For some neighborhoods in Detroit, public education’s history

Out in my backyard in Detroit, where pear trees hang heavy with growing fruit and the buzz of honey bees fills the warm air, I stand over a wheelbarrow full of mulch, chatting with my neighbor about the plight of Detroit Public Schools. A mother of four, Lori Weertz has chosen not to send her children to Detroit Public Schools because the quality of education there is abysmal. But there’s one other reason: there’s no school to go to. Really. Even if she wanted to get her kids into public school, she said the one in the area — a walkable distance — was closed years ago.

Ferry Elementary School, the school that served her neighborhood, was closed in 2005. Since then, the only school option for the children in the area are charter schools, some miles away.

If she sent her kids there, she would be paying for the bus to come and pick them up and bring them home, a fee among others that she can’t afford. So she has decided to home school her three youngest boys.

Continued – She told me about Ferry Elementary down the street, and how it has been accumulating litter and has been a target of vandalism. Since its closure three years ago, the large, three-story building has not been leased out nor is it serving any purpose.

So when I asked her opinion about the expected drop in enrollment to below 100,000 this fall that would trigger a flood of charter schools and cripple public education, she looked at me with a knowing smile and said, “Minni, in this neighborhood there’s already no public education.”

Since 2005, 67 schools in Detroit have closed due to plummeting enrollment numbers. Perhaps the damage has already been done.

Maybe it was the matter-of fact way she said it, but in all the news I’d heard over the past weeks about DPS, nothing hit quite as hard as hearing it from her, a parent, first hand.

I decided to pay the abandoned Ferry school a visit to see what the city was doing with the vacant building. Was this space truly not being utilized, or were they at least trying to do something productive with the old building? The embedded video shares what I found.