Yardley resident Jeff Bishop is quite the Woods Man

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Yardley resident and TCNJ alumnus Jeff Bishop teaches industrial arts to students who have significant physical, developmental, or emotional difficulties

EWING, NJ (10/01/2013)(readMedia)-- If Jeff Bishop's signature wooden bowtie doesn't make it clear enough, then the parade of handmade chairs and dressers and toys emerging from his industrial-arts classroom each day certainly does: Bishop is a guy who likes making things-and who likes to help other people make things, too.

This Yardley resident has spent the last 28 years showing students at Regional Day School in Jackson, NJ, how to build anything they can dream up, from grandfather clocks to rocking chairs to guitar stands. Each wooden creation is made from scratch, but still more impressive, it's constructed by a student who has significant physical, developmental, or emotional difficulties.

The projects give Bishop's students, who range in age from 5 to 21, "feelings of self-pride," he says. "These youngsters can say, 'Even though I'm disabled, I can still make a canoe. I can still make a chest of drawers.' They feel their sense of worth."

He's engineered all sorts of special modifications using fixtures and jigs to ensure that all 110 students in Regional Day School can participate, and he assigns tasks based on each student's abilities, often using an assembly-line setup for the physically disabled students. A blind student was recently charged with running a drill press and sanding down sharp edges. An autistic student drilled 2,000 holes for a set of math games. A student with emotional challenges built a full-size, Mission-style grandfather clock.

Bishop understands the difficulties his students face each day because he once struggled with physical challenges of his own. He was born with a congenital heart defect -known then as a "blue baby"-and had one of the first open-heart surgeries in Philadelphia in 1957. A second surgery at age 14 fully corrected the issue and "I had a new lease on life," Bishop says. "I could do anything I wanted to."

He joined his high school's swim team and became an active athlete, but he also never forgot what it was like to be considered "different" for those first 14 years. By the time he arrived at The College of New Jersey in 1971, he knew what he wanted to study.

"I went in and said, 'I would like to study industrial arts and take it to the special-needs youngsters,'" Bishop recalls. "Special-needs youngsters were closeted back then. They were not talked about; they were not shown."

In his senior year, the College approved a certification program for industrial arts in special education and Bishop became the first of its graduates. He is a strong supporter of his alma mater, and very generously supports scholarships that directly benefit students studying technological studies at TCNJ, the school's Dean of Engineering, Steven Schreiner, said.

Bishop went to work at Regional Day School in 1984 and has been there ever since, overseeing student projects and spearheading all sorts of traditions, including the annual creation of 2,000 wooden games and toys that are sent off to local elementary schools during the holiday season.

"Just like the woods, everybody's different," he says of his students, "but they can all make something."