In life, a bridge is usually necessary to span a chasm. One Pennsylvania-based company is bringing its bridge-building technique to area high school youths in need of a helping hand.

The program, called TechBridge, is the brainchild of Henkels & McCoy, Inc., an engineering, network development and construction company that has more than 80 offices nationwide. The company began developing the program 20 years ago.

The Workforce Development Board of Volusia / Flagler County hired TechBridge to work in Volusia County, and provided grant funding for the project, which aims to teach students various skills they might need if they look for high-tech jobs.

Currently, TechBridge has programs operating at Chisholm Community Center in DeLand and at DeLand High.

The TechBridge students at DeLand High School recently got a gigabyte of computer training. In return, they built and donated computers to two local charities, and were rewarded with rebuilt computers of their own.

According to Rob Davidson, project coordinator for TechBridge, ESE students in Marsha Weyler’s class were deemed to be the most in need of the academic-remediation program. At the beginning of the semester, the 13 young men and women were told they would be working on computer kits specially designed to be tutorials.

Along the way, Davidson said, enough computer parts and pieces were donated to the program to allow each student to take home a computer. The Volusia County Clerk of the Court donated 75 computers to the project, he added.

For 18 weeks, the students learned component identification, and installed power supplies, motherboards, video cards, accelerator cards, memory, floppy drives, hard drives, and the CPU fan, Davidson said.

"Students learned real trouble-shooting skills," Davidson said, as he described the methods by which students learned how to fix their computers.

The class was divided by departments, in much the same way a real company would operate. Using the process of elimination and trial and error, students were able to determine which component was defective.

For the final step, the students loaded an operating system onto the computers, as well as some basic learning-skills software and Microsoft Office, Davidson said.

In addressing the class, Davidson praised the efforts of the students, and mentioned this was the first time the project had been brought to Volusia County schools.

"You are kind of like trailblazers, setting the path for other students," Davidson told the class. "Hopefully, what you have learned here will stay with you the rest of your life."

In addition to learning how to build a computer, the class also learned how to reach out to other community members in need. The Boys and Girls Club of Spring Hill and The House Next Door each received five computers built by the students.

At Spring Hill’s Chisholm Center, TechBridge offers a yearlong computer program to young people ages 16 to 21 who have "dropped out, been kicked out, or flunked out" of a regular mainstream scholastic program, said Ron Goss, Henkels’ training director in the southeastern United States.

For more information about the TechBridge programs in West Volusia, or if you would like to donate a computer, call Rob Davidson at (386) 747-1845.