you know, so they will customize any size, shape, or design that you want. We're going to have a new administrator. Two are here in a few weeks and they're making administrator buttons for us to give to those new administrators.

Anthony Godfrey:
Very cool. Yes. This is one of the places we love to take new administrators to show it off, which gets me to why I'm here. Let's get some framing going, shall we?

Stay with us? When we come back, we'll hear more about the skills students are learning and find out how the public can access South Valley School's, engraving and framing services.

Break:
If you're ready to start your child on the path to personalized learning, we are ready to help. The Jordan Virtual Learning Academy is coming to Jordan School District in the 2021-22 school year. Three new schools will be opening as part of the Academy, Rocky Peak Virtual Elementary School, Kelsey Peak Virtual Middle School and Kings Peak High School. Each school will have their own principal and teachers and each will give students a choice in their own learning. The schools will offer synchronous learning, which is teachers providing real time, live online instruction and asynchronous learning, where teachers provide videotaped instruction for learning on a student's schedule. To register your student in the Jordan Virtual Learning Academy, visit http://connect.jordandistrict.org.

Anthony Godfrey:
We're going to switch to framing and it's time to meet the framing team. Let's have them introduce themselves.

Vicky:
Vicky Thomas. And I've been back in this room since 2009.

Anthony Godfrey:
And what did you do before that?

Vicky:
I was in a classroom.

Anthony Godfrey:
Okay.

Peggy:
Peggy Beuchert. And I just help out when they need me down here.

Anthony Godfrey:
All right. Well, it's great to have both of you and your keen eye and talent helped me with this next framing job, but I thought I'd bring a couple of greatest things that Vicky and Peggy helped frame for me. We have them all wrapped in bubble wrap. I love that you guys framed them for me before. Let's take a look here. I want to remind you of some of your handiwork from years gone by. This one is actually from Comic-Con in San Diego, and this is years ago before they charged you to meet individual stars. I don't know if you remember this when you've done a lot of pieces since then. But this is my Lord of the Rings piece with the Lord of the Rings mini promo poster. And then there's a picture of me with Elijah Wood and another random hobbit, and then the autographs from Elijah Wood and another one of the hobbits and some pictures of me leaning in at the table where I wasn't supposed to get a photo with them, but snuck one in anyway at the autograph table. And you guys did such a nice job. This frame, the mat is really, it just ties in very nicely with the poster. And you put this border in there. What's that border called when you put something like that in there, fill it, makes it look kind of old worldly. And this other one, we'll cut this one open too. I'm quite proud of this Lord of the Rings thing.

I sat in the Convention Hall in San Diego for a long time to get their autographs. It was before you paid for individual autographs, you just had to want it worse than everyone else and be willing to wait long enough. And that was me. So it's really nice to have these memories preserved instead of in a shoe box.

I just love having them framed so nicely. And I'm doing this podcast out of enthusiasm, personally, and I hope people just realize what a great resource we have here. Their stuff can get framed and look better than if they took it anywhere else. All right. The one I'm I'm going to reveal now that we pop out is actually something I didn't buy yo have frame. I actually saved the box tops for them. I saved proofs of purchase from a now defunct cereal. I can't even remember what cereal it was, but there were always involved "o's". It was my free Rocky Balboa poster. Actually my Rocky II poster.

Anthony Godfrey:
It's a little tattered, but so's Rocky. He's been through a little bit and you just mounted it so nicely. It kind of preserves the little curls and rips and tears. Preserved the oldness of it. It's absolutely beautiful.

You helped me pick out this weathered frame that goes with the weather dude on the weathered poster. I just love this. It was 1979. I was 10 years old, had this hanging on my wall and it's just a really fun way to preserve it. So it hangs up in our TV room and it's just another example of the great work that you guys do here framing.

So we have brought more for you and these are actually for my son. I framed for me first and then my son's second as well it should be.

Vicky:
That's right.

Anthony Godfrey:

So this is a picture of me and my sons with Mark Hamill, a Star Wars fan, Luke Skywalker. And when I posted it on social media, I said, Luke, I am their father.

Vicky:
That's too funny.

Anthony Godfrey:
So we have Luke and Yoda and just kind of a smaller poster size, and then an 8 x 10 photo of the four of us, my son with his lightsaber. And then this was an autograph that Mark Hamill actually just handed to my son as a bonus, out of his back pocket. So shall we take a look and see what frames and that's you guys recommend?

Vicky:
It was recommend for this one. Let's start with the mats. You got some blues in there and do you want a double matte or just single matte?

Anthony Godfrey:
What do you think?

Vicky:
Well, that other one, we did kind of the stand out with the fill it. So I think double matted would be nice.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah, let's do a double. I think it should be double knotted.

Anthony Godfrey:
Okay. Let's double that. So we just take a corner out now. When you pull these colors, what are you looking for?

Vicky:
Well, I don't know. We just tried to look for something that we think is going to go with the picture.

Anthony Godfrey:
You just kind of use The Force.

Vicky:
We do use The Force back here a lot.

Anthony Godfrey:
Okay. The purple kind of looks cool, actually.

Vicky:
Yeah. That's what the dark blue matte where we could do a black matte under the purple. It evokes space. You know, I think that l with the black and I think it looks better than the dark blue.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah. The black, and where does that fill, a lavender?

Vicky:
Let's see, that's what they call purple haze.

Anthony Godfrey:
Purple haze. I wondered why it was all in my brain.

Vicky:
So we'll do the black mat on the bottom, a quarter inch. And then the top matte would be the purple haze.

Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah. There is some black in there.

Vicky:
And the black just makes everything stand out.

Anthony Godfrey:
I don't know how it, but you pull these colors and it's exactly the colors that need to be around that picture and this set of pictures. It works for every picture on there. That's why I keep coming back. I really want people to know about the services that are available at South Valley. So why don't you tell us the services you're responsible for and how everyone can access those?

Vicky:
I do the engraving part and we service people from districts from North San Pete County. We do Ogden, Logan, Canyons District, Jordan School District. I think we've done a name tags for every state in the United States. We've done Hawaii to California, to New York. Utah's probably the fewest we've done.

Anthony Godfrey:
Wow. Well, the name South Valley has spread far and wide. And the framing, tell us about the framing services.

Vicky:
We do framing. Right now we have jobs from several people that are outside the District. We do a lot of in-district framing and probably on the framing part, we do as much outside the district that we do inside and we are better than anybody else in the valley. We have a great framing team.

Anthony Godfrey:
I can attest to that for sure. And the prices are the best part. So tell people how to get ahold of you.

Vicky:
Well, they can call the school or they can email vicky.thomas@jordandistrict.org, or they can call South Valley school and get our email through there and make an appointment. We're very flexible.

Anthony Godfrey:
Well, you don't know it yet, but I have a strange project coming your way. Next time I visit, I asked every school to send me one of their custom masks from the pandemic. So any school that had a custom mask, I've collected those, I have a whole drawer full of them. And what I really want to do is frame a huge display so that we can walk by it and either shutter for a while, while we think about everything we've been through, or also memorialize everything that we've been through, and we can see that down the line.

Vicky:
Well, I think that sounds like a great fun job. Now it's still shutter, but in the future, we'll able to be more normal.

Anthony Godfrey:
That's right. That's the hope. And I'd like us to frame that into a big display so we can walk by and shutter for the first few years. And later on, reflect back on everything we accomplished and overcame.

A big thanks to everyone at the South Valley School who joined us on the Supercast today. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Remember, education is the most important thing you will do today. We'll see you out there.