Mobile AeroFest organizers, joined by Mayor Sandy Stimpson and leaders from the local education community, have announced a new slate of classroom programming that will bring decorated military veterans and professional athletes directly into area schools this spring. The initiative is part of AeroFest’s broader effort to build lasting ties between military service members and the Mobile community, ahead of the festival’s inaugural event.
The school programming, organized in partnership with Mayor Stimpson’s office and area schools, is scheduled for March 18 and 19. Participating schools include St. Mary’s Catholic School, St. Mary’s Home and Prichard Preparatory School. Students at those campuses will hear from Shannon Lee of the Bruce Lee Foundation, members of Team Froglogic, representatives of the Saluting America School Program, and fighters from Titan FC.
“One of the most exciting things about the Mobile AeroFest is that it is designed to be a permanent campaign to bring the best of our city and region together to improve people’s lives and make a difference,” Mayor Stimpson said. “We are very energized about the prospect of bringing some of our nation’s greatest heroes, leaders and athletes to our classrooms to make a positive impact in the lives of children.”
Mobile AeroFest Co-Founder Dave Glassman said the classroom visits reflect the festival’s larger mission of connecting diverse community resources in support of veterans.
“Mobile AeroFest is a dynamic platform that involves bringing together diverse communities and resources to support veterans and serve our community,” Glassman said. “We are fortunate to have such an impressive array of nationally recognized leaders and athletes who have offered to come forward to shape the lives of young people in our area — this programming provides an excellent prelude to the personal development and educational resources we will be offering at the AeroFest each year.”
The roster of visitors
Shannon Lee, daughter of martial arts icon Bruce Lee, will lead sessions tied to the Bruce Lee Foundation, where she serves as president of the board of directors. Lee is also chief executive of Bruce Lee Enterprises and of Leeway Media, a production company, and regularly speaks at schools and educational organizations around the world.
The Bruce Lee Foundation, a California-based nonprofit, works to preserve and share Bruce Lee’s philosophy and martial arts legacy through events, educational programs and instruction in Jun Fan Jeet Kune Do. For students, the sessions connect a name most know from movies and popular culture to the discipline and philosophy behind it — a message about focus, practice and self-knowledge delivered by the person closest to its source.
The Saluting America School Program, founded by Medal of Honor recipient Col. “Doc” Ballard, gives teachers tools to build classroom activities centered on patriotism and the sacrifices made by active-duty service members and veterans. Students who take part complete a Tribute Card recognizing those who serve, and the program is funded through foundation grants, corporate sponsorships and volunteer support.
Titan FC, a mixed martial arts organization whose COO Lex McMahon has worked to connect the MMA community with the U.S. military, will send athletes into classrooms to talk with students about self-discipline, self-respect and respect for others. The organization has previously staged events nationwide aimed at morale-building and personal development for current and former service members.
Team Froglogic’s message
Team Froglogic will be represented by its founder, former Navy SEAL and behavioral training specialist David Rutherford. Over the past several years, Rutherford has built a following of more than 2.6 million people through motivational speaking, videos, a radio show and books rooted in lessons from more than 70 years of Navy SEAL and Underwater Demolition Team history.
His Froglogic program centers on four concepts — forging self-confidence, embracing a team mentality, facing fear and living with purpose — that organizers say translate well to a classroom setting.
The festival it leads into
The classroom sessions serve as a lead-in to the larger Mobile AeroFest, a multi-day festival planned for March 20-21 at the Mobile Aeroplex. Organizers describe the event’s mission as improving the lives of wounded veterans by combining entertainment, technology and community outreach in a large-scale public event. The classroom initiative gives students an early look at the festival’s veteran-focused mission before the public event takes place.
The timing places the school visits in the final week before the festival gates open, when public attention in Mobile turns toward the Aeroplex. Organizers have treated that week as an on-ramp rather than a separate effort: the same speakers who appear in classrooms on Wednesday and Thursday appear on festival stages that weekend, and teachers who bring their classes into the sessions are being encouraged to carry the material into the public event.
