Wright Flight allows students to reach new heights
Young pilots take wing for learning history, improving grades
By DAN PARSONS Staff Writer
The Washington Daily News
Isabel Juarez had never flown in an airplane before Saturday. The 10-year-old JohnSmallSchool student joined
16 others at Warren Field Airport who earned the chance not only to fly but also to take the controls of a single-engine plane by graduating from the Wright Flight program.
“I was scared before we took off,” Juarez, who is still learning English, said through a friend and translator Saturday morning. “I saw a lot of water while we were up there.”
The students were the inaugural class of the program at John Small. Last year the program, brought to BeaufortCounty by Cypress Landing residents Tom and Sandy Saccio, was offered through the Beaufort County Boys and Girls Club.
Participating students sign a contract at the beginning of the course promising to stay drug, alcohol and tobacco free. They also pledge to raise one school subject’s grade by five points before the end of the course. That element of the program is one of the most rewarding for Sandy Saccio.
“We had one student that went from a 65 to an 88 in a subject,” she said Saturday. “Once they see they can achieve things, they realize there are other things they can achieve. They learn that although they did not succeed the first time, they can still succeed.”
The curriculum is a basic history of aviation from the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903 to the Space Age, which began with the launching of Russia’s Sputnik 1 on Oct. 4, 1957. The one-hour courses are taught once a week for nine weeks. The course concludes with a cumulative exam on which the students must score 85 or higher of a possible
106 points to pass.
Leonel Brown, 11, said his favorite period he studied in the course was World War II, specifically the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway.
“I liked how the Americans took the Japanese by surprise because they broke the secret code,” he said.
If and when a student fulfills all of the terms of the original contract, they are treated to a flight over Washington and the PamlicoRiver. The students are even allowed to take control of the airplane for a time.
“It was really fun and a little scary,” Brown said. “You could see cars that looked like little toys.”
Though the Beaufort County Board of Education supported the program begin offered at John Small, it has offered no help in funding the program, which Sandy Saccio said costs about $60 per student. That’s before the students take off. With fuel costing $4.80 a gallon and the price of rental planes, the program’s overall cost becomes more daunting. The Saccios have started a 1903 Club — named for the year the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk — in the county to raise money for the program. They are also accepting one-time donations to keep the program airborne.
With all 22 students enrolled in the program having completed their obligations, the couple hopes the program will gain legitimacy and take off.
“We have to fund this ourselves,” Saccio said. “I’m in the process of looking into grant funding and finding sponsors. But we have pilots that donate their time, which is a tremendous help.”
The program also costs class time. Because it is not an official part of the school-board sanctioned curriculum, the teacher, Mary Carter Taylor, has to find time within her regular lessons. That doesn’t worry John Small Principal Lisa Tate, who said given the program’s apparent success, she will recommend it to other principals in the county.
“It’s exciting for the kids because the get to fly and they improve their grades,” Tate said Saturday at Warren Field. “It has shown some of them a whole other world that they might never have seen.”