Photo: Photo: John Guilfoil PR
EASTON, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — An old transit bus is getting a second life thanks to the hard work of students from a local vocational school.
A group of students from five different vocational programs at Southeastern Regional Vocational Technical High School teamed up to refurbish a decommissioned bus from the Brockton Area Transit Authority. They spent months repairing, restoring, and upgrading the bus so it could be used by the MassHire Greater Brockton Workforce Board.
The bus is now a classroom on wheels with workstations, televisions, wifi, and a whiteboard. The bus will be used by the MassHire Greater Brockton Workforce Board to help offer workforce training for different industry certifications and more. The students were also able to make the bus fully handicap accessible.
Stephen Bamford is one of the students who worked on the bus, and he said he and his classmates enjoyed the opportunity to make a difference.
"It makes me feel good," Bamford said. "It's going to be cool knowing that the bus is still going to be in use helping people."
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Students from the Electrical, Automotive Technology, Carpentry & Makerspace, Precision Machine Engineering, and Collision Repair & Restoration programs worked on the bus from October 2021 to January 2022, with a short pause because of the pandemic. The students put in about 85 hours of work in total.
Connor Maduskuie, a junior at Southeastern Regional Tech, said it was not an easy project for him and his classmates, but they enjoyed the challenge.
"When it came to us it was rough," Maduskuie said. "If we stuck to it and we kept our mind to it then we could refurbish [it] and send it out to do good things."
The bus is expected to go into service sometime in the spring.
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