Port Angeles High School Students Build Tiny Home for Local Touchstone Campus

A 9-foot by 12-foot tiny home is taking shape at 4PA's Touchstone Campus in Port Angeles, built not by professional contractors but by high school students learning the trade from the ground up, one wall frame at a time.

Students in Paul Arndt's Core Plus construction class at Port Angeles High School are currently working through the subfloor and framing phases of the build. The skills on the learning curve are foundational: reading a tape measure accurately, squaring a wall frame, and coordinating as a crew. These are the building blocks that separate a clean, plumb structure from one that compounds problems with every added course.

The project is part of Core Plus, a statewide Career and Technical Education program that integrates academic learning with industry-based training to prepare students for the workforce. That dual focus means students like Madden Reeves, Lathian Morris, and Juliann Edwards aren't just picking up shop-class basics. They're working on a real structure that will be delivered to and used by a real organization.

When complete, the tiny home will become part of 4PA's Touchstone Campus. The 108-square-foot footprint is modest by any measure, but in the tiny house world that's a livable, purposeful space, and the fact that students are building it to spec rather than as a static classroom exercise gives the whole project a different weight.

For a CTE program, a completed, placed structure is exactly the kind of outcome that justifies the model. Core Plus ties classroom instruction to industry-recognized standards, and a framed, delivered home is about as tangible a result as a construction program can produce.

Arndt's class represents one of the more concrete examples of what CTE construction programs can accomplish when they partner with community organizations: real materials, real dimensions, real consequences for sloppy work, and a finished product with somewhere to go.