In Huntsville, Alabama, a hybrid public boarding school hoping to be a blueprint for the future of education.

Almost from scratch, you're building a drone that you can market out in the real world.

Here, the high school Morning Bell is replaced by a symphony of creation.

Whether it's the glass, the open air, we want this to be a lab school. We want to be a national model. We didn't want it to feel like a school. We wanted the vibe to be an exciting place to come in.

What is this?

So this is our robot. They move side to side. It's tracking itself.

You're talking literally about almost reinventing the wheel. Absolutely. You're cutting metal with water in your shop class in high school. Yes, sir. Come on. Are you going to show me how to use one of those?

Oh, nice.

Okay, that was harder than it looked, but this school is designed around all things stem and all things cyber. Yeah, that means they're even teaching high schoolers the dark arts of hacking and defending.

You've got this room's network up, and you're able to see everything that's connected, all the different data that's being shared across this network. Hypothetically, hack the network or protect the network. Yes. And you're doing that all in code in the classroom. No other school that I know of has anything like this.

As for the more traditional core subjects like history and language arts, same familiar titles, but with a twist.

We're all so interested in this STEM field, the engineering, the cyber, and that really drives our artistic endeavors as well as well as our history, our literature. You start to realize that Engineering ties in with so many subjects.

Social engineering psychology. Everything is really down to how things work.

When it comes to grades, there are no A's, no Fs.

We want grades to reflect what students learn. What do they know? We got that industry. It's like, Hey, you got to write a proposal that works for this. If you're not there yet, go back and fix it.

And getting them ready for the AI-infused workplace of tomorrow means every student must finish all their core high school learning in three years. And when they become seniors, they leave the school every day to work a real-world job in either a government agency with an aerospace contractor or private industry.

What do you do? I was working under a grant with the DOD called the Viceword Grant, and through a local college.

The Department of Defense Yes, sir. And you're in high school? Yes, sir. Who are your mentors that you meet with? Mine works at Deloitte, and he's been very helpful.

It's those kinds of partnerships and funding that make this school, where about half the students live on campus, tuition free.

How would you respond to somebody who might see some of these classrooms, see a private company name outside of the classroom, and be a little bit put off by that?

We couldn't have this school today if we didn't have our private partnership, and we got incredible partners.

As for that high school dorm life, how many live on campus?

You live on campus? Live on campus? This is dorm life.

This is where we all live.

This looks like college.

Kira Richardson is starting at Harvard in the fall.

Is it scary first moving to your high school?

Oh, absolutely. Being 14 and moving out of my home.

If I may. Yeah. What?

You have a rocket? You have a rocket under your bed?

I do. What?

I'm Like so many students we met, she gets excited about the day she'll finally get to launch from a school where preparation for the future means learning to fly high above the rest.

The answer is, how do you engage these students into a learning environment and give them ownership of that?

You're not just building these drones, you're programming them as well? Yes, sir.

In the fields I'm going to go into, I'm going to be learning all the time.

Could you imagine going to a traditional high school after this? No, I could not. 3d printed carbon fiber rockets under a high school bed. Incredible stuff. Go, Sintanels.

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