New Board Members Appointed to Woodwork Career Alliance

The Woodwork Carrier Alliance of North America (WCA) announced the addition of two new members to their board of directors in February. The organization welcomed John Stearns and Brad Bagnall to the WCA board. Both members were appointed to three-year terms with WCA on the nonprofit board. Stearns is a career technical education director at Amity School District of Amity in Oregon, and Bagnall is a construction teacher at Bowness High School in Calgary, Alberta. Both Stearns and Bagnall will succeed WCA members Greg Heuer, Duane Griffiths, and Mick McGowan who have each retired.

The WCA was founded in 2017 as a non-profit volunteer board with the key goal to produce and administer a unified skill set of standards for the wood products industry. Since 2011, WCA has developed measurable performance standards and assessed over 300 woodworking machines and documented each holder’s record of woodworking skill accomplishments. Over 160 high schools and post-secondary institutions across North America are WCA EDUcation MANufacturing members.

Bangall and Bowness High School joined WCA as EDUcation members in 2016. Since then, he has become an accredited skill evaluator with the organization. “The biggest benefit to being a WCA EDU member is having access to up-to-date learning and teaching resources that I use often in my construction technology and trades classes. The widgets for teaching real application of measurement tasks are appropriate and adaptable for my classes in a meaningful way. The WCA assessment checklists make project development in my classes interesting as students can see the specific skills they will learn and demonstrate while working with tools needed to build their projects,” said Bagnall.

Expanding the presence and prominence of WCA in Canadian high school construction and skilled trades courses is one of Bagnall’s prerogatives.“I have worked as an Accredited Skill Evaluator in partnership with my employer, the Calgary Board of Education, and Southern Alberta Institute of Technology to offer WCA Skill Training courses for our school instructors. I hope to broaden these partnerships and continue to offer training sessions to educators. Being a part of the WCA Board of Directors allows for more networking capabilities with industry and I am excited to explore additional opportunities to bolster the WCA in Canada,” he concluded.