The top reported proficiency rate is 50% in Math. The lowest is 7% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Hillcrest Elementary School
Hillcrest Elementary School is a regular public school in the Crestwood School District, serving kindergarten through fourth grade in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. It sits on North Vernon Street in a working-class inner-ring suburb of Detroit, about twelve miles west of downtown. The school draws a modest enrollment for its grade band, with most of its students identifying as white and a smaller share identifying as Black, Hispanic, or Asian. A very large proportion of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which is consistent with the broader community profile of Dearborn Heights, where median household income sits below the national level and a meaningful slice of residents live in poverty.
On state testing, the most recent M-STEP results tell a mixed story that splits sharply by grade. Third graders at Hillcrest posted strong results, with a clear majority proficient in math and a solid majority proficient in English language arts. Those third-grade numbers place the school well above the Wayne County median for overall proficiency and in the top quartile among the county's districts, a comparison set that includes well over a hundred districts. Fourth-grade results, however, tell a different story. Fourth-grade math proficiency dropped to roughly a third of tested students, and fourth-grade ELA landed in a similar range. This is a sharp decline from the third-grade performance at the same school, and a parent may want to look into this further with the school to understand what is happening between those two grades, whether it reflects a cohort difference or something structural in the fourth-grade experience.
Science proficiency data exists only from an older testing cycle and shows very few fourth graders reaching proficiency. Because that result is several years old and Michigan has since changed its science assessment framework, it is best treated as a historical snapshot rather than a current indicator. No trend data was available to show whether performance is improving or declining over time, and participation rates for the current year were not reported, so a parent looking at the latest results should keep that gap in mind. The school does not serve high school grades, so there is no graduation rate to report. Data on individualized education programs, English learner status, chronic absenteeism, staffing levels, and discipline was not available in the provided materials, so those dimensions of school climate and student support could not be assessed here.
Dearborn Heights itself is a bedroom community without a traditional walkable downtown. Commercial activity runs along major road corridors, and daily life is car-dependent, with most residents commuting to work elsewhere in the Metro Detroit area. The city was assembled from discontinuous pieces of Dearborn Township and a connecting strip from Inkster, which helps explain why civic buildings and schools are spread across separate campuses rather than clustered in a center. Two public libraries, the Caroline Kennedy Library and the John F. Kennedy Jr. Library, serve as civic anchors alongside the Dearborn Heights Justice Center. The city is divided among five school districts, and Crestwood is one of three with a zoned high school inside the city limits.
The housing market around Hillcrest is affordable compared with both state and national benchmarks. Typical home values in the school's ZIP code sit well below the Michigan median and roughly a third below the national median. Rents are also moderate, and the estimated monthly mortgage on a typical home in the area is close to what a household would pay in rent, making ownership a realistic option for families with steady income. The market has seen modest home value appreciation recently, while rents have stayed roughly flat. Listings in Wayne County broadly have been moving at a moderate pace, with supply slightly easing and demand cooling compared with the prior year. Population in Dearborn Heights has been declining modestly, and the suburb is largely built out, with no major new housing developments identified in available public sources.
No parent-relevant district changes, such as bond issues, curriculum overhauls, facility projects, or program launches, were found in the search for Crestwood School District, so that information was left out rather than guessed. What a family gets at Hillcrest is a small elementary school in an affordable, quiet suburban setting, producing genuinely strong third-grade results and weaker fourth-grade ones, with a high-poverty student body and limited publicly reported information on climate and support services. Families considering this school would benefit from asking directly about the fourth-grade proficiency drop, what supports exist for students from low-income households, and how the school approaches transitions between grades.
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