Duluth students build lasting dining tables for fire department

The Duluth Fire Department now has dining tables built to outlast the crew using them. More than 30 Duluth East and Denfeld construction students delivered the homemade furniture Friday, giving firefighters a replacement they can use for decades after the department realized its old tables needed to be replaced.

The wood came from trees firefighters had cut down on their own properties, then milled and left to dry for more than a year before students turned it into finished tables. Assistant Chief Brent Consie said the tables could last 100 years, a measure of how far the project went beyond a classroom exercise and into the daily life of a city department that depends on practical, durable equipment.

For the students, the work stitched together shop skills, teamwork and a public-service deadline. Duluth Public Schools says its career and technical education programs are designed to provide rigorous, relevant, real-world learning, and the district is set to offer 68 CTE courses in the 2026-27 school year. At Denfeld High School, the culinary club describes its Foodies students as collaborators who study, plan and execute food-related projects, which fit the wider hands-on approach that made this project work from the shop floor to the firehouse kitchen.

Duluth East culinary students prepared a meal to mark the delivery, turning the handoff into a community event rather than a simple equipment swap. The project also drew support from Kraus-Anderson, Northland Construction and Jamar, showing how local trades and public agencies can line up behind a visible need that leaves a lasting result.

That lasting result matters to the fire department, whose mission includes code enforcement, fire prevention, public education, emergency response and adapting to community needs. Fire crews may change over time, but the new tables will stay in the building and keep serving the department’s day-to-day work, a small but concrete example of how local training programs can produce something that residents, firefighters and future students can point to for years.