You’re driving by Quitman high school, and you slow down and do a double-take. 

Is that…a pretty, gray, brand-new house sitting inside the school gates?

Yes – yes, it is. And in fact, there’s another one inside the wood shop warehouse next door.

In fact, QISD high school wood shop teacher John Herring has been building these tiny houses with students for a good ten years.

Every year, interested QISD high school students will spend the first half of their school year learning the physics, geometry and principles of construction. In the second half, students get to participate in hands-on learning, where they actually build a tiny house with Herring’s help. Students do all the wiring, construction, installation, painting and more.

“Yep, they do it all. I help them. I try to give them some skills to go on and do something with,” says Herring. “(Hopefully students will) at least get some skills they can use.”

Funds for the project are actually self-generated: the buildings that the class produces are sold “at cost” to the first interested party, and those funds are then set aside for next year’s project.

In 2025, the 13 students in Herring’s class did not technically build a tiny house, but rather two separate storage buildings. These are complete with disc lights, electrical plugins, insulation, new windows, painted trim, a brand-new roof and more.

Normally, Herring’s CTE class goes even beyond this, creating a normal, functional home with “a bathroom, a closet down on that end and a bedroom and a kitchen.”

It should be noted that these are not simply “practice” buildings with a non-useable size: in fact, Herring says that the larger of the two buildings is roughly 16 feet by 36 feet, or 576 square feet. 

“You know, people understand (the buildings) are not perfect, because kids do make mistakes, but… they do a pretty good job with them,” said Herring.

Herring says that, over the ten years of his teaching wood shop at the school, students have built about 20 buildings at two or three per year. The smaller of the two buildings is already sold, but the larger one has yet to be claimed. For more information, call Herring at 903-763-5000, or email him at herringj@quitmanisd.net.