Highland Park's Incredibly Shrinking School District

Many decades ago, Highland Park was a well-to-do enclave tucked inside the city of Detroit.

That's not the case today. Poverty, crime and blight are pervasive.

The school district also seems to have fallen on hard times and appears to be vanishing.

Curt Guyette writes in Metro Times:

In all, the Highland Park School District has had five emergency managers at the helm over the 4 1/2 years it has been under state control. 

Still, Highland Park’s public school system continued to disintegrate, finally reaching the point today where it barely exists at all.

For anyone seeking a measuring stick to assess the job done by the district’s emergency managers and the for-profit charter school company hired to run Highland Park schools, the most telling statistic may be this:

At the time of the takeover, the district had 969 students. Today, that number, according to the state’s school data web site, is 311 — a drop of nearly 70 percent. Moreover, all of the students attend the district’s last remaining school, which serves both elementary and middle school students.
Belton, who has three school-aged children, plans to soon join the ranks of those fleeing the district.