HARVEST, AL - Forget textbooks. What a class of Sparkman High School students needed on a recent afternoon was a wood plank and a pencil.

The students in the school's new Construction Science Academy were tracing patterns for a birdhouse and cutting wood on a radial-arm miter saw.

"Move your hands back six inches from that blade," said Matt Oldacre, pulling out a tape measure to show the correct distance to a student getting ready to operate the saw.

Oldacre, the instructor in the architecture, structure and manufacturing class at Sparkman, knows a thing or two about saws, wood and everything else related to the construction business. He has worked in the field for more than 20 years, beginning with summer jobs while he was still in high school.

"I learned hands on, in the field," said Oldacre, while keeping a close eye on his students at the saw. "It would have been nice for someone to teach me a little of what's going on."

Over the years, he's worked with many kids right out of high school who have no training and have to be taught on the job. Safety is always an issue with unskilled workers, said Oldacre, who has seen more traumatic injuries "than I want to talk about."

Giving students real-world skills is a goal at Sparkman, which now has programs in health care, business and engineering. Plans are in the works to add a mass media and a teacher academy, said Manuel Wallace, Sparkman's principal.

"It's learning by doing," Wallace said.

By offering "personalized education," the school is trying to help students know what they want to pursue whether they go on to college or directly into the work force after high school, he said.

The construction classes also come at the request of the Committee of 100 group of business leaders and the Huntsville/Madison County Builder's Association. The two groups sponsored a trip last spring to show local educators a construction academy at East Ridge High School in Chattanooga.

Those on the trip learned that the four "job vacuums" in the Huntsville area are health care, manufacturing, construction and culinary arts, said Gayle Owen, the instructional assistant principal at Sparkman.

Owen also learned that the key to the success of the program was to hire someone with real experience in the field to teach it.

"He needed to know what it's going to be like on a job site, what math skills are needed," as well as the "soft skills, politeness, responsibility, punctuality," Owen said. "That's what gets them a job tomorrow no matter what the job is."

The school didn't attempt to recruit students for the first class in the program and still had 60 students sign up. The goal is to add masonry, heating and cooling, plumbing and electrical courses as the program grows to include four years of curriculum, Owen said.

"This teaches them a skill, and there's money out there for scholarship," Oldacre said. Several community colleges offer associate's degrees in construction science, and Auburn University has a building science program.

"We're trying to explain to the kids that construction isn't just driving nails and sweating and digging footings," Oldacre said.

Even architects need to understand basic construction to make their designs work, he said.

The students who are taking the first class in the construction program range from Chris Dickson, who has grown up helping his grandfather, a general contractor, build everything from church pews to houses, to Heather Fields, who is interested in becoming an architect.

Her dad "is in love with this," said Heather, who sees herself helping out with home projects more with the skills she's learning in the program.

Even if she doesn't pursue architecture," this is useful to know," she said. "It makes you a well-rounded person."