“The Extreme Sacrifice Detroit Parents Make to Access Better Schools” is a powerfully tragic piece by Erin Einhorn of the Atlantic Magazine that captures the connection between schools closing and communities disintegrating.
Consider four current challenges Detroit parents face today, that are described in the Atlantic article, and Matchbook Learning’s response to each of them.
1. “If you ever want to break a community, just start by breaking down the school system and eventually you’re just going to have deserts and graveyards.” Closing schools decimates a neighborhood because of the anchor-effect such schools have on retaining families.
Matchbook Learning is in the business of turning around failing local public schools. Rather than seeking to build new schools from scratch, our entire five-year history has been singularly focused on helping neighborhood schools, transforming these schools from historical failure to promising success. You could say we are in the school closure prevention business.
2. “Many of the city’s new [school] options do not provide transportation, and new schools are often far from where kids live—a serious challenge in a city where a quarter of families have no access to a car and where the public-transit system is woefully insufficient.”
Matchbook Learning provides free bus transportation at both its elementary campus and middle school campus at Michigan Technical Academy. Our elementary campus is approximately eight miles away from our middle school campus and so we realize this can be challenging for families in Detroit, some of whom, according to the article, are used to driving anywhere from 52 to 93 miles a day round-trip! So we have created bus routes that link our two campuses and stagger our school bell times so that parents can make one pick up and drop off at the same elementary campus for both their elementary age children and returning middle school age children. We’ve purchased as well as leased our own buses and hire our own bus drivers and bus aides to ensure that lack of transportation is never a reason for lack of a quality education.
3. “The prominent city leaders behind the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren last year flagged this imbalance in a report that issued a series of recommendations for turning around the city’s schools. It called for the creation of a Detroit Education Commission that would have oversight authority over public and charter schools to better distribute school options around the city—an idea that’s now the subject of heated debate in the capital.”
Matchbook Learning agrees that the City of Detroit has way more available school seats than children, but way fewer high quality school seats than the children of Detroit, regardless of their zip code, deserve. Our charter school, Michigan Technical Academy, proudly joined the Enroll Detroit movement, which per the Coalition’s recommendation attempts to unify the dizzying array of school choices for Detroit parents into a seamless, singular enrollment process that ensures a minimum level of quality, transparency and equity for families of Detroit.
4. “I have to do this to make his dreams happen. If he’s passionate about it, then I’m going to do whatever it takes in rain, sleet, snow, bus and bike. I’m going to make it happen.”
This quote was from a parent of a high school student. Detroit parents often face tremendous challenges, going to school themselves, finding employment and staying employed. Driving or taking city buses through inclement weather, job interviews, etc. can strain the limited resources of any family, including its most precious resource, time. While we advocate for every one of our students being at school every day, on time, we have also invested heavily in our own open-sourced, technology platform Spark. Spark contains complete playlists of content, projects, assessments, etc. that students, teachers and parents alike can track via dashboards. School is closed due to a winter weather storm? A child is home sick and unable to attend school? No problem. So long as there’s an Internet connection, Spark can be accessed anywhere on any device. Learning never stops. We meet your passion with our own for your child’s learning so you and they can realize their dreams.
Interested? Apply now at our charter school, Michigan Technical Academy:
Elementary School serving grades PreK-5: 19940 Mansfield, Detroit, MI, 48235. (313) 272–1649
Middle School serving grades 5-8: 23750 Elmira, Redford, MI, 48239 (313) 537-9311
