Brick by brick | Maine School of Masonry founder Stephen Mitchell lays out a new plan to solve his school's recruitment woes

In a back room at the Maine School of Masonry in Avon, Stephen Mitchell, the school's founder, has set up his office. A desk rests against one wall, pens scattered on its surface. A phone book sits in the drawer and a telephone occupies a side table. Everything is arranged, ready to be the heart of operations for a full-time masonry school. The desk chair, however, has been empty since Mitchell opened the school a year ago. "This is my office," Mitchell says, walking into the room on a recent sunny morning. "Though I've never sat in here."

The masonry school Mitchell founded with great expectations in September 2005 hasn't turned out the way he had envisioned. A 25-year veteran of the masonry trade, Mitchell, 53, created the school because he saw a dearth of masons entering the industry at the same time retirement was thinning its ranks. Every year, he says, the industry loses roughly 1,500 to 2,000 masons nationwide due to retirement, but only attracts about 200 to 300 new masons. He thought a trade school would create interest in masonry and fill that void. But while the workforce needs may exist, Mitchell has not seen a queue of prospective masons at his door.

Mitchell's goal is to have full-time day classes of around 13 to 15 students every semester, but the first semester he only garnered one student interested in a full-time masonry program. This year he attracted three students, still not enough to allow Mitchell to teach on a full-time basis. At the moment, the only class in progress is a basic bricklaying class that meets one night a week and has attracted six students — mostly homeowners or hobbyists. "I can want a school, I can want full-time classes, but without students I have nothing," Mitchell says.

A number of factors may explain why recruitment has turned out tougher than Mitchell expected. Perhaps the school's relatively remote location in western Maine has something to do with it. Perhaps masonry just isn't an attractive career option among Maine's young people. Mitchell acknowledges those might play a part, but the bigger hurdles are related to his pool of potential students and the industry for which he's training them. Mitchell says not enough students in the state's vocational and technical high schools are being exposed to masonry, which would make them more likely to consider his program a good move after graduation. More importantly, masonry companies aren't exactly clamoring for trained recruits because the industry traditionally has developed its own employees.

Many masonry contractors in the state, such as Maine Masonry Co. in Scarborough, have apprenticeship programs designed to train up-and-coming masons. Darren Clough, vice president of Maine Masonry, says the company, which employees about 40 masons and 15 apprentices, normally hires people based on their work ethic and desire to be a mason, not on prior training. "We prefer to bring them up through ourselves," Clough says. "We usually hire people on as laborers or tenders [and] work with them for at least a year to learn the business and the way we do things."

Clough agrees, however, that there's a need for more masons in the state. "That's probably become the toughest part of this trade — to find the resources, the people to work this type of trade," Clough says. "So anything to help promote it is a great thing."

After a year into the endeavor, Mitchell is realizing the hurdles may be more significant than he initially thought, but he's still confident he can make the school a success. The trick now, he says, is to retool his approach — and promoting the school is number one on his list. In March, Mitchell plans a three-month recruitment tour during which he'll visit all the vocational schools in the state and offer free masonry workshops to create interest among the students. He also plans to reach out more to the state's masonry contractors to get them interested and involved in promoting the school.

It's doable, Mitchell says, given time. The trouble is, time is something he has very little of, since he also runs his own five-employee masonry contracting business. "I am so booked it's pitiful," Mitchell says. "Keeping five guys going to make enough money to pay for the school and my nighttime classes here has really hindered me from going out and doing what I need to do, and that is get to the schools and get to the kids."

An unusual trade for a classroom setting
The Maine School of Masonry is housed in the former Lauri Toy Factory, a squat building that hugs Route 4. Along with Mitchell's office and the main workshop, there is a garage where materials are stored, a traditional classroom, a break room, a library, a reception area and a bunkroom that will be available to full-time students who travel a long way to attend the school.

For Mitchell, the school is a long-held dream. After graduating in 1973 from the masonry program at Northern Maine Vocational Technical Institute in Presque Isle, Mitchell apprenticed with a masonry outfit for a few years before starting his own business, Stephen D. Mitchell Masonry. At the time, though, Mitchell wasn't quite satisfied with his career. In 1978, he got the opportunity to teach masonry at a farm in Missouri to about 100 troubled city teenagers and realized what had been missing: helping others learn the trade.

Mitchell returned to Maine ready to teach, but masonry is not a trade that traditionally had been taught in the classroom. "Nobody has ever considered teaching it in a school because it's such a hard, dirty type of job," Mitchell says, before adding, "It can be done, it can be done."

Mitchell has taught masonry all over the state in public, private and secondary schools, but says that practice was getting increasingly difficult. Programs like masonry were often the first to be dropped in school budget cuts, and his time away from his own business was always tough. So in the spring of 2005, Mitchell bought the former toy factory for the bargain price of $50,000 and made it a permanent home for those classes, expecting the students to come to him.

Since then, Mitchell has realized that the lack of masonry programs at the state's vocational and technical high schools is hurting his own recruitment efforts. Only two of the state's 27 technical high schools have masonry programs, Mitchell says. And only two of the remaining 25 include a masonry component within their larger construction and carpentry programs. "Out of 23 programs out there in the state, none of them are teaching any masonry at all," Mitchell says as he walks through the school's well-lit workshop. Six small rows of gray bricks run the length of the room, the work of students in Mitchell's Wednesday night adult education bricklaying class.

