The Ypsilanti Community has a long and proud history of excellent primary and secondary education.  We have been blessed with having a high value for education, driven in part by the immersion and presence of a broad spectrum of Post-Secondary opportunities which includes the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, Cleary College, Concordia College, Washtenaw Community College, and number of UAW educational opportunities and Construction Trades and other Skilled Trades opportunities.  Our primary and secondary education choices have always included secular and non-secular, private and public, and for a long time University affiliates. Indeed, world renowned scholars, athletes, artists, engineers, professionals, and so many others can trace their roots to the educational experience that they received in the Ypsilanti primary and secondary schools.

    Over the past several decades, education policy driven by state and outside policy makers has made the challenge of primary and secondary education in the Ypsilanti area much more challenging.  Additionally, Michigan has seen a steady drop in the population of K-12 age children.
More recently, some in our region were able to convince the community that the answer to these challenges was to merge the Ypsilanti and Willow Run School districts.  To be sure, both had become economically and socially distressed.  But as we have mentioned briefly above, each district had a long and proud history of success in the broad spectrum of the activities of their programs and students.  And each had its own culture and identity.  This merger resulted in one district with all of the challenges of mixing these cultures; and the merger only compounded the social and economic distress that had been growing in each district separately.

To make matters worse, in addition to many other issues that were left unaddressed, the merger failed to address the staggering debt that had been incurred by each district, the challenge of which was only going to exacerbate when the districts would lose more students to schools of choice, charter schools, alternative schools and private schools as a result of the merger.

Now, nearly a decade after the merger, in a county that has enjoyed great social and economic diversity and success because of the intersection of commerce, culture and education in our region, we find a district that is 85% non-white, and with dramatically programmatic offerings, faculty compensation, extracurriculars, and capital resources.  And this is in a region where we find the most affluent and dynamic economy and social culture in all of Michigan.

So, while we work in a macro sense to address this broad based racial and socio-economic inequity, separation, and isolation, we have established the Student Development Program, Inc., to work more directly in a micro sense with individual students to remove complications and barriers that they individually experience as extremely unfair challenges and competitive disadvantages to their growth and success.