A Salem, New Hampshire educator and project engineer, Anthony Helinski spent decades applying the same iterative discipline to lesson plans and pipeline infrastructure alike. Now he is turning that same precision toward something more personal.
The Kind of Teacher Who Brings Snakes to Work
There are teachers who stand at a whiteboard and teachers who fill a room with living things. Anthony Helinski was the second kind. During his seven years at Lawrence Public Schools in Massachusetts, his middle school science classroom held fish, frogs, snakes, and mice alongside the usual furniture. The animals were not decorations. They were the point.
Helinski’s approach to teaching was grounded in the belief that learning happens when students are required to engage with something real. He built lessons around inquiry and hands-on discovery, drawing on universal design principles to reach students with different learning needs. His classroom was, in the most literal sense, a working environment.
That philosophy did not emerge from a textbook. It came from someone who had spent years being coached, tested, and evaluated inside competitive athletic structures and who understood that performance is always the result of repeated effort against real resistance.
A Player Who Became a Teacher Who Became an Engineer
Helinski grew up in Salem, New Hampshire, where he played goalie for the Salem Saints youth hockey program and competed in Little League baseball. He was recruited to play hockey at Suffolk University in Boston, where he played from 2002 to 2005 before stepping back from the sport to complete his BA in History in 2006.
The transition from athlete to teacher was less a departure than a continuation. At Suffolk, Helinski had already begun navigating the tension between competitive commitment and academic development. By the time he enrolled at Lesley University for a Master of Science in General Science, completing the program between 2009 and 2011 with a 3.9 GPA, that tension had become productive. He returned to Lesley from 2012 to 2014 for a second master’s degree in Education, finishing with a 4.0 GPA.
Two master’s degrees. Two distinct disciplines. The combination pointed somewhere specific.
Engineering by a Different Name
After his time at Lawrence Public Schools, Helinski moved to a teaching position in Andover, Massachusetts, where his focus shifted from science to engineering and design. The new role suited him. He led students through lessons in robotics, rocketry, and ergonomics, and ran an after-school civil engineering club alongside a woodworking club.
He was, in effect, doing what good engineers do: identifying a problem, designing a solution, testing it, and iterating. The only difference was that the problems were student-sized and the solutions came in the form of understanding. His teaching method reflected what would later become his professional operating principle: ask what worked, what did not work, and what could be changed or improved.
Surrounding yourself with positive thinkers who hold different views can make a significant difference in how a position unfolds, he has noted. It is a perspective shaped equally by classrooms and project sites.
Into the Utility Sector
When Helinski left teaching to pursue a career in engineering and project management, he joined Progressive Pipeline Management, a specialized pipelining company based in Wenonah, New Jersey. The work involved designing gas main remediation jobs for major utility companies along the east coast.
The role required precision, coordination across technical teams, and the ability to move between field conditions and documentation. Helinski held the position of Senior Project Engineer and applied his background in education to develop a new curriculum for employee onboarding and operator qualifications. It was the same skill set, applied at a different scale.
He remained in the role until September 2025, when he departed the company. The transition left him, for the first time in a long career, without a defined institutional affiliation. What filled that space had been waiting for years in the corner of his garage.
What Gets Made by Hand
Helinski’s woodworking practice began as a hobby and evolved quietly alongside his professional life. He makes cutting boards and other handmade items, often giving them as gifts. The work he describes through Helinski Custom Woodworking is casual in origin but precise in execution.
The connection to his earlier career is not hard to trace. Teaching engineering design to students, he asked them to think about function and form together. In the woodworking shop, he applies the same thinking. A cutting board is, in its way, a small engineering problem: material selection, proportion, finish, durability. Every piece he makes answers a question he set himself.
He approaches craft the way he once approached lesson planning and pipeline design: with the discipline, focus, and attention to detail developed through years of athletics and structured professional work. He states that everything starts with self-care and mindfulness, and that mastering one’s own clarity tends to clarify what comes next professionally as well.
Anthony Helinski and the Work Ahead
Helinski’s career does not follow a single narrative arc so much as a set of recurring themes: precision, iteration, instruction, and the belief that impact on others is the real measure of a well-spent effort. He built his reputation across two distinct professional worlds and is now navigating a third.
Salem, New Hampshire is not a place that produces a great deal of public-facing professional content. Helinski’s combination of credentials, hands-on experience, and clear professional philosophy makes him an unusual figure in the local context: someone whose career was shaped by teaching children to build things, then building things himself at an industrial scale, and now returning to the smaller, more personal version of that same work.
The question he has always asked of any project remains the operating principle: did it work, was the outcome optimal, and did it make a collateral impact on the people and events around it? For the moment, he is building toward an answer.
