LEROY - Amid talk of tax levies and test scores, LeRoy School Board members have seen how a relatively small expenditure can provide important hands-on education for students.

And it came when a teacher and a pair of students used a wood lathe to make a writing pen before their very eyes.

High school industrial technology instructor Doug Larson and Woodworking II students Austin Hamblin and Zack Hazen demonstrated a small lathe purchased with $160 in grant money. With supplies, the total expenditure was around $800.

The so-called "midi-lathe" has templates and small pieces of pre-purchased wood that are worked to produce high-end pens and pencils.

As board members watched the process, Larson told how he hopes the class can grow into more than a woodworking exercise for students.

"What it's enabled us to do is to introduce applications that are for the real world," said Larson. "We can also use this as an opportunity for a small business, where we can show how a corporation works; mass production and so forth."

Students have been getting requests for the pens, and hope to start making enough to begin selling them, with the money going to the industrial technology department.

The project appealed to Hamblen enough that he bought his own lathe for home woodworking projects.