A tiny San Diego County school district that has struggled with declining enrollment in recent years is getting ready to launch an aviation program that officials hope will attract new students.
State and federal grants are funding the program in the Warner Unified School District, which serves 210 students in kindergarten through 12th grade in the far northeastern edge of the county. The curriculum would create a second “career pathways” option in the school district, where an agriculture program has already shown success, said district Superintendent Melissa Brown.
Roughly a third of Warner Unified students come from local Indian reservations — including the Los Coyotes Band of Cahuilla and Cupeno Indians, IIPAY Nation of Santa Ysabel, and Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians — and officials say the program will offer needed training in an area starved for jobs.
“It gives our students more leverage with some sort of future career,” said Brown. The district is working on a plan to feed students to San Diego’s Miramar College, which offers FAA-certificates in aviation operations and maintenance technology.
Officials recently hired Katie MacLeod, an academic counselor, to help map out the district’s aviation program. History teacher Scott Loefke, who is a pilot, has offered to teach some of the classes and additional personnel may be hired.
The curriculum is still under development, but the pathway will provide a sequence of coursework that partially fulfills FAA training requirements for both aircraft mechanics and pilots. Students in the program will touch on all aspects of aviation, including repairing engines, operating a plane, and possibly piloting an aircraft at a nearby airport.
They’ll get firsthand training on everything from the fuselage to adjustable cowl flaps needed to cool a plane’s engine.
A home-built Cavalier plane was recently donated to the district by Art Peterson, a Warner Springs resident and former president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona. Peterson is helping Warner Unified to model its aviation program after a similar aviation academy he created for troubled kids in Riverside at Flabob Airport.
The all-wood Cavalier is the crown jewel of the program as it’ll give the students an opportunity to learn how an airplane works. It’s currently without an engine, and its wings have been taken off in order to fit into a storage shed.
“We’re trying to stabilize enrollment,” said Brown, who noted that other areas of study under consideration — like water conservation and wineries — didn’t resonate as well as aviation because of its historic ties in the community.
Warner Unified is in various stages of applying for a total of $320,000 in grants from the California Pathways Trust Grant and Career Technical Education Incentive Grant Program to give birth to the aviation program, and provide ongoing funding for the district’s agricultural career pathway program.
Key to the district’s program will be its relationship with Sky Sailing, a nearby airport that mainly serves as a gliderport for enthusiasts.
The gliderport, which has a 3,500-foot landing strip and 80 gliders, has been visited by big-name actors and astronauts over the years. They’ve included Richard Dean Anderson, the actor who played MacGyver in the 1980s TV series; Jesse White, an actor who portrayed the Maytag repairman in television commercials, a role that he filled from 1967 to 1988; and Astronaut David Walker, who flew on four space shuttle missions in the 1980s and 1990s.
Karen Willat, who served on the Warner Unified board of trustees from 1996 until 2008, said some mechanics from the family-owned airport have volunteered to help students learn how to repair airplane engines.
“It’s all in the developmental stage,” Willat said of her airport’s relationship with the startup program.
The aviation program grew out of work this past summer with the San Diego County Office of Education, and worries over losing state funding due to declining enrollment. The district lost $122,000 in state funding because enrollment fell from 63 in the 2014-15 school year, to 56 this year.
A big part of the school district’s declining enrollment woes have been tied to the closing of Warner Springs Ranch, a popular resort that opened in the 1920s and had operated as a cattle ranch and trading post since the mid-1800s.
When the resort closed down following the Great Recession, many of the employees whose children attended Warner Unified schools left the area. Some have already come back, lured by affordable housing options. Others may come back as the resort reopens under new ownership.
