If you want to break the ice with a bunch of high school kids, a Nissan GT-R Nismo is a good way to go. Two minutes after I roll into the parking lot at Freedom High (about a half hour from Green Bay, Wisconsin), a tall, ruddy kid named Cole Woods walks up to introduce himself, his eyes on the car. The Nismo isn't completely out of context, since this is the Freedom Auto Club's annual end-of-the-year car show, an event where the kids showcase their projects and the local horsepower fiends show up en masse to clear the carbon out of whatever high-strung machinery's been slumbering in the garage over the long Wisconsin winter. Adjacent to the low, brick high school is a lot filled with Chevelles and Mustangs, circle-track race cars, and rat rods. Here a $151,000 Japanese hypercar raises some eyebrows. I figured a little Nismo show-and-tell would be a worthy way to salute the auto club, which we've been following in these pages for the past eight months as they've restored two of the cars on display here today—Woods's leviathan Oldsmobile and automotive instructor Jay Abitz's 1981 Camaro Z/28.

Abitz founded the auto club in 2009 after realizing that he effectively ran an after-school extracurricular program fixing up cars. "I always had these kids working on their cars after school or at lunch, and I thought we should give this a name and make it official," Abitz says. The program's been a major success, with students learning skills that either propel them into the automotive business or just render them more mechanically competent citizens of the world. Welding, bodywork, brake jobs—this is all stuff I would've loved to have learned in high school. Freedom High even has its own paint booth, always in demand but even more so now after the coverage from a certain major magazine. "A guy called me and asked if we could paint his classic Porsche," Abitz says. The answer was no. We're not doing Pebble Beach cars here, buddy.

Woods, a junior, shows me over to his uncle's 1974 Oldsmobile Delta 88 convertible, a car that he himself painted in the booth. It must've taken a lot of paint, because this thing is a barge. "For my first time painting a car, I think it turned out wonderful," Woods says. "There are some tiger stripes where I sprayed it too thick, but it's okay. I'm gonna drive it."

Abitz's dad, Bob, got the paint booth installed in 1972, when he began teaching automotive classes at Freedom. Back then there were lots of high schools with paint booths. Now Freedom's paint shop is an outlier, and not for the usual budgetary reasons that always pertain to school infrastructure. "Nobody around here's painting cars anymore because nobody can teach it," Abitz says. "When the guys from the '70s and '80s retired, nobody stepped up to take their place. It's a strange job, because if you want to go work at a body shop, you don't want to go to college for four or five years to get a teaching degree. And vice versa."

From looking around Freedom High's parking lot on this overcast Saturday morning under the big white water tower that says freedom, 22 days before graduation, you can tell Abitz stepped up, and it's working. Students, parents, toddlers, local enthusiasts, teachers, and neighbors walk up and down the rows of gleaming machines, most of which have their hoods up. Volunteers cook burgers and hot dogs under a tent. Next to that, staff from a nearby technical school recruit potential enrollees. The students in the auto club prepare to judge the cars in various categories, and a table holds a row of wooden plaques to be given out as awards—the students made those too.

One particularly menacing 2011 Camaro at the show belongs to Justin Hendrickson, Freedom High class of '99. The auto club didn't exist when Hendrickson went here, when he was surprising locals with a Geo Prizm that he'd built to run 13-second quarter-miles. "I wish there had been something like the auto club when I was here," he says. "I like to come back and support it however I can." Like maybe by rolling in with a Camaro that hides twin turbos under the V-8's exhaust manifolds. The Nismo is officially not the most powerful machine in this high school parking lot.

The auto club isn't just an echo chamber for like-minded car nuts. It attracts kids who might've been indifferent toward cars until they got their license and realized how profoundly a car can change a person's life. "I wasn't into cars at all until this year," says Ryan Lucier, a skinny kid wrapping up his junior year. "I was into skateboarding, and I thought Freedom was kind of boring. But any place will seem lame if your mom has to drive you around. Getting my license made me more excited to be in Freedom. You're out in the country, but you're not far from cities with lots going on."

If, that is, you have a car. Lucier has a Pontiac Grand Prix with a naturally aspirated 3.8-liter V-6. "I wanted a supercharged one, but my parents wouldn't let me," he says. Probably a good move, parents. Not to disparage young Ryan's driving, but I do notice quite a few stripes of rubber in the ol' Freedom parking lot. And the skid marks are activating some latent hormonal lobe in the brain that makes me want to get into the GT-R and rip some righteous donuts out behind the gym, the way my 17-year-old self certainly would've done if armed with 600 horsepower.

Being older, wiser, and 12 percent more mature now than I was then, I take the Nismo off-site before I spool up the GT3-sized race turbos. The kids queue up for rides, and I try to remind myself that I'm the responsible adult and should set a good example. But there may have been a couple of times, in first-gear situations, when I demonstrated the concept of torque vectoring in a way that might have been memorable.

On one ride the shotgun seat is occupied by a serious kid named Cody Walrath, an accomplished wrestler who won first place at the state skills challenge for auto-body repair. He had to fix a dented fender, repair a plastic bumper, and demonstrate his chops at welding, all within four hours. Walrath says he wants to start an auto-restoration business, speaking as if that's a hypothetical. But this is actually the game plan, with his parents helping him set up a business once he graduates. I learn this not from Walrath but from his friend Dan Vosberg, who graduated last year and plans to work at Walrath's shop. "Yeah, that's actually happening," Walrath admits. "I didn't want to seem like I was bragging or something."

While I'm talking with Walrath, he fires up the Buick Grand National that he brought to the car show, and the car promptly coughs off its left valve cover vent, the gasket splitting in two as it falls onto the fender well. Walrath calmly seats the gasket back in the cap, aligning the two halves and screwing it back on. Not a major fix, but one he executed without even thinking about it. If it had been my car, I would've already been on my way to AutoZone by now, hunting for part numbers. This is a guy, I imagine, who will not have much use for roadside-assistance programs.

Nor will the other graduates of the Freedom Auto Club, regardless of whether they ever go pro. And that's a big part of the appeal, one that transcends cars, really—in a different age, we could be talking about shoeing horses or rebuilding cotton gins. The principle is the same: Given the right knowledge and the right equipment, this opaque expertise is within your grasp. Mr. Abitz will hand you a grinder, and you're going to learn how to find metal under that body filler. No way to it but to do it.

"At some point I decided every guy should know how to change his own oil," Lucier, the skater, tells me. "It's calming, working on cars. And then when you're done, you can look at it and say, I did that. I helped create this." Maybe you end up with a few tiger stripes here and there, but you're on your way to something wonderful.

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