BY JOHN T . PRUSAK

Located on the rural prairies of southwestern Minnesota , where the soil is luxuriously black and rich and the landscape is so flat you can watch your dog run away for three days , Bold high school appears outwardly like many other aged small-town schools .

But there ’ s something special going on inside the nearly century-old building on weekdays – some of the results of which can be spotted on laketop speed run racetracks on winter weekends .

Bold high school is home to a cutting-edge small engine shop class program where the students learn first-hand how to fix anything from lawn mowers to ATVs to snowmobiles and beyond .

The snowmobiles , though , are the stars of the show . On a December visit , we found the shop filled with 10 sleds , and students of varying skill and confidence levels tuning carburetors , chasing down electrical gremlins and even rebuilding the top-end of a two-stroke .

That was impressive on its own . But select students also participate in speed run racing on winter weekends as a part of the program ’ s Black Max Racing Team . The 16- to 18-year-olds compete at sanctioned events against adult racers while guiding high-powered Yamahas at speeds exceeding 100 mph .

The teens don ’ t just race , they also tune their snowmobiles between runs , expertly dialing in clutching and jetting in an endless effort to gain iotas of speed .

Through it all , the classes are giving young learners a practical education , confidence and , for some , a reason to finally enjoy going to school . It ’ s also potentially creating future powersports mechanics , snowmobilers and racers while being a shimmering beacon for other school shop programs .

The Foundation

Formed in 1992 , the Bold school district is an amalgam of once separate schools in Bird Island ( population 977 ), Olivia ( 2,289 ) and Lake Lillian ( 246 ) in a particularly rural part of Minnesota . The high school , found on the south edge of Olivia , showed its age but otherwise looked tidy but unspectacular when we circled the building on a crisp December morning .

Curiously , though , a lettered-up Black Max Racing trailer sat in an adjoining parking lot , and a half-dozen snowmobiles of various ages were cued up outside a service door , despite the fact that there was no snow in the surrounding farm fields .

Once we were buzzed inside the school , Rob Van Der Hagen – a former multi-location NAPA auto parts store owner and lifelong snowmobiler who is now the school ’ s industrial tech teacher – took us down the hall to his laboratory . While he described the basics of this unique program to us in an otherwise abandoned classroom , we could hear air compressors engaging , power tools grinding and exhaust fans humming in the adjoining workshop . His students were hard at work .

Van Der Hagen was talked into being a shop teacher in 2021 after he sold his NAPA businesses and had time on his hands . But if he was going to take the job , he insisted he had to do some things his own way .

“ I run my classes like a business , we do not run them like a school program ,” Van Der Hagen explained . When students sign up for the class , he said , “ they are an employee who now works for me , and of all of the work we do in here , 99 percent of it is for customers – people in the community outside of school .

42 / FEBRUARY 2025 / SNOWGOER . COM