The top reported proficiency rate is 57% in Math. The lowest is 50% in English language arts.
Original Research by School Decision on Detour Arts and Technology Academy
DeTour Arts and Technology Academy is a charter school serving students from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade in a single building in De Tour Village, at the eastern tip of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It is one of the smallest schools you will find operating across the full PK-to-12 span, and that smallness shapes nearly everything about what this place is and whom it fits.
The village sits on the western shore of the St. Mary's River, a quiet settlement oriented around its state marina, the Drummond Island Ferry, and seasonal maritime tourism. A single state highway runs through town, connecting westward to the interstate and north to Sault Ste. Marie. The community has no major employers surfaced in available sources, and no evident development activity beyond a longstanding master plan. What you get here is geographic isolation and a tight, water-oriented community where summer brings boaters and ferry traffic and winters are quiet. Housing values sit well below both the Michigan and national benchmarks, which places this among the more affordable corners of the state for a family looking to buy, though the trade-off is remoteness and limited local commerce.
The school's enrollment is very small, with only a handful of students per grade. A substantial majority of students are white, and the school includes a meaningful Native American and Alaska Native population alongside a few students from other backgrounds. A majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The school's own data does not report figures for special education, English learner services, staffing, course access, discipline, attendance, or program offerings, so a parent would need to contact the school directly for detail on any of those fronts.
On state testing, most grade-level results are suppressed because no students were recorded as tested in those grades for the current year. This is common in schools this small, where a given grade may have only a few students and privacy rules kick in. The one grade with reported results, seventh grade, showed a majority of tested students proficient in math and half proficient in English language arts. Aggregated into a proficiency index and compared relative to districts in Chippewa County, the school lands in the top quartile for overall proficiency. That is a solid standing, and it is worth recognizing given how thin the underlying data is. A parent should treat this as a promising signal rather than a full picture, since it rests on a single grade's results.
No graduation rate, chronic absenteeism rate, or trend data was available for this school. The district brief notes that this charter district has very limited public coverage of policy, curriculum, or fiscal changes, and nothing substantive was found to report. No strategic priorities or recent initiatives surfaced in the available material, so there is little to say about the direction the school is heading beyond what the name implies: an arts-and-technology orientation. A parent would reasonably want to ask how that focus plays out in the actual curriculum and daily schedule.
What this school offers is intimacy and continuity. A child can attend from preschool through senior year in the same building, in a community where everyone knows everyone. The setting is remote and seasonal, the peer group is small and stable, and housing is affordable by statewide standards. The academic signal from the one grade tested is encouraging, and the school's standing among its Chippewa County peers is strong on the measure that exists. The gaps in the data, though, are real and wide. A family considering this school should weigh the closeness and continuity against the limited public information on programs, support services, and outcomes, and should plan to have direct conversations with the school to fill in what the published record does not cover.
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