Amid the whipping wind and erratic rain that swept through Heber City on Wednesday was a spot of sunshine as students and instructors of Wasatch High School’s homebuilding course gathered to celebrate the completion of their year-long project — a two-story home — and honor the life of a friend.
Students built the house under the guidance of their teacher, Canyon Prusso, and volunteer instructors like the late Joe Witt, who in February died in an avalanche while snowmobiling in the Snake Creek area.
Above the radiant yellow front door is a stained glass window showing the sun peeking out over Mount Timpanogos. An interior design student made it, per Witt’s suggestion. The school district initially shot down the idea because of the cost.
“When I found out Joe died, I think the next day, I called the district and said, ‘We’re doing the stained glass,’” Prusso recalled. “And they said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”
The current iteration of the homebuilding program has run for about five years consecutively, building one home each year. The program began in 1975, but much of its history has been lost to time, Prusso explained.
Each home built by students is sold to a school district employee. Applications for the newest home will open in the next two weeks, with the goal of selling the home in the next month.
“Principals will give input. Administrators will have input, and say, ‘We need this teacher to stay. Get them in a house,’” Prusso said.
After building next year’s home on the empty lot next door, the school district will be out of land designated for the program. The district plans on rezoning an 8.6-acre parcel to create a subdivision of homes, with one home per quarter acre. The current zoning allows one home per acre.
While the Wasatch County Council has not approved a rezone yet, Prusso said the “process is going as positively as (he) can imagine.”
The subdivision would fulfill Witt’s dream of the program lasting another three decades, said his sister, Bonnie Vance.
Witt became involved with the program at the beginning of the school year.
“Joe was a little burned out from building houses, and you could tell, the last few years. But the spark was back in his eyes and in his voice and in his attitude because of this program,” Vance said. “He loved sharing his knowledge with other people, especially the younger generation. … We talked endlessly as a family of the amount of knowledge that was buried with Joe. It sucks that we weren’t able to learn everything from him that we should have. … As siblings, we’re going to try to help fulfill Joe’s vision.”
Like Witt, silver-ponytailed contractor Marc Barcomb was also growing tired of construction when Witt invited him to help teach the kids.
“I think he said, ‘Boy, it’s time to give back.’ And I’m like, ‘Hell yeah, sign me up,’” Barcomb said. “And he said it would be good to have a hippie on the job site. It’d add a little color.”
Witt was right. With Barcomb came onsite jam sessions to The Grateful Dead.
“When (the students) were dancing on the scaffold, I’d have to say, ‘You can’t have eight of you on the scaffold,’” Barcomb laughed. “But they were boogieing to ‘Hard to Handle’ or something like that.”
Aside from training his employees and raising his children, Barcomb had no formal teaching experience. But he found it fulfilling to introduce the students to the trades while throwing in some basic life lessons — drink water, keep your nose clean and treat others with respect, for example.
“They got to see the process. They got to touch it, feel it,” Barcomb said. “It’s like trying to learn French. Everybody wants to learn French until you conjugate verbs. Then, you’re like, ‘All right, I’m out of French.’ I think that sums it up right there. They didn’t get stuck at any one point, and it was a break in their day. Some of the kids would stay late, and it was fun. There would be a lot of laughter.”
Barcomb tried to impart on the kids that blue-collar work is just as honorable as paper pushing. The job site is a place for math skills, an artist’s touch and authentic self-expression and bonding with co-workers, he explained.
Witt’s greatest impact on the homebuilding program, Prusso said, was that he leveraged all his relationships to connect students with homebuilding professionals like Barcomb.
“I think the kids learned the most just by watching good people do good work,” Prusso said. “It was really cool to see them watching a good electrician, and they’re like, ‘Electrical work is actually fascinating, and you can make a good living, and he’s a cool guy.’ And plumbing, you’re not digging around in the sewer all day. It’s actually a lot of problem solving and high cognitive thinking.”
Homebuilding teacher Canyon Prusso speaks about Joe Witt during the ribbon cutting for the students’ newly constructed home. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record 
Wasatch High School homebuilding students gather Wednesday to celebrate the ribbon cutting of their completed home. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record
The students helped with all aspects of construction other than laying the foundation, exposing them to a variety of career paths.
A few students got the “ultimate high school construction education” by also taking architecture courses, Prusso said. Three budding architects — seniors Juan Marin, Diego Solorio and Brady Shea — designed the home last year through the high school’s Center for Advanced Professional Studies before taking the homebuilding course.
“It was really cool to see, ‘I actually put this wall here, and it’s being built,’” Shea said.
The students drew up the plans based on a few specifications: It had to be two stories, 1,700 square feet each, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Fitting everything into such a “small” house was a source of headaches for Solorio, but he was pleased with the result.
“Overall, what I like about this house is the open living,” he said. “It feels really cozy.”
Aside from construction skills, the biggest thing the homebuilding course taught Shea was patience.
“There’s been so many setbacks I’ve had to deal with,” he said. “With the flooring here, we’ve had to scrape up the entire row of glue and relay it, which took probably the whole class. And then with architecture, you have multiple people telling you, ‘Hey, I want this change,’ but then someone else will say, ‘Hey, don’t do that change. Do this change.’ It’s kind of a lot, and you need to have that patience.”
Despite the occasional frustration, there was never a conflict on the job site.
While the students started out as strangers, they eventually became like brothers, Solorio said. That’s in no small part because the two-period length of the course means the students are spending more time with each other than with their other peers.
Before he took over the homebuilding course at the beginning of this year, Prusso, a self-described nerd, worried the homebuilding students would “eat (him) alive.” He was surprised by what he found.
“My outlook on young people changed dramatically watching these students, working together the way they did, accomplishing what they did, being kind, being fun. They picked on me, but just a good time,” he said.
Now that they’ve gotten some onsite experience, the sky’s the limit for the homebuilding students.
Solorio and Shea are dying to design multi-million dollar mansions with slides and home theaters.
Junior Taytum Smith’s electrician aspirations were sparked while installing the lights in the house.
Senior Max Carlson plans to “work for the government, hopefully get (his) retirement and get out when (he’s) 55.”
Marin wants to land an internship in construction, which he’ll surely have no trouble doing, thanks to the hands-on experience he gained in this year.
“I feel like we’re one of the few (schools) that has these type of courses, which I’m extremely grateful for because, for other schools, they don’t really have this type of thing. For us to have this is very helpful for what we want to do in the future,” he said. “With artificial intelligence, it keeps on getting better and better. I feel like going into the trade route is something that AI won’t take over.”