The first snowfall of the season lashed Tommy Sanders' high school students in Sun Prairie, yet they continued to hustle, sweeping mud and gravel off the floor of their homebuilding project.

"I think this class is amazing," said shivering senior Reggie Kellum, who believes the rugged teamwork is preparing him to become a heavy equipment operator.

In Mount Horeb, all high school students were dismissed before lunch one recent day — but half of Keith Hutchison's students in a homebuilding class voluntarily worked an afternoon shift.

Gung-ho high school students and instructors can be found at home construction sites across Wisconsin, taking courses in which the classrooms are muddy and toolbelts are required attire as students learn basic carpentry, plumbing, wiring and other skills.

But tensions are growing in many school districts that offer building trades courses.

Educators are facing unprecedented financial pressures from the reeling housing market, forcing them to seek options to reduce the financial risk to school districts when student-built homes don't sell.

The Baraboo and Wisconsin Dells school districts each have two unsold homes. Mount Horeb has one.

As school budgets tighten and focus on test scores intensifies, some students and educators wonder how long they'll be able to keep building homes.

"Unfortunately the thought has crossed their minds, because school districts aren't in the business of holding homes," said Brent Kindred, the state Department of Public Instruction's consultant for technology and engineering education. "It does seem with this economy the way it is, nobody can move a house, whether you're a homeowner or a school district. So that's a problem."

Not just schools

Similar pressures are afflicting Operation Fresh Start, a nonprofit Dane County agency that is facing the most serious economic crisis of its nearly four decades of operation, said Connie Ferris Bailey, the agency's executive director.

Operation Fresh Start is a nationally acclaimed program that hires teenagers in trouble, assigning them to crews that build or renovate homes for low-income buyers.

Although Operation Fresh Start continues to succeed in turning around the lives of its teenage clients, over the past 18 months it has accumulated a backlog of nine unsold properties — roughly the number of homes it constructs in a typical year, Ferris Bailey said.

It costs $10,000 to $15,000 a year to hold onto each property, to pay credit, maintenance and tax expenses, further straining the agency's budget. To survive the housing slump, leaders are seeking ways to reduce their programs' financial risks while continuing to teach teenagers skills.

Operation Fresh Start plans to buy and rehabilitate a few repossessed properties that can quickly be returned to the market.

Still committed

In the Baraboo School District, the debt on two unsold homes is held by the nonprofit Baraboo Contractors and Students Corp., not the school district, but contractors aren't getting paid until the homes sell.

Mike McGann, Baraboo High School building trades instructor, said he's considering whether it'd be better to assign his 15-student crew to work on homes being built by the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity.

Or, the students could build a home for a specific customer.

For now, though, he and his students are committed to breaking ground on a project this month — a home that will be marketed at around $185,000 — and hoping that the housing market recovers.

It's only possible, McGann said, because contractors continue to back the program through these hard times.

The Madison School District, which operates a homebuilding program out of La Follette High School, likely will take a small loss on the home students constructed last year, but at least there's an offer pending on the property, said Steve Munson, the teacher who supervises the program's 18 students.

Each year since the 1999-2000 school year, Madison students have built a home in the fall semester. This is the first time they've had trouble selling one.

Munson believes this year's home, at 318 Rustic Drive on Madison's Far East Side, will be easier to sell because it's smaller and less expensive than last year's version. Current and former students say the experience of building a home can be life-changing.

"There should be more programs like this around Wisconsin, definitely," said Matt Johnson, a 2008 Sun Prairie High School graduate who credits his experiences in the building trades course with helping him land a coveted job repairing boilers in schools and businesses. "That class was probably the best time I'll have in my life, building a house with my friends."

Uncertain future

Some educators said the state's revenue limits on school districts and the emphasis on No Child Left Behind test scores threaten the future of classes in homebuilding and other technology and engineering programs including manufacturing, welding, auto repair and printing.

In many cases, the classes are expensive to operate because the class sizes are small and the equipment is pricey.

"Our schools have been forced to make unpleasant and tough decision about programs," said Kindred, the DPI official.

Kindred argues that career-focused programs help raise students' test scores, because students learn best when they apply concepts to real situations.

Some tasks, such as designing roof pitches and stair stringers, "are screaming trig and calculus," he said, and can prepare students for college.

Mount Horeb's Hutchison said too many parents and educators consider the skilled trades to be inferior careers, so they push students to attend college and uncertain job prospects although his students "have two or three good job offers before they're done with school."

The classes also push students to develop problem-solving skills.

"Muns, that door still isn't closing," La Follette senior Will Simmons told Munson one recent chilly morning at the homebuilding site.

"The frame has to be square," Munson told Simmons and classmate Trevor Scharnke before explaining, over the clatter of power tools, what to do next.

Soon a crew of three students was repairing the door frame and Munson quickly moved on to supervise crews in the garage and basement.

"It's kind of cool to see all of this come together," said La Follette senior Nate Alioto, who dreams that as an older man, he'll bring his children here someday to show them what he did in high school.