You Can Fly: $1 million in scholarships awarded
High schoolers and teachers all benefit
AOPA recently announced the 80 high school students and 20 teachers who won scholarships of $10,000 each in the 2019 You Can Fly High School Flight Training Scholarship program. The total of $1 million in scholarships awarded to exceptional, aviation-minded students age 15 to 18, and teachers dedicated to advancing aviation education in their classrooms, was made possible by a grant from the Ray Foundation to the AOPA Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
The scholarships, available to AOPA members, are a component of the AOPA You Can Fly program, a set of initiatives working toward building a larger, more vibrant pilot community. The You Can Fly initiatives are getting and keeping more pilots flying by introducing youth to aviation, improving the flight training experience, supporting flying clubs, and helping lapsed pilots return to the cockpit.
You Can Fly has inspired more than 3,500 high school students through its aviation curriculum, helped launch more than 100 new flying clubs, and made it easier for more than 7,000 formerly inactive pilots to complete their flight reviews.
Scholarship recipients will be able to use the money for flight training expenses to pursue a primary pilot certificate. They must complete a flight training milestone—achieving either solo or earning a primary pilot certificate—within one year of receiving a scholarship.
Dream come true
For Carla Ladner, a teacher at Hudson High School in Lufkin, Texas, the scholarship means living a dream that she thought would never come true.
Ladner said that after taking six hours of flight training, she had crunched the numbers at lunch one day and concluded that going further would not be possible. Returning home that day, she broke the news to her aviation-enthusiast husband that her pilot training may have come to an end. “We were both a bit down about it,” she said.
It was four hours later when she checked her email and found a message from AOPA, congratulating her on being one of the 20 teachers picked to receive a $10,000 scholarship.
“It makes you speechless,” she said, describing the award as “a gift that’s not measurable.”
As the only aviation teacher in her school, it has been up to Ladner to shape the program. Now having AOPA’s You Can Fly high school curriculum as a resource helps her organize and deliver her lessons—a process she hopes to enhance further by eventually earning her flight instructor certificate, she said.
The scholarship has become a great start. “There are no words to describe the gift that they have given me and my students and our school,” she said.
Dan Namowitz
Related Articles
