Traverse City schools add hands-on board-building class for credit

Traverse City Area Public Schools is turning board-building into a credit-bearing class this fall, giving students a hands-on route into geometry, physics and business while they design and build custom boards at both high schools.

The new course will earn two credits toward graduation, a notable payoff for a class built around project work instead of a traditional lecture model. District officials have framed the Innovation and Manufacturing Centers at Traverse City Central High School and Traverse City West Senior High School as spaces where students can connect classroom math and science to a product they actually make, test and finish. For students interested in design, manufacturing, entrepreneurship or the trades, the class offers something more concrete than a standard elective.

The course will use the district’s new innovation centers, one at each high school, which opened with ribbon cuttings in April 2025. Each center is roughly 7,000 square feet and was designed to resemble a real STEM job environment. The spaces include equipment for computer programming, construction, manufacturing and design, and they are home to the schools’ robotics teams. At the 2023 groundbreaking, Superintendent John VanWagoner said the centers would include CNC mills, 3D printers and other tools for robotics and engineering work.

Those facilities were financed through TCAPS’ 2018 capital bond. District newsletters said the August 2018 bond passed by more than a 2-to-1 margin and provided $107 million over 10 years at an estimated tax rate of 3.1 mills, with no increase to the current rate. The board-building class is one of the clearest signs yet that the district intended the bond to do more than renovate buildings. It was also meant to create a place where students could learn in settings that mirror the kinds of work local employers actually need.

That matters in Grand Traverse County, where students who learn by doing often want options that lead somewhere practical without forcing them to leave the region. Northern Express reported in 2025 that the innovation and manufacturing centers were intended to broaden instruction in manufacturing, engineering and STEM, especially for freshmen and sophomores. The new boards class fits that same pipeline: it gives students early exposure to technical skills, product design and business thinking, and it does so in a space built for the kind of work that can feed Northern Michigan’s workforce.