SD, as a temporary student you've got an M-1 visa. Such a visa is "sponsored" by a specific training organization, whether it's a university or a flight school. You cannot train at any other facility on such a visa. In fact, the organization that sponsors your M-1 visa is actually listed under "annotation" on the visa itself. (And yes, I did get my passport out to check that!)
So technically if you start training with another facility on your current M-1 visa you're in breach of your visa regulations. There's two ways this can be handled:
- The school is not cooperating with you, for whatever reason. In this case they have every right (and maybe even an obligation under TSA rules) to report YOU to the INS. Who will probably fine you, cancel your visa altogether and then deport you.
- The school is cooperating with you. In which case they can probably act as some sort of intermediary between you and your "new" flight school in such a way that technically you're still training at your old school, but the old school buys whatever services they need for you from the "new" school.
I'm not too sure about the obvious third way: You could try and contact the INS yourself, see if you can get your visa changed to another flight school. But I don't know if the INS allows this.
Whether the school wants to cooperate is probably up, to a large extent, to your own attitude towards the school, and the reason for switching. But switching schools, as a foreign student, is not an automatic right under the terms of your M-1 visa. And in certain cases, in the heat of an argument, the school may just use that against you, to "encourage" you to sit out the contract that you signed with them for instance.
So before everybody starts judging OFT (or any other school) badly because somebody was "threatened with deportation", I'd like to know the circumstances under which that happened. I, for one, had no problems with them. And when the weather threatened to upset my exam schedule seriously, they were very cooperative in letting me find a solution to do my exams at another school. (In the end that solution was never required. The weather got better in the nick of time.)