An Alabama school district is trying to break the cycle of poverty by enrolling students in programs that allow them to eventually graduate with college credits or degrees

Soaring 1,000 feet above rural Alabama, Trent Stewart is airborne for the second time in his life. The 17-year-old takes control of the three-seat aircraft for just a moment before his flight instructor is in charge again, steering Trent closer to the 10 hours of flight time he needs before he can feel the fear and exhilaration of a solo flight.

Stewart has dreamed of being a pilot since he was three, but he might never have been airborne if it wasn’t for Pike county school district being one of the only public schools in the US that pays for students, who mostly come from impoverished backgrounds, to train to become professional pilots.

There are 2,141 students in the rural school district and 77% of the children, aged four to 19, qualify for free or reduced priced lunches – a measure often used as a proxy for school poverty levels. The district spends $10,527 per student annually, about $2,000 less than the national average.



The pilot training is one small piece of the school district’s extensive plan to break the cycle of poverty. “There’s a fine line between defining poverty as a barrier and using it as an excuse for why kids can’t do well,” said Mark Bazzell, superintendent of Pike county school district.

From 1,000 feet up above the municipal airport in Troy, Pike county’s main city, homes and businesses are obscured by dark cypress tree forests. The only buildings distinct from the endless green landscape are the local university and large factories that employ many of the 19,191 people who live in the main city.

The region is bouncing back from the recession – a gun factory is being built on one end of the town and a whiskey distillery on the other – but families are still struggling. The median household income in the school district is $36,700, about $8,000 less than the state’s median income.

Decades of data that show children from poor backgrounds, especially those who are not white – 49% of the school’s pupils are black and 44% white – are less likely to succeed. But those statistics have little bearing on the school district’s simple philosophy: every child is capable of learning.

It doesn’t matter if a student lives 30 miles from school, the 40 district school buses travel that far. If a student’s parent is incarcerated, it is an opportunity for a teacher to work that much harder at supporting them in the classroom. If students don’t have the money to pay for coats in an unusually cold winter, teachers raid their closets and give warm clothes to the children.

“Our expectations are that every student can do well,” Bazzell said.

So, each student is educated at a granular level.

‘We’ve got to give them everything here’

Pike county elementary school is home to 700 students aged seven to 12, and its principal, Tracey Arnold, is constantly buzzing through the school’s hallways. She paused to speak to the Guardian in the place she calls her “situation room”.

It’s twice the size of an average classroom and looks like the contents of an office supply store have been emptied on the walls.

Two of the walls and several rolling whiteboards are covered with charts wider and taller than most humans and decorated with different colored numbers and symbols. Other walls are plastered with smaller sheets of paper also coded with sticky notes and highlighters.

Encoded in those markings was a precise story about each student, whose names are written next to the dozens of standards for core subjects like math and English.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bulletin board displays examples of things that students in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade are able to control in their lives in a hallway at Pike county elementary school on 30 August. Photograph: Erin Nelson/The Guardian

Point to any child on the chart and Arnold can tell their story.

There is the special needs girl who kept falling out of her chair during a test. What have the teachers learned? Before she’s assessed, you must ask what happened at her home the night before because her home life is unstable. On that particular day, she said no one had given her her behavioral medication.

“We’ve got to give them everything here,” Arnold said.

Teachers meet monthly to discuss the students, but informal conversations about how to improve the learning experience are constant. The data isn’t only to identify who needs more help and why, but also so teachers who are struggling with certain lessons or students can come to their colleagues for advice and strategies.

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This kind of monitoring, along with robust goal-setting and character development, is meant to prepare young students for the district’s unique programs for adolescents.

These enrollment programs put students in secondary education courses so they can be on track to graduate high school with college credits or an associate’s degree, a two-year credential that costs less than a four-year degree program and can be transferred to a university.

There is the flight program, as well as courses for exercise and health, business and finance, arts, global studies, health information technology, Stem and agriscience technology.

The district goal is for 30 to 35% of each graduating class to leave with an associate’s degree and for the rest of the students to graduate with another meaningful credential, such as certified vocational programs, not the standalone ones typically associated with high schools.

In 2018, 20 of 153 students graduated with an associate’s degree and 34 with college credits.

Mara Tieken, author of Why Rural Schools Matter and associate professor of education at Bates College, said there is emerging evidence that dual enrollment programs are good for acclimating students to college and inspiring them to continue with their education.

