School Steers a Sweet Deal on Car for Class

Officials at Francis Polytechnic High School accepted the keys to an almost brand-new Nissan Maxima on Thursday--but neither the principal nor anyone else will be driving the vehicle off the Sun Valley campus.

The car, a 1996 model with 17,000 miles on the odometer, was donated by the Sun Valley Chamber of Commerce for use in the school’s automotive repair program. The chamber received the car from Nissan Motors U.S.A., which agreed to donate the vehicle with the hitch that it never be driven again.

“There is a certain amount of cars that get damaged en route from Japan or when they are being transported across the U.S.,” said chamber member Frank Jacobs, a retired Nissan executive. “We thought, why don’t we give them to schools as a training tool, with the condition that they can never be put on the road,” Jacobs said, citing legal reasons for the no-driving policy.

The driving restriction did not dampen the enthusiasm of the school’s automotive technologies instructor Larry Hall, who said the car was a “big asset” for his program.

“This is the only way we can get the newest technology into our program,” Hall said. “It takes a lot of money to get a hold of a car like this. We just couldn’t do it without outside help.”

The Poly automotive program has several introductory automotive repair classes and a special vocational training course for 11th- and 12th-graders. The Nissan, which Hall estimated as having a life span of five to seven years before wearing out, will help teach students how to perform tuneups and do repair work on electrical systems, brakes and upholstery, among other things.

“A good percentage of these kids will go into automotive mechanics,” said Hall, of the 24 students in the vocational program. “It’s a good field, [and] you know there will always be jobs.”