Sue Sitter/PCT Students in Linda Burbidge’s small unmanned aircraft systems program at Dakota College at Bottineau work to repair drones.

Rugby High School students will have a chance to develop technology skills and earn college credit beginning in the 2023-24 school year with a dual-credit drone program offered by Dakota College at Bottineau.

The course receives funding from a grant supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Secondary Education, Two-Year Postsecondary Education and Agriculture in the K-12 Classroom Challenge Grants Program

The program also uses support and guidelines from Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

“We’re part of that membership of schools called the UASCTI,” said Linda Burbidge, who chairs the small unmanned aircraft systems program at DCB.

“It’s the collegiate training initiative. So, the FAA recognizes there’s going to be a huge need for drone pilots, so we have a meeting every three months,” Burbidge said. “We’ll meet with other two-year schools offering similar programs and talk about what has worked well.”

“We’re going to offer some of our basic drone classes through dual credit online,” Burbidge added. “We can learn a lot by talking in the classroom or doing some things online and virtually, but the hands-on part, like working on the drones and flying the drones, that needs to be done at each high school.”

“So, as part of that grant, we wrote in money to train in an instructor at each of the high schools,” she added. “I’ll be training them in to be a licensed drone pilot and they’ll be able to take their students out and run a lab at each of their classes.”

“That way, they’ll be able to do some flight at their school and hopefully, do some fun things in their communities with it,” she said.

“Here on campus, we’ve done some neat things with the drones. We work all the time with the school. We take drone photos of the campus and send them on to our photography and marketing departments,” Burbidge noted. “So, it’s a really good opportunity.”

“Younger students gain awareness,” she said of the technology.

Burbidge said the classes offered to high school students would focus on the basics of drone operation and maintenance. Students will also learn about their uses in the agriculture field.

In Burbidge’s class at DCB, students learn to operate and maintain drones. They prepare for unmanned aircraft pilot exams, which they take with the FAA.

Some of her students come from Canada, and they prepare to take a similar test that would enable them to operate drones in their country.

Student Leighton Holstein, a Manitoban, worked to repair a drone in the class one morning in late October. “For our work we use drones for crop scouting in agronomy,” he said.

“Right now, (agricultural applications) are really our focus,” Burbidge said. We’ll have three core courses plus a flight lab. But, the three courses could be something like this where we talk about basic drone topics, like what are they used for, care and maintenance, safe flight, and things like that.”

“We’re planning to start in the next school year,” she added. “That’s our goal. So, right now, I’m working on just developing the curriculum and making sure it would translate well onto an online format, because that’s how we’re going to do the main core of the learning, and we’re going to make a plan around getting the instructors trained at each high school.”

At Rugby High, Superintendent Mike McNeff said, “We hope to have something in place by next fall.”

“It sounds really exciting,” Rugby High Principal Jared Blikre said of the program. “They’ve got some nice equipment and that would be pretty cool for our kids to use.”

McNeff and Blikre said math instructor Dan Seykora had expressed interest in teaching the lab portion of the drone course.

“We’re targeting five to 10 kids for the course,” McNeff said.

“Logistics are hard to say for the class size,” Blikre noted. “It depends on the equipment we get and of course, it’s got to fit in schedules.”

“But, we’re really excited about it,” McNeff said.