Like the neighborhood public schools of Grand Rapids, the academy, on the grounds of Gerald Ford Airport, receives $7,500 per student in state funding. This helps pay for its rigorous science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, curriculum and its faculty, including the four flight instructors on staff.
But it does not pay for the school’s two airplanes; many of its science, engineering and mathematics facilities; or its distinction as the only school in the country that offers flight instruction as part of the curriculum. Students can graduate and fly a plane before they can rent a car or legally have a beer.
How? The DeVoses alone have given more than $4 million to the school. Mr. DeVos donated an airplane from his private collection. Delta Air Lines donated another.
“The concept is good. I just wish a public school would’ve thought of starting that rather than have it be a charter,” said Mary Bouwense, president of the Grand Rapids teachers union. “But I guess we wouldn’t have been able to afford it. You have to have a boatload of money to start a school at the airport.”
The school, publicly funded and privately operated, is representative of the tensions in the school choice movement that have grown under the Trump administration
