Every school day hundreds of kids from Detroit travel up Woodward and many other routes on their way to Ferndale’s schools. They don't need to move to go to these schools.
Ferndale has wooed Detroit students, exercising their ability to educate students from other districts under Michigan’s "schools of choice" policy.
The district has two high schools that cater almost exclusively to students from Detroit.
One of them, University High, has 426 students only seven of whom come from Ferndale.
The school system has been called a "funnel district" because of traffic in and out of the district. Kids coming in from Detroit and some suburbs like Oak Park and Hazel Park make up one end of the funnel.
The other end of the funnel is made up of kids leaving Ferndale for suburbs a little farther out.
You can learn more about how this got started and the financial and educational consequences of it on our State of Opportunity page.
This story is the first in our week-long series looking at how the neighborhood school and education in metro Detroit has changed over the past few decades.
