Ferndale Public Schools
Ferndale Public Schools is a public school district in Metro Detroit in the U.S. state of Michigan, serving most of Ferndale, all of Pleasant Ridge, and portions of Oak Park and Royal Oak Township.
History
A school was built in the 1870s at the corner of Woodward Avenue and Nine Mile Road. It was replaced by a wooden building on the same site in 1909, but that building burned on December 28, 1914. It was rebuilt a year later in brick, and became known as Ferndale Central School. The building remains as commercial space.1918 saw the first graduating class of Ferndale--two students. The district was seeing fast population growth and by 1920, Lincoln High School was built at the northeast corner of Livernois and Nine Mile Rd. Although Ferndale's only high school, the district had a tradition of naming schools after United States presidents until the 1950s. When Ferndale High School opened in January, 1959, Lincoln became a junior high.
In the 1950s, the area of the school district serving Oak Park was embroiled in a controversy over progressive education. Andrew Jackson School opened to serve this area in fall 1950. It was unlike existing district schools, both in terms of education and the building itself. Designed by Modernist architect Eberle M. Smith, the school's classrooms were essentially open to the corridors, contained tables rather than desks, and were connected directly to single-stall bathrooms that were not gendered by signage. Principal Scott Street, with the backing of Superintendent Roy Robinson, worked with parents in developing flexible teaching methods that caused disagreement amongst parent-teacher associations at other district schools and some school board members.
Devotees of progressive education were outraged when, in February 1959, the school board demoted Principal Street from his position at Paul R. Best School, a newer school down the street from Jackson School. The School Board claimed Street had been openly campaigning against certain school board members. By that July, eleven teachers had resigned in the district, many in protest of the school board. Street accepted a superintendent position with the U.S. Army in Libya before becoming a principal in Ypsilanti 1962.
Throughout the 1970s, the district was involved in court battles over the racial segregation of Grant Elementary. The district had built Grant in 1926 in Royal Oak Township, a majority-Black area outside of the majority-white city of Ferndale where, even as late as 1944, there was no sewer system and inadequate police protection. A Federal Court judge found that the school district had practiced de jure segregation by allowing Grant to be overcrowded with Black students while other district schools, which were all more than ninety percent white, were under capacity. On October 7, 1980, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan issued a plan by which Ferndale's elementary schools would be integrated by reassigning some students to different schools.
In 2015, the district began an extensive restructuring process, led by the Board of Education and deeply dependent on community involvement. Changes to curriculum, expansion of academic opportunities for students and site transitions were all based on the district's strategic plan.