This is especially relevant for rural students because they do not pursue higher education at the same rate of suburban or urban students for reasons including that their academic preparation is not the same, universities are farther away and a four-year education is expensive.

Twelve million students were enrolled in rural public schools in the 2010 to 2011 school year, representing 24% of the 49 million students in the country that year, according to the US education department.

Tieken has not studied Pike county, but she said in taking a cursory look at the district, it was clear “some really promising things” were happening there, including the focus on higher education, the relationship between the school and local economy and, especially, the role teachers play in making these things happen.

Her concern was that historically, when education access improves, there is a corresponding differentiation in how students are educated. “What I worry about is rural kids, particularly rural students of color, being disproportionately tracked into associate’s degrees, so then they are not able to continue on with education which we know corresponds with higher earnings and all kinds of other benefits,” Tieken said.

She was encouraged, however, that in Pike county these programs are not treated like the endgame, but a jumping-off point for more.

Ignoring expectations to build a better future

Given the students’ backgrounds, expecting them all to graduate with credentials is an almost revolutionary concept.

Like many rural children, the 14 students enrolled in the agriscience technology program at Goshen high school are experienced farm hands by age 15, but they had not been as exposed to the professionalization of the industry.

In the program, they take college-level courses and run a 21-acre farm with three greenhouses, cows and chickens named Claudia, Penny, Nugget and Lou.

The students said their parents and relatives were jealous about the opportunities they had to get a credential in agriculture, ensuring they would be higher paid and have more job opportunities than if they had just graduated high school.

The agriscience academy facilitator and teacher, Jamie Rich, said her students often had part-time jobs to help support their families and that half wouldn’t have considered college if it hadn’t been presented directly to them in this cost-effective way.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Davis Hughes, left, a student pilot with Trojan Aviation and senior at Troy University, goes through the pre-flight inspection with Trent Stewart. Photograph: Erin Nelson/The Guardian

What’s good for the students is good for the state. By 2025, Alabama needs to have added 500,000 highly skilled adults to the state workforce, according to industry projections in a 2018 report by the Alabama Workforce Council.

To pitch Pike county children as an answer to the state’s workforce development problems, Bazzell had to shake up the school district when he took over in 2003.

Severals schools in the district had been put on watchlists in the 1990s, but Bazzell began his tenure by saying poverty would no longer be an excuse for poor performance and anyone who felt different would probably be uncomfortable sticking around. Within about 18 months, 19 teachers left, were put on probation or retired.

The teachers, school principals and district leadership who remain, or have joined since, speak to each other in their own language, comfortably bouncing back and forth in clipped sentences, finishing each other’s thoughts. There is no small talk or hesitancy, but a remarkable easiness as they provide updates on problems, ideas for other initiatives and anecdotes about their families.

The conversation about what needs to be done next is never ending.

Donella Carter, who was a Pike county student and is now head of instructional services, said: “The problems we’ve had here have always been the problems – but what are you going to do about it?”

The district looks closely at where money is being spent and whether that is most effective for developing the skills students need to enter the workforce.

Bazzell found, for instance, that paying 100% of the costs for a few students to go to flight school would give everyone more bang for their buck than hiring a teacher to teach advanced courses that may result in just as many students earning a sliver of college credit.

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So far, two students have left with a pilot’s license. Trent will be the third and four more are in line.

Carter and Mark Head, who oversees prevention and support services, estimated that of the seven students in the flight school, one would have definitely gone into aviation and a second might have, both because they had family in the air force. They didn’t see how the other five would have recognized that it was a career opportunity for them or would have been able to finance the training needed.

Aviation is in the blood of Alabama, where the first flight school in the country was located. The state is home to the first black pilots trained to fly in the US, the Tuskegee airmen. Their air force unit, which trained near and occasionally in, Troy, at the beginning of the second world war was segregated, just like life outside the base, where race separation was enforced by law and violence.

But it speaks to the nature of poverty that a pilot’s license would not be an obvious path for Pike county youth.

Through each step of the taxi, takeoff, cruise and landing, Trent focused on how the aircraft moved and glimpsed the living, breathing world below – so rich compared with the pixelated scenes he’d grown used to while practicing every day in the school’s flight simulator.

Trent’s careful with his words, and responds to questions with a firm “yes ma’am” or “no sir”.

Back on the ground, he broke up those responses with a smile, repeating how good it felt to be up in the air.