COLUMN | Federal Way Students Build Their Futures by Trying the Trades

The buzz saws are already singing when you enter. The harsh metallic hymn of wood giving way and the sound of raw material surrendering itself to human intent is palpable. This is the song of something being made the old-fashioned way — the music of labor and creation that no algorithm can replicate and no touch screen can fully imitate. Here inside Federal Way High School, in a city too often treated as an afterthought to the gleaming tech campuses and glass towers just north of it, a group of seniors craft tiny homes with their own hands.

Watching these teenagers raise walls in an era supposedly ruled by apps, automation, and artificial intelligence, it's difficult not to ask a larger question: What if the future of work in America is not being coded in a South Lake Union skyscraper, but framed with a nail gun inside a high school shop class in South King County?

This is the fifth year of Federal Way High School's Pre-Apprenticeship Program, founded in 2021 by alumnus and former State Rep. Jesse Johnson. These days, the program is beginning to look less like a vocational elective, and more like a blueprint for what education in this country could actually be.

In recent months, tech companies across the country have announced wave after wave of layoffs. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, recently cut roughly 5% of its workforce. The average student borrower takes on roughly $30,000 in debt pursuing a four-year degree.

Meanwhile, blue-collar industries long dismissed as fallback options are facing labor shortages so severe they are actively searching for young workers. The trades, it turns out, never disappeared. We simply stopped looking at them.

Johnson, who grew up watching his father support their family through the trades, understood this long before the headlines caught up. "Kids deserve to see the full menu of options for a career," he said. "When they're weighing decisions about their future, we shouldn't omit anything." The program he built reflects that conviction.

The trades industry itself desperately needs programs like this. Marianna Hyke of the Western States Regional Council of Carpenters describes a workforce aging out faster than it can be replaced, with entry historically dependent on who you knew. She calls it the FBI: fathers, brothers, in-laws.

Programs like Federal Way High School's attempt to democratize that access.

Hyke holds a bachelor's degree in nursing, yet ultimately found greater financial stability in the trades. "Coming in as a first bracket apprentice, you're making almost $40 an hour plus medical, dental, vision, and a pension," she said. "By the time you journey out, you're making well over six figures." On the question of AI displacing workers, she is direct: "AI is not going to build the building."

Megan Coffland, a project executive at BNBuilders and a program partner, puts the stakes plainly. "If we depend on familial relationships, we won't have a workforce in 10 years. Programs like this expose students to construction who wouldn't otherwise get exposed." Her company is now working to formalize a pipeline of summer employment for graduates, with wraparound support and sponsored apprenticeships for students who choose it.

Instructor Larry DuFresne describes Federal Way's program as a place where students are seen across extended time (four and a half hours every other day) and where what they build with their hands begins to clarify who they might become. It now has a waiting list. Only seven school districts across Washington State currently offer something similar.

The four seniors I met on a late April morning were not waiting to be handed a future. They were constructing one.

Devin Cash came in on the recommendation of his older cousin Trey, who had been through the program the year prior. "I was like, why not just give it a try," he said, with the ease of someone who already knows how the story ends. "I'll do one year, if I like it, I'll do the second year. And I loved it."

Eduardo Campos arrived without much English and found in the program something no standardized test had been able to give him: a sense of proficiency, and people willing to meet him where he was. "Mr. DuFresne is always gonna try to help you out," he said. "It's good for people who maybe don't know English or don't know what they want to do after graduating."

Kevin Ramsey, a football player headed to Montana Technological University on a construction management path, described something quieter than bravado: the confidence that comes from seeing a future materialize where previously there had only been fog.

"Beforehand, I wasn't sure if I would be able to meet the qualifications just in a day-to-day work sense," he said. "But after taking this, I have a lot more confidence in how I interact with people and how I move in a workspace."

And Josiah Piñon, who knew since freshman year that college was not his road, described the program with a phrase that cuts straight to the marrow: "I created a whole brotherhood and sisterhood with all the people in this class."

He has a plan now: flagging, then the electrical apprenticeship, then journeyman. Before, he said, "I had no idea. Working at McDonald's for the rest of my life to find something to do."

This is what the withholding of options costs a young person: the narrowing of the imagination, the foreclosure of futures that were always there, just never named.

"There's a roof over our head now," Piñon said, gesturing at the tiny homes students are constructing for the Low Income Housing Institute. "Just seeing that we did this."

None of this is an argument against college. Several students in the program still plan to pursue higher education. Johnson himself is a University of Washington graduate. This is about rejecting a culture that too often confuses working with your hands for lack of intellect instead of another form of mastery entirely.

Some early graduates from the inaugural cohort are already earning $70,000 starting wages, without a dollar of college debt. The program has been adapted by Tacoma Public Schools and Spokane. There are plans to expand within Federal Way to Thomas Jefferson and Decatur, adding electrical, automotive, and welding pathways.

These young people are not settling. They are choosing, with full knowledge and agency, their selected path. And what they are landing on is not simply workforce development or economic mobility, but the dignity of discovering they are capable of building something sturdy in a world that increasingly feels unstable.

Marcus Harrison Green is the founder of the South Seattle Emerald.