Camosun College has received additional tool sets for their automotive students thanks to a recent donation from a Maple Ridge-based foundation. The Ed Coates Memorial Foundation—a foundation formed after Lordco Auto Parts co-founder/president/CEO Ed Coates, who was passionate about sustainability and the automotive industry, passed away in 2014—recently donated 12 tool kits to the college. Before the COVID-19 crisis hit, says Camosun automotive instructor Patrick Jones, it was normal for students to share tools. Prior to the donation, they needed to spend time cleaning each tool before it could be passed on to someone else. The donation works out to one tool kit per student, which Jones says increases quality of education for everyone.
“It makes what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis easier,” says Jones. “That’s not the be all and end all, but it’s helping us improve the education that we provide.”
Prior to the donation, there were eight tool kits for 16 students in apprentice classes. Before the pandemic, sanitizing wasn’t necessarily a concern, but some of the tools weren’t as good as they could have been in some of the courses offered in Women In Trades Training and high-school equivalent courses in particular, says Jones.
“We haven’t had proper tools for those students; whenever we’ve run those programs, it’s been kind of using old tool kits for those students,” he says. “The tools just aren’t up to snuff for a proper learning experience, so by having these extra kits, that will help us out with those programs, as well.”
Especially during COVID-19, where so much time has to be given to proper sanitization, the donation will help students, says Jones.
“It does give peace of mind to the students that are actually working, and it reduces time to get stuff done, because they’ve got the equipment close at hand,” he says. “They’re not waiting for somebody else to be finished with it and then clean it.”
The new kits consist of tools like ratchets, wrenches, screwdriver sets, impact guns, impact sockets, and digital multimeters. The 12 kits total roughly $25,000, says Jones.
“The choice of everything [in the tool kits] was ours,” he says. “And we weren’t told about a dollar amount or anything. Basically, we were just asked, ‘Well, what would you need?’ So we put together a list of needs, and it was like, ‘Okay, well, that’s perfect; that’s what a set is; and how many sets do you want?’ It was pretty nice to work out that way. It wasn’t like, ‘Okay, here’s just a bunch of tools’; it was what we were after.”
Teaching has changed quite a bit since the start of the pandemic, says Jones. Students are on reduced shop hours, with theory being delivered online.
“We’re in the shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he says. “How our apprentice classes typically worked was we’re in the classroom for the mornings and in the shop for the afternoons.”
Mechanics have to take the same amount of care around COVID safety as any other business in the province, says Jones, adding that automotive technicians play an essential role in society.
“From an essential service standpoint, if there wasn’t mechanics, the streets would be littered with cars that weren’t working,” says Jones.