James Fishback stood in front of Spirit Airlines' now-empty Dania Beach headquarters this week and told laid-off workers he wants to turn the building into a public vocational high school. The Florida gubernatorial candidate said he would direct the state legislature to buy the 180,000-square-foot campus and convert it into a training ground for aviation and aerospace careers, funded mostly by private industry, not taxpayers.
It is the kind of proposal that sounds almost too tidy. A bankrupt airline's gleaming corporate campus, completed just two years ago at a reported cost of $250 million, repurposed into a school that teaches young Floridians skills the market actually rewards. Whether Fishback can deliver is another question entirely. But the pitch itself tells a story about what happens when a major employer collapses and a politician tries to fill the vacuum with something more durable than promises.
Spirit Airlines announced on May 2, in a statement issued at 2:45 a.m., that it would cease operations. All of its aircraft had been grounded the previous weekend. Thousands of employees lost their jobs. Passengers were left scrambling.
The airline's Dania Beach headquarters, a state-of-the-art campus approved for construction in 2019 and completed in 2024, now sits as a monument to corporate miscalculation. It houses eight full-motion flight simulators, classroom and training space, a cafeteria, a gym, and rows of computers.
The abrupt shutdown ended a 34-year run for the ultra-low-cost carrier. Spirit itself acknowledged the finality in its public statement:
"We are proud of the impact of our ultra-low-cost model on the industry for the last 33 years and had hoped to serve our guests for many years to come."
That pride did not save a single job. And now the building, worth a quarter of a billion dollars, will be sold through the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. A Spirit spokesperson confirmed the company welcomes inquiries, stating: "We are grateful that there are multiple parties interested in our state-of-the-art corporate campus. We welcome all inquiries, which will be addressed through the Chapter 11 process."
Fishback, who announced his candidacy to succeed Governor Ron DeSantis last November, held a press conference Monday in front of the headquarters. He addressed former Spirit workers directly and laid out his vision.
"I'm asking the state of Florida to do something with this building behind us to remember and to honor the Spirit employees who came from South Florida and make an indelible impact on this community."
His proposal: call on the state legislature to appropriate funds to purchase the building and open a public vocational high school serving students across Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties. He envisions enrollment of roughly 5,000 students.
The building's existing infrastructure makes the idea less far-fetched than it might sound on paper. Fishback ticked through the features:
"It has classroom space. It has training space. It has computers that help students model and do flight simulations. It has a cafeteria. It has a gym. It's 180,000sq ft and it's pretty darn centrally located."
The broader collapse of Spirit Airlines has drawn scrutiny to the Biden administration's decision to block the JetBlue-Spirit merger, a move that many observers believe hastened the airline's demise. That context matters here. The building exists because Spirit was investing in a future that federal regulators helped foreclose.
Fishback said he would not rely primarily on taxpayer dollars. Instead, he described a public-private partnership model in which 80 percent of the funding would come from Florida's largest aerospace and aviation companies.
"I would source most of the funding not from taxpayers, but I would go to these companies.... I'd pick up the phone and call Elon. I'd pick up the phone and call Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin, all these big companies, and say, 'Invest in this school because this school is gonna send you great, talented employees in just a matter of years.'"
He pointed to the earning potential of graduates. A school board member in Collier County, whom Fishback did not name publicly, reportedly praised the idea. Fishback said she was drawn to a model that would train students for jobs paying far more than typical starting salaries.
"She loved the idea of creating a school that would teach people real practical skills, great technical training, not just for jobs that are gonna pay fifty or sixty grand, but a lot of these jobs that would come out of Spirit High School, entry-level would pay a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars."
The consequences of the merger block left roughly 17,000 workers without jobs across the airline's operations. A vocational school that channels even a fraction of displaced workers' children into high-paying trades would be a concrete answer to an abstract policy failure.
