Amid all the talk of a comeback in the core of Detroit -- with new restaurants, housing and hotels -- the subject of schools continues to get short shrift.
"We can build new buildings, restaurants and stores, but until we fix our schools, longtime Detroiters will continue to be ill-served and Detroit will lose young professionals when they start families," writes KC Crain, 39-year-old president and chief operating officer of Crain Communications.
KC Crain (Company photo)
In a column in Crain's Detroit Business, the company's third-generation executive writes:
Not many people realize Detroit's unique position: Almost half of the children in Detroit go to a school in the Detroit Public School Community District; almost half go to a publicly financed charter school. The rest — about 30,000 — go to private schools or a school outside of city boundaries...
You can imagine how frustrating it is for our new superintendent when he has control of less than half the possible school population of K-12 kids in Detroit. And that he has to watch those 30,000 kids leave Detroit every day for a school outside the city's borders.
Like the auto industry has experienced, we have over-capacity, too many schools — about 200 buildings — for 100,000 kids. As populations have shrunk across the city, the buildings for the most part haven't moved. That has created large deserts with no schools in some places and other parts that have far too many competing for the same kids...How can a parent find the best school? It's hard to navigate.
