Original Research by School Decision on Berlin Township S/d #3
Berlin Township S/D #3 is a single-school rural district in Ionia County, Michigan, serving kindergarten through sixth grade. Its one school, Coon School, is open and operating. The enrollment is very small even for an elementary-only district, with just a handful of students spread across the grade levels, and one grade reporting no students at all. The student body is entirely white. No free-or-reduced-price lunch data, special-education counts, or English-learner figures were reported, so the economic and special-population picture is incomplete.
State assessment results are unavailable. Every M-STEP proficiency rate the state collects for this district in math, English language arts, science, and social studies across grades three through six is suppressed, with zero students recorded as tested in each grade and subject. This kind of suppression is common in extremely small districts where reporting any result could identify individual students, so a parent should read the gap as a reflection of scale rather than a sign of poor performance. There is no graduation rate because the district does not serve high school grades. No multi-year academic trend data was available either. Without any reported proficiency figures, it is not possible to characterize how students here perform relative to state benchmarks or neighboring districts on standardized tests. A parent looking for academic evidence would need to contact the school directly.
The district does stand out in one area that the county comparison set captures: attendance. Berlin Township's chronic absenteeism rate sits in the top quartile among Ionia County's seven districts, meaning it reports the lowest share of chronically absent students in the group. That is a genuine strength for a district of any size, suggesting students are showing up regularly. Per-pupil current spending is in the upper range among the county's districts, which makes sense given that a very small district spreads fixed costs across few students.
No course-access, staffing, discipline, or Title I data was provided. No programs data was available. No civil-rights data was reported. The district brief searched for parent-relevant changes such as referendums, curriculum updates, or property-tax shifts and found none. No locale brief was provided for the township, so there is no sourced community context to draw on beyond the housing data.
The housing market in the district's zip codes sits below both the state and national benchmarks for typical home values, making the area relatively affordable by statewide standards. Home values have appreciated at a moderate pace recently. The district draws from areas near Ionia, Lake Odessa, and Portland, with the largest share of housing value coming from the Ionia area. The estimated monthly mortgage cost at current rates is modest relative to national median household income, with a price-to-income ratio that looks manageable by national norms. Rental data was not available.
For a parent considering this district, the picture is thin on published academic evidence but carries some practical positives: strong attendance and above-average per-pupil spending. The extremely small scale means a child here would be in classes with very few peers, which some families seek and others find limiting. Because state test results, program offerings, staffing details, and special-population data are all missing from the public record, a family would need to reach out to Coon School directly to understand what the day-to-day academic experience looks like and how the school supports individual learners.
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