Middle school students toured the Ohio State University Airport on Friday as part of a project to encourage disadvantaged youth to go to college.
“Even though they live within a mile of campus, many students have never even been there,” said Edwin England, an employee of Educational Service Center of Central Ohio. “The field trip was a reward for students whose attendance has improved dramatically from their involvement with Project KEY.”
Project KEY, an acronym for Keep Engaging Youth, is a truancy intervention project that joins Columbus City Schools with the university. Friday was Scarlet Carpet Day, which allows students underrepresented in college demographics to “be a Buckeye for a day and get a college experience,” England said.
Students earned the field trip via two 30-day stretches of no unexcused absences from school, said Jeff McCreary, Project KEY advocate at Columbus’ Champion Middle School. Of the 70 students involved with the project at Champion, 18 qualified for Scarlet Carpet Day. Students from Indianola Middle School and Eastmoor Middle School also participated Friday.
“The airport is a valuable tool to get kids excited about college,” said Cecilia Lammers, communication assistant for the University Airport. “Even if they’re bored in the beginning, they’re interested by the end.”
At the airport, students got lessons in aerodynamics and aircraft maintenance before visiting the observation tower and sitting in flight-education planes.
The OSU Airport is one of the only university-owned-and-operated airports in the country. It gives tours to more than 2,000 people a year through its outreach program, which, among other things, teaches inner city kids about aviation.
On May 13, employees gave a tour to 100 elementary students, and on May 24, they taught aviation at an African-American community outreach center. However, the airport’s opportunities are not limited to children. On May 12, airport employees taught the general public about flying as a hobby through the Upper Arlington LifeLong Learning program.
OSU students use the airport as well and those interested in aviation can ask about introductory flight lessons. As the birthplace of the Wright brothers, Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, Ohio is well-known for its aviation.
“Increasingly, we are seeing more aviation minors as well as interest from faculty, staff and administrators,” said Jim Oppermann, aviation lecturer and faculty adviser to OSU’s Alpha Eta Rho aviation fraternity.
“There’s something for everyone out here, but nobody knows about us,” said Brad Hock, an OSU flight student and airport employee.
But before students can experience the airport, much less become a pilot, they need to get to college. Enter Project KEY and the P-12 Project.
Housed in the Office of Academic Affairs, the P-12 Project strengthens OSU’s commitment to preschool through 12th grade education. Its primary goal is to increase success for all students, but it has a special focus on “districts that serve children and youths from lower socioeconomic families,” according to its website.
By stimulating partnerships between Columbus schools and the university, the P-12 Project fosters college aspiration in youths. It also tracks demographics of high school dropouts and the long-term costs of such dropouts to the state.
The P-12 Project is important because, for the first time in U.S. history, the educational level of one generation of Americans will not exceed or even approach the level of its parents, according to a 2008 College Board report.
As a declining, aging and well-educated white population approaches retirement, it will be replaced by a growing number of younger minority citizens with lower levels of educational attainment. If current degree attainment patterns continue, individual opportunity will suffer, economic growth will falter and America’s place in the world will be that much more diminished, the report said.
Project KEY is part of the P-12 Project’s Partnership Development branch. P-12 arranged for Project KEY’s participants to visit the airport because it is an undervalued asset to the university and a teaching laboratory.
The OSU Airport is also an aviation reliever for Port Columbus International Airport.
Home to 230 aircrafts, it oversees an estimated 100,000 operations each year, including student training, leisure flying and corporate activity.
Columbus is a travel hub, as it’s a two-hour flight from 60 percent of the nation’s population. The OSU airport contributes roughly $103.6 million annually to Columbus through direct means of fuel and pilot supplies sales and taxes, and through indirect means of its users renting cars and visiting restaurants and hotels.
Because it is more isolated and accessible to private planes than Port Columbus, the OSU Airport sees its share of stars.
“Some celebrities like Vince Vaughn stop and chat with us,” Hock said. “But others like Tiger Woods only give us a glimpse as they move from plane to car.”
Woods will return to Columbus this week for the Memorial Tournament. The golf tournament makes for the OSU Airport’s busiest week each year, Hock said, “because every major golfer has their own jet.”
