By Melissa Santos
The News Tribune
Copyright 2007 The News Tribune
 AP Photo/The News Tribune/Lui Kit Wong Wash. college students work on an old 1988 Ford ambulance that has been converted into a Christmas sleigh for distributing gifts and candy to local children. |
PIERCE COUNTY, Wash. — Auto restoration student Cory Burkhead had never upholstered a sleigh before. But he and his fellow automotive students at Clover Park Technical College spent this fall creating one for a Pierce County Sheriff’s Department charity project.
Sheriff’s deputies will take the sleigh, which the students created from a retired police rescue van, to 22 apartment complexes in the Parkland and Spanaway areas this month to distribute toys and candy to children. The crew intended to head out Thursday and today, but was rained out.
Sheriff’s deputies plan to turn the Santamobile visits into an annual tradition.
“A lot of the kids we reach out to with this may not be in the highest economic bracket,” said Travis Hoffman, a deputy with the department’s community policing unit. “These may be the only presents they get all year.”
Burkhead said that converting the 1988 Ford rescue van into a sleigh was a big change from the kind of projects the Clover Park students normally do.
To make the transformation, the students cut away the roof of the van, rewired it, repainted it and installed red-and-white seats and carpet.
“About the most exciting thing we’ve done is a ’55 Chevy,” Burkhead said. “This is definitely more exotic.”
The Sheriff’s Department borrowed a sleigh float from the City of Steilacoom to distribute toys in the past. The collaboration with the college on the department’s own sleigh began this summer, when deputies asked automotive teachers at Clover Park if they could incorporate the sleigh-building project into their fall curriculum.
Students in the school’s auto collision repair and upholstery classes have spent the past three months helping transform the Sheriff’s Department van.
“We decided we needed to make this a permanent thing, and for that we needed our own sleigh,” Hoffman said.
Typically, sheriff’s deputies and volunteers from Pacific Lutheran University’s campus safety program help distribute the toys. Some of them choose to dress up as Santa, Mrs. Claus or Santa’s elves.
“For us, it’s just a lot of fun,” Hoffman said.
Even though sleigh-making likely won’t be a project the Clover Park students tackle again, they’ll be able to apply the skills they learned while working on this one, said auto collision repair instructor Kurt Freeman.
“We wanted it to move safely and actually be a functioning vehicle,” Freeman said. “The painting and metalworking skills are completely applicable to the things we normally train for.”
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department’s Santamobile will make prescheduled stops at apartment complexes as the weather permits. It might also make appearances at holiday events and parades.