It was shop class--you've got to wear safety goggles when using power-tools, soldering irons, and so forth.
Come to think of it, if we'd had coed shop back in our day, that probably is the only classroom in which something like this could have happened: the lumber storage area would be completely ignored by the teacher when the kids were using power-tools, etc. (And rightly so, since the tools were dangerous.)
Oh, now I see it in the article - I missed that.