The headquarters is set to be sold under Section 363 of the Bankruptcy Code. Attorney Barry Janay, a lawyer whose practice spans real estate, aviation, and litigation, told the Daily Mail the plan is legally possible, with conditions.
"If they can get the secured creditors to approve, then yeah, something like that absolutely could happen."
But Janay also noted that secured creditors in Chapter 11 need to monetize assets quickly. That creates a potential timing problem. The Florida legislature would need to approve an appropriation, and legislative timelines do not typically move at bankruptcy-court speed. Whether lawmakers could act fast enough to compete with private buyers remains an open question.
Governor DeSantis' office was contacted for comment on the proposal but had not responded as of the article's publication. No other Florida officials were quoted supporting or opposing the plan.
Fishback is not running unopposed. Congressman Byron Donalds is widely described as the frontrunner in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Fishback has drawn attention, and controversy, for his sharp rhetoric about Donalds.
In remarks captured on record, Fishback said of Donalds: "Byron Donalds is a slave. I'm sorry, he's a slave. He is a slave to his donors. He is a slave to the corporate interests, to the tech bros that want to turn our state into his own words, a financial capital." Donalds' team responded by referencing "racist Twitter trolls who attack him."
The language is reckless. Whatever Fishback's intended meaning, that Donalds is beholden to donor interests, the phrasing was gratuitously provocative and detracted from the substantive argument he was trying to make about corporate influence in Florida politics.
Fishback has also drawn scrutiny for his media appearances. Streamer Nick Fuentes wore Fishback campaign merchandise on his May 1 livestream and praised Fishback as "on fire" and "been incredible." Fishback appeared on a separate livestream with streamers Clavicular and Sneako. Asked about Fuentes, Fishback said he had never spoken to or met the streamer, and framed the matter as a First Amendment issue:
"We have to believe in the First Amendment, and I support the free speech of anyone who wants to disagree with that person's free speech."
That answer sidesteps the question of whether a candidate should welcome endorsements from figures known for extreme rhetoric. But it also reflects a broader tension in Republican politics: how to handle unsolicited support without either embracing or disavowing every voice in a fractured media landscape.
Not all reactions to the headquarters proposal were friendly, either. One commenter on X wrote: "This isn't it... you keep losing me. Spirit was an awful company. You seem to be another virtue signaling politician." Another called him the "Biggest grifter in politics." A third raised a more substantive objection: "This is a very bad idea. We can't even take care of the schools we already have. Bigger schools is definitely the wrong direction. Especially since we know government doesn't run any institution well."
That last criticism carries weight. Florida's existing public schools face their own funding and performance challenges. Adding a 5,000-student campus to the system is not a small undertaking, and the state's track record with large institutional projects does not inspire automatic confidence.
Still, the core idea deserves serious consideration. The country has spent decades funneling students toward four-year degrees while neglecting vocational and technical training. The result is a glut of graduates carrying six-figure debt and a shortage of skilled workers in trades that pay well and cannot be outsourced.
A vocational high school built inside an aviation headquarters, with flight simulators already installed, training rooms already wired, and a location already zoned for commercial use, is not a typical government boondoggle. It is a building designed to train people, being repurposed to train people.
The human toll of Spirit's collapse has been real. Pilots lost final flights. Workers lost livelihoods. Communities in South Florida lost a major employer. Fishback's proposal, whatever its political motivations, at least points toward something constructive rather than letting a $250 million building sit empty while lawyers sort through creditor claims.
Fishback said he would advocate for the plan even if he does not win the governor's race. That pledge is easy to make and harder to keep. But the underlying argument, that Florida should invest in practical skills training and use existing infrastructure to do it, is sound regardless of who makes it.
The question is whether any Florida leader will actually do the work to make it happen, or whether the wreckage of Spirit Airlines will simply be auctioned off to the highest bidder and forgotten.
A building full of flight simulators and classrooms, sitting empty in Dania Beach, is either a rebuke or an opportunity. Florida has enough of the former. It could use more of the latter.
