On his hands and knees in a dingy basement, Croom Vocational High School teacher Anthony Fletcher wrestled with a water pump set into a round pit in the floor.
After affixing the pump to a PVC pipe, he asked his student, 16-year-old Rodney Williams, to plug it in, and the pump gurgled to life.
‘‘It works,” Fletcher said.
Fletcher and Williams, a junior at Croom Vocational, were not in class. They were participating in Christmas in April - the first time the school has sent a group of volunteers to the 20-year-old Prince George’s County event.
Croom Vocational PTSA President Melody Ford, who organized the school’s participation, said she did so because not enough volunteer opportunities are available to Croom students.
‘‘I just felt like it would be a good idea to do some volunteer work. I mean, they have skills, and I felt they should do some volunteer work and put their skills to work,” said Ford, who participated with the group.
Christmas in April is an annual one-day event, held Saturday this year, where volunteers repair the homes of elderly homeowners who have been physically or financially unable to do their own upkeep. Christmas in April is funded through donations and a golf tournament fundraiser in September.
This year, 3,500 volunteers worked on 92 houses in the county, organizers said.
Croom Vocational sent eight volunteers, including teachers, students and parents, to work along with about 45 others on a 79-year-old woman’s home on Shadyside Avenue in Suitland.
‘‘We’re just trying to give back to the community, to help people out,” Williams, of Fort Washington, said.
Mark Walker, a 12th-grader who did some electrical repairs, said he had not done that kind of volunteer work before Saturday.
‘‘It was fun. It was a good experience,” said Walker, 19, of Forestville.
Principal Lauretta Williams said Christmas in April represents an effort by her school to expand community service options for students. It is the only volunteer opportunity through the school that allows students to use their trade skills.
‘‘We’re trying to do more of what you call educating the total child,” she said. ‘‘It’s good for them to have the skills, but then it’s good to have skills and the sense of community.”
The Croom volunteers helped fill a commercial trash container with yard trimmings and junk from the homeowner’s basement.
While other volunteers repainted inside the house, the Croom group did electrical work and replaced a broken sump pump, a device used to remove groundwater from basements.
Dennis Poe, an electrical engineering teacher at Croom, and Walker put in a new bathroom light fixture and pull chain switch, and replaced some old wiring.
‘‘The work that we did at the house, some of that definitely correlated to some of the work we do in class as far as putting in pull chain switches and getting new wiring,” Poe said.
Because one of the house’s two sump pumps was broken, about an inch of water had collected on parts of the basement floor.
‘‘It was stagnant and smelly,” Rodney Williams said.
Al Rich, a volunteer leader for the site, said that Fletcher, Poe and their students were the only ones at the house that morning who knew how to remove the broken pump.
‘‘They did pretty good,” Rich said.
Williams said he and other students at Croom learn about sump pumps in class and are required to install them in houses that they build as part of their program. But he said he learned more about their parts and about repairing them by assisting Fletcher, a carpentry teacher at Croom Vocational for 33 years.
‘‘Everything I did out here was educational,” Williams said.
