There is a house on Melrose Road in Centralia — white siding, black roof, two bedrooms, two full baths, an open living room, a kitchen, and a detached two-car garage. It sits on a corner lot and backs up to an alleyway. It is approximately 1,300 square feet, listed at around $144,000 through a local realtor who is currently holding open houses. It was designed by a student and built by students. It took two years. And the person who designed the next one is sitting across the hall in architectural drafting class, finishing the bathroom layouts.

Nolan Pryor is a senior who spent the better part of this school year in building trades for three consecutive hours each morning. His class was the finishing crew — the previous year's students had laid the foundation, framed it out, and gotten the structure to the rough-in stage. Nolan's group came in and did everything from there: flooring, siding, cabinets, appliances, bathtubs, sinks, and trim. Plumbing was subcontracted out. Countertops, too — someone came in to set those. Everything else was the students, working under building trades teacher Mr. Tyberendt. They poured concrete, set trusses, hung cabinets, and laid every floor. "People get hesitant about a student-built house," Nolan says. "But it can be student-built and done the right way. It's a great house for anybody."

The proceeds from the sale go directly into funding the next build — a self-sustaining model that keeps the program running without ongoing budget requests. The city donates the lots. The students do the work. The house sells. It starts again.

Mackenzie Perez is the student who designed what comes next. She's a senior who discovered the drafting program in her junior year, starting with Engineering Technology — a class where students use design software to create objects and then fabricate them in metal using plasma cutters. She liked it enough to take Intro to Drafting the following semester, which starts with pencil-and-paper fundamentals before moving to AutoCAD at the end of the term. Her instinct for it showed up quickly: that year, she entered the drafting competition for Introduction to Board Drafting, and placed first in regionals and second in state. "This is what I want to do for the rest of my life," she says.

This year, she takes honors CAD theory, mechanical drafting, and architectural drafting — three periods with Mr. Dinkelman, who has taught these courses for around 15 years. In architectural drafting, the standard second-semester assignment is to design your own house in Revit, a professional 3D building design software. Every few years, one student in the class gets selected to design the actual building trades house instead. This year, that student was Mackenzie. Mr. Tyberendt gave her the parameters: a 30-by-48-foot house with a 30-by-30-foot attached garage. She found the proposed lot on Google Maps, pulled it up on Revit, and started with the foundation — downloading the specific block file for the foundation type the crew planned to use, modeling it out, and delivering the design.

Then the lot fell through. The city had initially approved the layout, but when the building trades class staked the site and were two days out from digging the footings, a resurvey revealed that the approved dimensions had been based on two city lots — and the school only had one. The footprint was too large for the actual parcel. Work stopped. The school is now waiting for a new lot. Mackenzie's design is on hold but not scrapped. The rooms are laid out. She's working on the bathrooms. The kitchen cabinet designs are nearly done. The house exists in the computer, waiting for the right piece of ground.

The previous house — the one on Melrose Road — was designed by a student named Cameron Tomlianovich, whose floor plan Mackenzie's work resembles: similar footprint, similar layout, another two-bedroom starter home built for someone just finding their way. When Nolan's friends asked why he had building trades for three hours a day, he told them he was building a house. They didn't believe him at first. He understood why. "Nobody around here does that," he says.

After graduation, Nolan is entering a heavy equipment operator apprenticeship through the union — the direct trade path the program was built to support. Mackenzie is going to Kaskaskia College to play tennis before transferring to the University of Illinois to major in civil engineering with a specialization in structural engineering. Using her problem-solving skills, love for drafting, and her desire to make the world a safer place, she will help design homes for people. She's already designing one. It's a fitting way to close out a program that started with a blank lot and ends, two years later, with something you can walk through.