Aviation High helps students apply math, science

SEATTLE – Four years ago, 103 students enrolled in Aviation High School, a fledgling experiment with an aerospace-themed curriculum, run out of a rented airplane hangar and a few classrooms.

Now a respected college-preparatory school with nearly 400 students, Aviation High School will graduate its first class in June and has plans to build a $36 million school on the Museum of Flight campus.

The school draws students from districts around the region and boasts some of the strongest WASL scores in the state, which administrators believe is proof that students succeed when they’re interested.

“This is the mechanism to get kids excited,” said retired NASA astronaut Bonnie Dunbar, president of the Museum of Flight and an Aviation High board member.

A public school in the Highline School District, Aviation High is open to students in any district. The aviation theme is threaded throughout every aspect of the curriculum, though the school, says Principal Reba Gilman, is less about flying airplanes and more about learning to apply math and science in the real world.

Now housed in an old Des Moines school near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Aviation High will get a permanent home in 2011 at the Museum of Flight. There, students will be at the epicenter of Seattle-area aviation, Gilman said.

While students already use the museum’s resources, they’ll be even closer.

“We’re sort of a big laboratory for them,” Dunbar said.

The museum’s plans for expansion call for a three-story building on property the museum recently acquired in Seattle. The Museum of Flight offered the district a long-term lease on the property.

But before the new school is even designed, Aviation High needs to raise a lot of money.

The Port of Seattle and the Highline School District have together pledged $10 million. More than $1 million has been allocated toward the school in Gov. Christine Gregoire’s 2008 budget. That’s enough to get started designing the facility.

Gilman, a veteran school administrator, came up with the idea for a theme-based high school after years of watching dismal math and science test scores in the Highline School District. As director of the district’s Puget Sound Skills Center, a technical high school, Gilman saw that students weren’t applying the skills they had learned in school once they were in the work force.

After brainstorming ideas for a theme-based school, aviation stuck out, Gilman said.

Aviation High is the only school of its kind in the state and one of few in the country.

The school gives students the foundation they need to pursue a career in a math- or science-dependent field, Dunbar said.

When she was growing up in Yakima County, Dunbar recalls telling her eighth-grade teacher that she wanted to build and fly spaceships. The teacher promptly informed Dunbar that she’d need to start by studying algebra.

Dunbar said that advice put her on an engineering path that eventually led her into space. She made five space flights as a NASA astronaut.

“It shows what you can do with any student who’s inspired,” Dunbar said.