That's exactly what I mean. Can a Mom&Pop Part 61 flight school gain SEVIS approval, if they so wish? Or is there some significant barrier that prevents them from doing so? Or are the SEVIS regulations (which fall under USCIS/INS or whatever it's called) specifically written to exclude Part 61 (which falls under the FAA, a totally different branch of the government)?
The underlying issue is that a school in the US that offers JAA PPL training will for all practical purposes operate as if they were a Part 61 school. After all, for JAA PPL there's no mandatory groundschool, academic program or whatever. The two reasons for them to actually be a Part 141 school is to get SEVIS approval and because most (all?) of them offer an ATPL program too.
Now if a certain school would do everything to become a Part 141 school but after their two-year provisional period would only have trained JAA PPLs, who do not complete an academic program yadayadayada, that school may well lose the Part 141 accreditation, and thus the SEVIS approval.
Hence, again, my question: Could these schools not simply be a Part 61 school and separately gain SEVIS approval? And if not, why not?
Just out of curiosity of course. But it actually goes a bit deeper than that. Suppose I (as a foreigner) would want to get trained at a Part 61 school for an FAA PPL. The way the regs are now, as you explain them, it seems that this is totally impossible. After all, I need an I-20 VISA, which can only be sponsored by SEVIS approved institutions, and a Part 61 school cannot be SEVIS approved. Sounds like unfair competition to me. There's got to be a way around this.