MANATEE COUNTY, Fla. — From shipping containers to tiny homes.
- Students add kitchen, bathroom, living space to shipping containers
- About 800 to 1,000 homeless students in county
- Class wants to complete one home per semester
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This isn't part of the next trendy home craze, but instead a local high school's project to help homeless students.
"You need to have a heart for other people, and we talk about that in class," said Hudson Slaughter, who leads the construction trades class at Bayshore High School.
Dozens of Slaughter's students have been working to convert traditional shipping containers into fully functioning homes. Using the skills learned in class, the students work to add a kitchen, bathroom, and living space to the roughly 160-square-foot shipping container.
The idea is the shipping container homes will be used by students at the school who would otherwise be homeless.
"We have homeless students here and I think there's 800 to 1,000 throughout the county," Slaughter said. "I've been notified that there's been three or four in my own class, so they've been helping build something that they might live in."
According to Slaughter, after helping students at Bayshore High, they would like to use the shipping container homes for additional students in need in the county.
The idea is that these shipping container homes would qualify as an accessory dwelling unit, which would allow for smaller secondary homes on the same lot as a primary home.
Slaughter says these shipping containers could be set in the backyards of sponsoring families and would be close enough to the school to allow the teen to walk.
The class plans to complete a home each semester.