SailFuture
St. Petersburg, Florida
Providing project-based experiences to students in maritime and outdoor environments, is, like the wind, the power in the students’ sails.
Winner of 2022 STOP Award for Sustainability
About
This innovative school model defines transformative learning. With a belief that schools should design themselves around student and family needs and not the other way around, Florida’s SailFuture Academy designed a learning environment where students within foster care, in trouble or at risk can gain education and access to employment through paid apprenticeships. This tuition-free entrepreneurship high school leverages project-based learning and paid apprenticeships to prepare students for successful careers by focusing on the maritime business in addition to culinary and construction experiences. Their full project-based curriculum allows students to drive their own education solving real-world problems.
Their Story
This is not just a school. It’s a learning ecosystem that literally takes high school age students around the world to refocus and repair what education should be for students who have revolted against their education.
Michael Long
Founder & CEO
We are quite literally breaking the cycles of poverty and abuse and paving pathways to economic freedom and social mobility.
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Why they stand out
Students are taught to think like entrepreneurs across themes like maritime, culinary and construction experiences, and are required to experience a 6-8 week long international sailing expedition and to learn life skills. SailFuture staff are integrally involved with families through home visits and off site activities. They never skipped a beat during the pandemic or since. The school’s founder, Mike Long, knows how to get results from troubled youth. He spent more than a year in and out of Florida’s juvenile justice system and was placed in a multitude of intervention programs too numerous to count. His passion to inspire and empower young people who are caught in a broken system stems from his own journey through ineffective and oppressive approaches to behavior reform.
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How they STOP for education
Three school-owned social enterprises employ students in paid apprenticeships and also generate net income for the school. Last year, the enterprises donated $150,000 representing 25 percent of the school’s operating budget.
Students are eligible for the state’s wide variety of Family Empowerment and publicly-funded scholarships.
Transformation doesn’t even begin to describe the integration of project-based learning and experiences that are motivating students to return and persist in education and career success.
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Winning their award
SailFuture hopes to soon be a second family and to offer a second chance to more than 1,000 students across Florida including a brick and mortar campus in Tampa, deepening the repository of projects available to students and opening a second site in Hillsborough county to be a solution for those families plus adding more sailing expeditions – to learning seamanship, and services projects in the ports of call – particularly for students who do not attend the academy.
