Original Research by School Decision on River Heights Academy
River Heights Academy operated as a single-school charter district in Flat Rock, Michigan, serving students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The school was operated by Distinctive Learning and was the only school within the River Heights Academy School District. It closed in June 2023, which means this is no longer an active educational option for families. Flat Rock Community Schools subsequently purchased the building to house an Early Childhood Center, which publicly reported sources indicate will offer programs including the Great Start Readiness Program and tuition-based preschool.
Because the school has closed, much of what a parent would want to know about it is either unavailable or no longer actionable. The state assessment record from the final year the school was open is fragmentary. Across nearly every tested grade and subject, proficiency results were suppressed because no students were tested. This is consistent with a very small school where many grade levels may have had too few students to produce reportable results, or where testing simply did not occur in certain grades. The only grade with any testing data was sixth grade, where a small handful of students sat for both the math and English language arts portions of the M-STEP. In both subjects, proficiency fell in the lowest reporting band, and the proficient count was zero. This is a weak academic signal, though the tiny number of test takers means a parent should treat it as limited evidence rather than a broad verdict on the school's effectiveness. No other grade produced usable proficiency data in math, English language arts, science, or social studies.
Enrollment and demographic data were not available in the records we reviewed. We looked for total enrollment counts, free-or-reduced-price lunch figures, racial and ethnic composition, and special population rates including students with individualized education programs and English learners, and none were reported. Publicly reported sources describe the school as having served a small student body, but the specific figures are not carried in the data provided here. Without these details, it is not possible to characterize the peer environment or the level of student need the school was designed to meet.
No community or economic context was available for the Flat Rock area in this dataset. Housing values, rental costs, and local growth indicators were all absent. We also found no program listings, no course access information, no staffing data, no attendance figures, and no discipline or civil-rights records. A comparison fact-set placing this entity among neighboring districts was not provided, which is consistent with its status as a closed single-school charter district.
For a parent reading this, the practical takeaway is straightforward. River Heights Academy is no longer open. Families who might have considered it would now look to other options in the Flat Rock area, including Flat Rock Community Schools, which absorbed the building for early childhood programming. The academic data from the school's final year is too sparse to draw confident conclusions about what the educational experience was like, and the absence of enrollment, demographic, and program information leaves a substantial gap. A parent interested in understanding what this school offered at its peak would need to seek out archived records or contact Flat Rock Community Schools directly, as the data here does not support a fuller picture.
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