ARLINGTON — Sonny Blankenship excels at 3D design at Weston High School, to the point that his teacher has lauded his virtual architecture skills.

“He’s a really talented animator,” Chris Hauk, who teaches animation and web design at Weston, told state Sen. Kirk Pearson and other visitors Oct. 9. “He built this really ominous haunted mansion for Halloween.”

Pearson, who laughingly acknowledged he’s a member of “the older generation,” admitted that he’s still surprised by how much potential there is in such fields.

“And these kids take to it in ways that even I’m not always familiar with,” Hauk said. “They’re digital natives.”

Blankenship was one of half a dozen students who served as guides for the adults who toured his school, and two others, as part of the Arlington School District’s “Know Your Schools” event. He touted the opportunities that Weston has afforded him to visit real-world employers and take part in job fairs staffed by representatives of Boeing, Zodiac Aerospace and military contractors.

“They really work to help you get career-ready here,” Blankenship said, before he showed Pearson and others the robot he’d been working on. “You can program it to follow light, sound or movement. It can chase flashlights if you want to. It’s not easy to program, though, because if there’s just one flaw, it won’t function.”

Pearson drew laughter again when he asked what the term “GUI” meant, saying, “I know it’s a stupid question,” before Blankenship told him, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” and explained that it stands for “Graphical User Interface,” a more visual way of programming commands into robots.

“There’s a lot of misconceptions about this school, like students only come here if they’re in trouble,” fellow Weston senior Samantha Frakes said. “But we actually don’t have any more problems than other high schools. Our staff is able to go much more one-on-one with us, and everyone is super-encouraging. It’s the best school I’ve ever been to.”

Weston Principal Amie Verellen-Grubbs, who also serves as career and technical director for the school district as a whole, noted that Weston serves up to 200 students a day, between regular-day attendees and those who take part in after-hours courses. She added that as many as 20 percent of the students come from outside the district.

Diane Kirchner-Scott, assistant superintendent of the district, prefaced the tour by arguing that reports of “failing schools” misrepresent the progress that Weston and other schools had made.

“When the state received the waiver from No Child Left Behind, we went from Adequate Yearly Progress to Annual Measurable Objectives,” Kirchner-Scott said, elaborating that, instead of requiring 100 percent of students be at standard by 2014, it required schools to reduce the number of students not meeting those standards by half by 2017.

The state’s waiver was conditional, based on the Department of Education’s concerns about teacher and principal evaluations, and by April of this year, it had been revoked, returning the state’s schools to federal accountability standards.

“No school district met that target,” Kirchner-Scott said. “But by the state accountability standards, we had made progress.”