But the absence of masonry programs at vocational high schools is not surprising, given that the industry has usually dealt with workforce needs on its own. "It's a trade that has always been taught by your grandfather or your father and handed down," Mitchell says.

Mitchell stresses that his masonry school in no way usurps the traditional apprenticeship program. If anything, he says, it augments the system by creating apprentices who already know the basics of mixing mortar or working with a trowel. He also plans to take students to a concrete factory, a block factory and a brick factory, so they have an intimate knowledge of how materials are made. "These apprentices that will be graduating will be way better off than any apprentice that comes up through the contracting business, because there's so much you can learn here in a shop environment, a classroom environment, that you're not going to learn [on the job]," Mitchell says.

Matthew Wentworth, the masonry instructor at the Portland Arts and Technical High School — one of the two technical high schools in the state with its own masonry program — shares Mitchell's desire to attract more young people to the trade. "It's desperate, we need masons," says Wentworth, who began teaching at PATHS three years ago.

Wentworth encourages his students who want to pursue a career in masonry to look at options such as the Maine School of Masonry. "If you are really driven and excited about masonry and you give it your all in high school and then you go to this school in Avon and give it your all there, you're going to be ready and years ahead of a young person with no experience," Wentworth says.

But graduating from Mitchell's school won't necessarily mean an automatic job at a masonry business. Although Mitchell's students could be prime candidates for jobs as tenders or apprentices at a commercial masonry business, they might not find it as easy to get a job with a residential masonry company, says Wayne Libby, the owner of W.F. Libby Masonry. Libby's Stow-based residential masonry business relies on more complex techniques and diverse materials than the typical commercial masonry company — which tends to focus on bricks, blocks and walls — so Libby himself prefers to hire employees without any prior training or experience. "If I did commercial work I would be in constant demand for [these students]," Libby says, "[but] with arches and other high-end custom residential stonework, they would be lost."

Convincing students and the industry
Teaching techniques for residential masonry is part of Mitchell's plan. But first, he has to concentrate on developing his full-time, commercial masonry programs, which he says can form the basis for a career in all types of masonry. Keeping the school afloat without those full-time students and their tuitions has been a challenge for Mitchell — and a burden that his masonry business has carried. It costs $2,000 a month to keep the lights on in the school, Mitchell says. There's not much else left over after he pays his workers and covers the school's bills, so he saves money anyway he can.

The carpeting in his office and the classroom and all the furniture was plundered from schools that were jettisoning belongings. Although he offered classes last winter, Mitchell won't this year because it costs too much to heat the building.

The Opportunity Center in Avon has stepped in to help Mitchell get the school off the ground. The organization is using a $3,000 community development grant from Sugarloaf/USA and International Paper to help pay for his springtime recruitment trip. "They want this school to grow because that will help this area," Mitchell says.

Still, he expects challenges on his recruitment trip, because he knows masonry can be a tough sell. While it can be a lucrative trade — the hourly mean wage of a mason in this country is between $18 and $20 an hour, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics — Mitchell and others cite a declining work ethic as a possible factor for the lack of interest in masonry as a career. "Twenty-five years ago the first question from students was, 'How much money does a mason make?'" Mitchell says. "One of the questions now, though, is, 'Isn't that a lot of work?'"

Masons across the country are dealing with this phenomenon, says Melissa Polivka, director of workforce development for the Schaumburg, Ill.-based Mason Contractors Association of America. "A student can make significantly more money out of a three-year apprenticeship program then he can coming out of a four-year college," Polivka says. "[But] it's working outside, it's working in the cold, it's working in the heat. That whole concept of a career has lost its attractiveness in the last 50 years."

Figuring out a message that students respond to will be one of Mitchell's key tasks. One strategy Mitchell plans to use is stressing that masonry is more than a trade, "It's an art and it's good if you're a creative type person," he says.

And while Mitchell will let students know they can make a very comfortable living as a mason, Polivka says he needs to do more. "He'll have to prove it to them," she says.

For Polivka, that means securing job placements. She says Mitchell should seek promises from contractors to take his students on as apprentices before the classes even start. It's a goal Mitchell shares, but he hasn't had time to communicate with more than a handful of small, local masonry contractors, who mostly focus on the residential market. "As soon as [large commercial contractors] find out about this, I'm sure I'm going to be getting some calls from them," Mitchell says.

His website, www.masonryschool.org, has helped promote the school to an extent, and given him reason to believe he will find supporters in the masonry industry. This spring, he received a call from a masonry contractor in Texas that promised to hire any talented stonemasons Mitchell trains at the school. "All it takes is word of mouth and people to know about you," Mitchell says. "When it becomes big enough that people know about it out of state, there's no reason why big masonry contractors from New York and Connecticut won't be e-mailing me and say, 'Hey you got anybody graduating in June who wants a job?'"

Until that time, Mitchell will continue offering adult education classes while building support for the school among masonry contractors in the state. He'll continue to work to create interest among students, because, despite the past year of unmet expectations, teaching the trade to the next generation of masons remains a labor of love for Mitchell. "I never expect to make any money from this school," he says, "but I expect that this school will pay for itself."