NORTH ADAMS — When carpentry students at McCann Technical School weren’t sitting in traditional math and English courses last semester, they suited up in yellow vests, hard hats and bore the bitter cold to pave new sidewalks around their alma mater.

Led by carpentry instructors Patrick Ryan and Justin Howland, 17 students formed and poured concrete sidewalks and a set of stairs on the Hodges Cross Road campus over roughly 20 days last semester.

McCann Technical School carpentry student Isaac Lovell builds a wooden form before pouring and smoothing concrete recently as part of a project with 17 other students.

Two carpentry students at McCann Technical School chat with the driver of the concrete mixer truck that delivered the concrete they poured to pave new sidewalks around the school.

The sidewalk revamp was part of required Americans with Disabilities Act compliance work tied to the school’s nearly $17 million roof and window replacement project with the Massachusetts School Building Authority.

The roof and window project is slated to start in May and go through September 2026.

McCann officials asked the state to allow carpentry students to pave the sidewalks as part of their vocational training, and it agreed, said Principal Justin Kratz.

“This is the first time a vocational school and the MSBA has reached this type of agreement and the district is very appreciative of their consideration in this regard,” said Kratz, who added that the agreement likely saved a “considerable” amount of money compared to hiring contractors.

The state building authority will cover 64 percent of eligible project costs of the $16.7 million project, or about $9.3 million. That leaves about $7.4 million to be split among the nine member communities. Adding the $2.2 million interest over the life of the 15-year bond, the local share totals just over $9 million.

The school’s Computer Assisted Drafting program designed the blueprints for the project.

Junior Ryder Lefebvre said his favorite and most satisfying part of the work was pouring and smoothing the concrete.

Carpentry students at McCann Technical School use a screed to smooth concrete sidewalk slabs last semester. Led by their instructors, 17 students formed and poured concrete sidewalks and a set of stairs over roughly 20 days.

“Just because I had never done it before and it was really interesting to see how it works,” he said.

Ryan was nervous about how the project would turn out, but breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the result of the first concrete pour.

“I was like, ‘Oh this is not going to be as bad as I anticipated it to be,” the teacher said. “And each pour just got better and better.”

When pouring concrete slabs like sidewalks, carpenters use a technique called skip pouring — “You can’t pour all of that long run of sidewalk [in one long slab],” said Ryan. “You have to skip a section, pour a section, skip a section, pour.”

It isn’t random that concrete is poured in slabs with thin lines between them. Those lines are called expansion joints, and Junior Isaac Lovell said installing them was his favorite part of the project.

“[It] is a composite, kind of like a [thick] paper material put in between two different pours to stop it from cracking or expanding,” Lovell said.

The hardest part, said Lovell and other students, was building the wooden forms to set the concrete.

“You have to draw stakes in the ground and do the measurements and make sure everything will be perfect,” Lovell said.

The most satisfying part was stripping the forms for Lovell — “taking the [wooden] forms that we built off the set concrete and seeing the perfect finish," said Lovell, who early last year helped pave a 20- by 30-foot pavilion near the school’s football field unrelated to the current building project.

Lefebvre and Lovell said that the skills they learned would come in handy for future personal projects, like a porch.

The sidewalks paved by the students lead up to two side entrances of the school, and in the Spring, a second phase of carpentry students will pave more sidewalks near the front entrance.

Students at McCann Technical School in the carpentry program recently paved sidewalks outside the school that was part of necessary Americans with Disabilities Act compliance work that has to be completed as the school embarked on its $17 million roof and window replacement project with the Massachusetts School Building Authority.

The ADA compliance work must be completed before the final MSBA review of the project.

Ryan, who planned the project and described his role as the “math and angle measurement guy,” said the most challenging part was doing it in cold weather.

“But the kids’ work ethic made it just so much better,” he said.

The kids were awesome, Kratz added, but it started with the instructors’ attitudes: “Pat and Justin were like ‘let's roll up our sleeves and get this done, and the kids are going to feed off of that.”