Eighty freshmen at East High School in Kansas City, Missouri are spending part of their school day laying rebar, framing walls, and installing windows instead of sitting through another lecture. The hands-on work is part of a brand-new four-year program called LEARN, launched this fall through a partnership between Kansas City Public Schools and Heavy Construction Laborers' Local Union 663, and it comes with a built-in pathway to a union paycheck.
The program is the first of its kind in Kansas City, according to KCTV, though similar construction pre-apprenticeship models already exist in roughly 13 locations nationwide. April Adams, KCPS's director of career and technical education, told the station that starting students as freshmen gives them four full years to build industry professionalism and start networking within unions and labor circles before they ever graduate. “Students receive access they might not otherwise have through LIUNA,” Adams said, per the station's report.
The curriculum itself was developed nationally by LIUNA Training as a standardized Career and Technical Education track for Construction Craft Laborers, weaving math, science, and English into jobsite skills that feed directly into U.S. Department of Labor-recognized apprenticeships, according to LIUNA Training. Kansas City isn't the first stop for the model — the same LEARN framework was already running in public high schools including Roosevelt High School in New York in early 2024 and Buchtel CLC in Akron, Ohio, per the Ohio Laborers' Training and Apprenticeship Trust Fund.
From Classroom Projects to Real Summer Jobsites
East High students in the program are learning to lay concrete, set rebar, do woodworking, install flashing, lay floors, and hang windows and doors, the same KCTV report notes. They can also earn an OSHA-10 safety certification along the way. The training isn't just theoretical — the same account cites that East High students helped build stages for FIFA events in the Kansas City area over the summer, giving the freshman cohort an early taste of commercial-scale work.
Jason Mendenhall, president of Local 663, said the goal is to show students a real, viable career path in construction at a time when the trade is booming. He added that students who finish the program and move into the apprenticeship face no ceiling on what they can achieve, according to the station's report. Local 663 itself is no small operation — chartered in 1938, it represents nearly 2,000 members across a 13-county jurisdiction in western Missouri out of its union hall on Prospect Avenue, per Union Facts.
Free Boots Remove a Cost Barrier
To make sure cost isn't a barrier to entry, Local 663 is providing every LEARN student with free industry work boots through a partnership with E. Edwards Workwear, a Kansas City-area supplier with locations in Kansas City, Olathe, Grandview, and Independence, according to E. Edwards Workwear. The boots typically run around $160, and per the same KCTV account, that gear addresses both student safety and access. The detail matters at East High specifically — the school enrolls roughly 1,155 students across grades 9 through 12, and 100% of them qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, according to SchoolDigger.
Graduates of the LEARN program don't just get a certificate and a handshake. They're accepted directly into LIUNA's apprenticeship program at 80% of scale pay, with wages starting between $38 and $42 an hour, the KCTV report states. Program graduates arrive already trained before formally entering the laborers' union, giving them a head start that most entry-level apprentices don't get.
A Construction Boom Fuels the Timing
The program's launch lands amid a genuine hiring crunch in Missouri construction. The state added 7,300 construction jobs between April 2025 and April 2026, a 4.9% annual increase that tied for the third-highest percentage gain of any U.S. state, according to the Associated General Contractors of America. Major Kansas City projects, including a new Royals stadium and a new Chiefs stadium, will require large construction workforces, per the KCTV report — and the metro's commercial building network is already sizable, with The Builders AGC chapter representing firms that collectively employ more than 25,000 workers across mid-America.
Kansas City's own infrastructure pipeline adds to the demand. The City Council approved $51.57 million in bond funding last month to launch Phase One construction on Kansas City's I-670 deck park, a three-block project capping the interstate downtown and reconnecting it with the Crossroads Arts District. Metro-area nonfarm employment reached nearly 1.18 million jobs as of August, with non-residential and specialty trade construction remaining active sectors, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For now, East High's 80 freshmen are the first cohort to test whether a high school classroom can feed directly into a union hall. Whether KCPS expands the LEARN curriculum to other campuses, and how many of these students stick with the four-year track through graduation and into a Local 663 apprenticeship, remains to be seen.
