Perkins V is formula funding. Your district receives an allocation every year whether or not anyone uses it well. A drone and autonomy pathway is one of the cleanest allowable line items in it.
Perkins V sends roughly $1.4 billion a year to states by formula, and at least 85 percent of it flows to local districts and colleges. You do not compete for it. You already get it. Section 135 permits those funds to be spent on equipment, curriculum, instructor training, and industry-recognized credentials for an approved program of study, and a drone pathway checks every one of those boxes. The constraint is almost never eligibility. It is that nobody wrote the pathway into the plan, and then the obligation window closed.
Before anything else, the number you need to put in the request. A twelve-drone classroom program from FTW:
Year one is the capital line. Years two and three are the recurring line. That structure maps cleanly onto how a Perkins budget is written. No per-team competition fees, no per-event entry fees, no separate curriculum subscription. A three-year prepay is available at a discount on the platform renewal. These are estimates for a single classroom bundle, not a quote. Current pricing is on the shop and is subject to change.
State guidance varies in the details, but reviewers converge on the same four questions. Answer them inside the request and you can predict the outcome before you send it.
Every Perkins expenditure has to trace back to a documented need and an approved program of study. If your Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment names aviation, advanced manufacturing, public safety, agriculture, logistics, or IT as high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand for your region, uncrewed systems sit inside those clusters, not beside them. Cite the labor market data you already collected.
State guidance routinely excludes supplies that get used up and items that become a student's personal property. Perkins equipment is tagged, inventoried, and stays with the program, and if the program closes it transfers to another approved CTE program. Ask any vendor one question: after a year of instruction, what is left in the room? If the answer involves rebuying airframes every semester, that is a consumable, and it is a compliance problem you budgeted for yourself.
The example that appears in state guidance after state guidance is the audio-video program that wants inexpensive cameras so every student can hold one, when professionals in the field use professional-grade gear. The request gets flagged. Perkins is career and technical education. The equipment is supposed to look like the job.
This one is new as of December 2025, and it is where an otherwise clean Perkins request gets rejected. It is covered in full below.
The American Security Drone Act took full effect on December 22, 2025. It bars federal grant funds, Perkins V among them, from being used to buy or operate drones from covered foreign manufacturers. The same restriction reaches ESSER, JROTC, STARBASE, NSF, and NASA STEM budgets.
Schools can keep flying drones they already own. What changed is what a federal grant dollar is permitted to buy. If your plan was to spend Perkins money on a Tello, a DJI, or another foreign-manufactured classroom drone, that is not a gray area, and the problem surfaces at audit rather than at purchase. Everything else about the pathway is still fundable. Only the hardware decision changed.
There is a second-order problem. Perkins equipment is a multi-year asset, tagged and carried on the books. The FCC added all foreign-produced uncrewed aircraft and critical components to its Covered List the same day, blocking new equipment authorizations from foreign manufacturers. A covered drone bought today has no successor that can clear US authorization and cannot gain capability through firmware. When a unit breaks in year three, the program does not scale down. It stops.
Ask every drone vendor, in writing, before the requisition: do you manufacture this aircraft or resell it, where is it built, and will you put that in writing for our procurement file? A vendor who cannot answer that in one email is not a vendor you can spend federal money with. The full regulatory picture is in our guide to the three questions to ask every drone education company. If you are currently running Tellos or Mambos, start with the replacement guide.
Perkins funds generally cannot be rolled over at the local level. Programs that identify a fundable pathway late lose the window to shipping time, not to eligibility. If you do not have a vendor engaged by late April, you are betting the allocation on a delivery date.
Do not submit a line item that says "drones." Submit a program. Reviewers are looking for these seven things:
Hopper is designed and assembled in the United States by FTW Robotics. It arrives as a finished aircraft, flight-tested before shipping, not as a kit. Students build it, fly it, code it, take it apart, and it stays with the program at the end of the year. Build Fly Code is the curriculum that runs alongside it, through Part 107 prep and the BFCC competition. One vendor, one purchase order, the whole pathway.
We supply a written compliance statement for your procurement file and a quote structured to Perkins V budget categories. Ask for both.
FTW Robotics is a manufacturer, not a grant administrator or compliance authority. Perkins V allowability is determined by your state CTE office against your Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment, approved local application, and state plan, and rules vary by state. Confirm every expenditure with your Perkins coordinator before you obligate funds. This page reflects the funding and regulatory landscape as of July 13, 2026 and will be updated as it evolves. FTW Robotics is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Education. To suggest a correction, contact FTW.
To everyone who owns a Hopper: thank you.
Some of you bought the very first Hopper in 2023. You believed before it was easy to, and we made you a promise, that it would get better, and better, and better.
We meant it every time we said we were close. We genuinely believed it, every time. The truth is it was harder than we imagined. Way, way harder. It took longer and cost more, in every sense, than we could have known. But we stood in it. For years. And then came the breakthrough.
Firmware 2.0 is here, and it is not a small step. It is a magnitude better, honestly a hundred times better than Hopper has ever flown. And every existing Hopper receives it, free, because that was always the promise.
We are proud of this one because we killed for it. And we couldn’t have done it without you. The early adopters gave us real feedback in real conditions, and that is exactly what now teaches an .ai platform that gets more intelligent with every flight, made smarter by the people in our network.
FTW is one of the few American drone companies that owns its entire telemetry and flight control stack. Wholly owned. Zero outside dependency. And it’s genuinely good. We have been teaching and learning on real systems, across the country, the whole way.
This July 4th, we shipped an American flight stack. And it’s actually good.