Venice High’s Auto Engineering program just got a big upgrade.

The program, which has been back up and running for two years now, has just begun using Auto Engineering teacher Kevin Brockway’s 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air since the first week of the semester.

“Instead of just a picture or a word, students can now physically see what’s going on in a car,” he said.

Even though this is an incredible improvement, Venice is still working towards rebuilding the program to fit the professional expectations of today’s auto industry.

There’s been a long-standing history of the Auto Engineering course at Venice, but the course has only recently returned to campus.

Renovations for a new Auto Engineering workshop in the Shop building ended in 2021, but the course didn’t immediately start back up again.

Instead, the classroom was being used as the Sports Medicine facility until construction on the gym had completed.

Venice High then hired an Auto Engineering teacher and began filling up the classroom slots, but the Auto Engineering teacher never actually showed.

Eventually, Brockway, Venice’s baseball coach who has years worth of hands-on experience working on cars, stepped up to the challenge of taking on the program.

“We were really lost,” said principal Yavonka Hairston-Truitt. “But Mr. Brockway, who’s been a part of this community for years, who’s been a coach for years, who cares about this school, said he’d take this adventure with us and we are very appreciative.”

As of now, Venice is still working towards getting enough funding to the Auto Engineering program.

“Currently, the goal is to get the program on its feet,” said Hairston-Truitt. “We have a facility and we are trying to support funding for it so that the students who really do enjoy it.”

Brockway discussed the previous challenges of running a course without the proper machinery.

“To be honest, it’s been hard to get this thing rolling, because we didn’t have tools at our side,” he said before the car arrived. “But for the most part, the students were still staying engaged with the knowledge they gained through paper.”

Students in the class have now been applying what they’ve learned over the course of the year to a visual model.

However, students are still not able to run scenarios with the car. For example: even though students can point out parts of the car that relate to making oil changes, they still can’t perform an actual oil change to the car.

Senior Adrian Campbell said that having a physical car in the workshop is helping kids become more involved in the class.

“It makes me personally excited for the future,” said Campbell. “Hopefully, the class is going to be oriented towards rebuilding cars, analyzing the functions, and featuring different opportunities to work on more types of vehicles.”

According to Hairston-Truitt, Venice High is currently working towards connecting the Auto Engineering program with the Career Technical Education (CTE) department so that Brockway will be eligible to apply for grants.

Additionally, Venice is working on connecting Brockway with a mentor to help come up with more curriculum for the course, she said.

Hairston-Truitt is optimistic about the future of the Auto Engineering program at Venice.

“We have the blueprint to become one of the best high school auto engineering programs,” Hairston-Truitt said. “We are continuing to do the hard work to get ourselves there.”