Mike Schloff founded Maplewoodshop in 2016 to help all children develop life skills through woodworking with hand tools. Mike has been woodworking since 2004 when he moved into his first home and needed to tackle repairs. He invented the workstation that Maplewoodshop uses after building several generations of woodworking tables and fixtures for teaching children and adults. He is a lifelong tinkerer and still teaches locally to try out new lesson plans.
In recent years, school districts have made a stronger push to gauge student interest in trade careers, extolling the virtues of the region’s technical schools and the wide-open job market for skilled laborers. In Pennsylvania, one cyber charter school is looking to add some of those elements to its curriculum.
We were brought in by the carpenters’ union to help Reach develop the program. And they’re doing it in a geographically dispersed way, which opens the door for them to serve as a supplier to other schools.