Kingwood takes part in tiny home project
After working since August, construction students at Kingwood High School recently finished building their first tiny home, which will soon house a homeless veteran.
The accomplishment held a personal significance for Kingwood teacher Shellie Dick, whose father served in the military.
“That makes me so happy. My dad, who fought for this country, is my GI Joe and I’m so proud of him,” he said.
This was the first tiny home project undertaken at Kingwood High, but not the first in Humble ISD.
The Big Heroes, Tiny Homes program launched in 2017 at Summer Creek High School and expanded to Kingwood Park. Humble and Kingwood high schools joined the game this past school year. Atascocita High plans to adopt the program the school year after next.
Al Segura, assistant principal at Summer Creek, is the visionary who saw the program, explored it, and presented it to James Gaylord who teaches construction management at the school.
Gaylord saw it as a great opportunity for his students to apply the principles they were learning in the classroom to a real-world project.
Segura, who retired this year, led the program for the entire district and hopes it will continue long after he’s gone. When instructors asked students what the program meant to them, he said, “the recurring theme was serving other people.”
“They’ve learned to serve others and have an empathy and appreciation for the veterans who served our country,” he said.
After watching how the program worked and helping with a tiny home project at Summer Creek, Dick decided it was time for his construction classes at Kingwood to get off the sidelines and build their own tiny home for a homeless veteran.
Dick has taught construction trades at Kingwood for 13 years, including carpentry, plumbing, and electrical type work.
When Gaylord started the first year of the program at Summer Creek in 2017, Dick and his students were sharing the campus with them after Kingwood High was flooded by Hurricane Harvey.
“I didn’t have a classroom, I couldn’t use a lot of our construction things on the campus, it was a challenging time for us,” Dick said.
When Dick and his students returned to Kingwood, he was still overwhelmed with the Harvey fallout, and then the pandemic. But once it settled down, he jumped on board with the program.
Dick and his students immediately went into fundraising mode since the program is not funded by the district.
“We had so many businessminded people who bought into our program we were blessed and able to get the funding together,” he said. He was also grateful for parents and other community members who helped make it happen.
“We were so blessed to have the help of (Missi) Taylor and her students at (Kingwood) Park who came in with our students and helped spearhead the first year with them,” he said.
“They made our kids feel so comfortable and that they could accomplish anything. The peerto-peer support was phenomenal.”
The first year was a learning experience for both Dick and the students.
“I was learning right beside them on things I didn’t know,” he said.
At first it was slow going as they figured out an efficient process, but the finished product was impressive.
“It just turned out amazing because it was student-based driven,” he said. “We kept saying, this is not a sprint but a marathon.”
Dick said even though they have a long way to go following Summer Creek and Kingwood Park, he’s more committed than ever.
“I know we must step it up, and I don’t mean that in a negative way, but as a positive firestarter. We had to begin somewhere, and we appreciate their help,” Dick said.
The tiny home is set to be delivered to a community site in Liberty this week.