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By Ben DeGrow
Seven years ago, Highland Park Schools went through a highly publicized period of turmoil and organizational upheaval. The troubled time for that Detroit-area district was brought on by a steep drop in enrollment and the deep financial crisis that followed. By contrast, the district’s newest upheaval is rooted less in obvious signs of distress than in conflicting visions of what success looks like.
The state enacted a charter school law in 1994, and the first charter school, known in state law as a “public school academy,” opened a year later. By 2012, the idea of governing a school through a contract, or charter, had expanded beyond individual schools to encompass entire districts. Highland Park, in metro Detroit, and Muskegon Heights, on the state’s west side, both came under state emergency management because of their fiscal woes. The emergency manager for Highland Park decided to convert the conventional district into a “public school academy system.” When the manager sought outside help to oversee the schools’ operations and instruction, only the Leona Group, a Michigan-based charter management company, stepped forward.
In 2018, the state relinquished its control over Highland Park, and the newly empowered district school board pushed Leona out in favor of another management company: Promise Schools. The new operator has the charge of bringing Highland Park’s sole public school to new levels of academic achievement and winning back thousands of students who have left for opportunities elsewhere. But many families with students at the school are unhappy with the Highland Park board, which first must prove it can calm a turbulent situation and regain their trust.
Educators and officials in Highland Park have struggled with the task of preparing the city’s poor and often transient student population for college and career. The new school operator has a hard task in front of it. The school is improving yet still fragile, and its new leaders will have to find a way to preserve and build on the cultural gains of the last few years. They will also have to help student achievement, which has started to make gains, improve more and improve faster — all while dealing with the disruption that brought them to Highland Park in the first place.