For the festival’s first year, the classroom slate also functions as proof of concept. A new event asking a city for attention, sponsors and volunteers has to show what it is for, and two days of veterans and athletes in Mobile classrooms make the case more concretely than any brochure. The visits give the inaugural AeroFest a civic footprint before the first ticket is scanned.
The Aeroplex setting is part of the festival’s identity. The Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley, the former Air Force facility on Mobile Bay that now anchors the region’s aviation and aerospace industry, gives an air- and veteran-focused event both a fitting venue and a working backdrop — hangars, runways and the companies that employ veterans across the Gulf Coast’s growing aerospace sector.
The two-day school program before the festival follows a deliberate sequence. Students hear the messages first in their own classrooms, in groups their teachers know, and then see the same themes staged at scale at the Aeroplex — performances, exhibits and demonstrations that extend the classroom conversations. Organizers describe that arc as the point: the festival is meant to be a permanent campaign rather than a one-weekend spectacle, and the schools are where the campaign begins each year.
The four concepts give the school visits a teachable structure. Self-confidence and teamwork are familiar themes in elementary and middle school programming; facing fear and living with purpose push students toward questions about goals and resilience that educators in the participating schools have welcomed. That the lessons come from a former SEAL, and are illustrated with stories from the SEAL teams’ history, gives them an authenticity that assembly speakers are not always able to offer.
The pairing of military voices and athletic ones is itself the design. Titan FC fighters and a former SEAL speak the same language of discipline and preparation that student athletes hear from their coaches, and the classroom format lets them unpack it in conversation rather than performance — questions from students, stories from the visitors, and a teacher steering the exchange toward the school day that resumes when the speakers leave the room.
What the visits mean for the participating schools
The three participating campuses represent different corners of Mobile-area education. St. Mary’s Catholic School serves students in the city’s Catholic school system; St. Mary’s Home cares for children in residential placement, a population that rarely appears on the tour schedules of national speakers; and Prichard Preparatory School educates students from Prichard, the small city just north of Mobile whose schools have worked for years to expand opportunity for its students.
Bringing speakers of this profile to St. Mary’s Home in particular stands out. Residential children’s facilities seldom host visiting athletes and veterans, and organizers’ decision to include the Home alongside the conventional school campuses signals the breadth the festival’s outreach claims for itself. For the students at all three campuses, the sessions put them in the same rooms with a Medal of Honor recipient’s educational program, the daughter of Bruce Lee, a former Navy SEAL and professional fighters — visitors their schools could not assemble on their own.
Veterans and the Gulf Coast community
The initiative sits within a broader Gulf Coast reality: the region is home to a dense veteran population, sustained by the area’s military installations, shipbuilding workforce and the large Coast Guard and National Guard presence along the coast. Festivals and programs built around veterans find a natural base here, both in the audiences that attend and in the volunteers and sponsors who support them.
Mobile AeroFest’s model differs from a benefits concert or a stand-down event in that it aims at the whole community — schools before the festival, the general public during it, and wounded veterans as the beneficiaries throughout. The entertainment and technology programming that anchors the public weekend funds and frames the outreach, in the organizers’ telling, rather than existing for its own sake.
Whether the permanent campaign takes hold will be visible in whether the school program returns each spring alongside the festival. The inaugural event’s classroom slate gives the model its first run: two days, three campuses, four organizations and a roster of speakers whose names carry well beyond Mobile. If the sequence works as designed, students who heard Rutherford talk about facing fear in March will carry that session with them when the festival gates open at the Aeroplex — and the festival will have begun its work in Mobile’s classrooms rather than outside them.
The city’s support gives the model its institutional footing. A mayor’s office that lends its partnership to the school program is effectively endorsing the festival’s claim to be a civic campaign rather than a private show, and the school districts’ willingness to schedule the visits during instructional time is its own measure of the program’s perceived value. Both will be tested against results — attendance at the festival, feedback from the three campuses and whether the speakers return.
Organizers have not announced whether additional schools will join the program in future years, but the partnership structure with the mayor’s office and area schools is built to grow. For now, the March 18 and 19 sessions mark the first time the festival’s mission has moved from the Aeroplex grounds into the classrooms of Mobile and Prichard.