Northwest Technical School students compete in state competition
Submitted Photo
Northwest Technical Students Trestan McGeorge and Kyle Price compete in the “Hands-On” Ford/ AAA Student Auto Skills National Quality Care Challenge. The event took place earlier this month in Pittsburg, Kansas.
Students from across the state of Kansas and Missouri competed in high school automotive technology competition earlier this month. 20 students from 10 different schools from each state were a part of the “Hands-On” Ford/ AAA Student Auto Skills National Quality Care Challenge. Two students from Northwest Technical School were able to attend the event.
“In order to qualify for this competition, my students take an online exam,” Northwest Technical School Instructor Steve Holtman said. “After taking the exam and it is finished, Ford takes all of the scores and takes the top two scores from our school. Then, they look at all of schools in the state and they take the top 10 scores from the state.”
North Andrew R-6 senior Kyle Price and South Nodaway R-4 senior Trestan McGeorge scored the highest from the school and were able to compete in the competition. However, Price was not originally selected for the competition.
“At first when Mr. Holtman got the results back, I was one point away from going to the competition,” Price said. “However, they miss calculated their results and a couple of days later I got the results I needed to go and I was eligible to go.
In the competition, McGeorge and Price had 90 minutes to identify and fix 10 problems with a 2015 Ford Fiesta. One of the challenges for the two was that they had never met before and had not had the opportunity to work together.
“Trestan is a morning student and Kyle is an afternoon student,” Holtman said. “They never met each other until the Monday before competition. So, to go from not knowing each other to meeting three days before the competition, I think they did really well.”
Before the competition, the students were able to look over a vehicle from Tri-State Ford in order to understand the vehicle in the competition.
The team of McGeorge and Price finished fifth in the competition and McGeorge felt like the duo worked well together.
“Kyle is really easy to get along with and that made it easy to work together,” McGeorge said. “I hope I was easy to get along with too.”
Holtman taught both McGeorge and Price and was impressed with how well they worked together to be successful in the competition.
“I think it shows their character,” Holtman said. “They showed they are really good people and that showed they can get along with other people. Both of them have the same interests, they both like to work on cars and they just clicked.”
Over the years, Holtman has had multiple students take part in the competition and believes it is great educational tool.
“It’s a great learning experience for them,” Holtman said. “I think they learned about it will be like in a real world situation. They don’t have the instructor there to ask questions. All they have is the car, problems and they have to fix the problems.”
McGeorge and Price graduated earlier this month and both of them are looking to go to trade school. Price plans to attend Southeast Community College in Milford, Nebraska. McGeorge is still weighing his options moving forward, but his main interest is working on cars.
