Original Research by School Decision on Clarkston Project Search
Clarkston Project Search is a special education school operating within the Clarkston Community School District in northern Oakland County. It sits at a single address on Bow Pointe Drive, serving a very small number of students in an ungraded format, which is consistent with its designation as a specialized program rather than a conventional grade-banded school. The student body is predominantly white, with a small number of students overall, and the school does not report free-or-reduced-price lunch counts, English learner figures, or IEP rates in the data available to us.
Because this is a special education school with ungraded enrollment, the standard state assessment results do not appear in the data. No proficiency metrics, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism figures were reported. These absences are explained by the nature of the school itself: ungraded special-education programs typically fall outside the tested-grade and four-year-cohort frameworks that produce those numbers, so a parent should not read the missing results as a sign of weak performance. The comparison set for Oakland County districts could not place this school on proficiency, graduation, or attendance measures for the same reason.
What the data does tell a parent is narrow but clear. Clarkston Project Search is a public, non-charter special education program run by the district. It is extremely small, which suggests individualized attention is built into the design rather than an aspiration. Beyond that, the publicly reported data does not describe the curriculum, therapies, staffing ratios, or transition services the program offers, and we will not fill those gaps with guesswork. A family considering this placement would want to ask the district directly what the instructional model looks like, what support services are provided on-site, and how students transition into or out of the program.
The surrounding community is the City of the Village of Clarkston, a compact historic mill village at the center of Independence Township, roughly a short drive northwest of Detroit. Publicly reported descriptions note that it is the smallest city by land area in Michigan, with a downtown clustered along Main Street around the Mill Pond, a section of the Clinton River. The village has a protected historic district with many preserved structures, and the converted Ford mill building now holds art galleries and office space. Independence Township, which uses the Clarkston mailing address, is more suburban and car-dependent. Civic life centers on the village core, with community events such as a July Fourth parade.
The housing market in the 48346 zip code sits above the state benchmark for typical home values and close to the national benchmark, with rents that are moderate for the region. Oakland County's broader market has seen listing inventory grow over the past year, with homes spending about a month on the market, indicating a market with reasonable supply rather than a tight squeeze. The estimated mortgage payment runs higher than typical rent in the area, which is worth noting for families weighing a move.
At the district level, the Clarkston Community School District recently completed a rebuild of Clarkston Junior High School, which reopened in 2025, affecting families with students in the upper middle grades. The district's campuses are spread across the surrounding township area rather than concentrated in the village itself. For a family looking at Clarkston Project Search specifically, the picture from available data is limited to the fact of a small, specialized public program in a historic, relatively affluent suburban area with a recently upgraded district facility footprint. The program-level details that would tell a parent whether it fits their child are not in the data we have, and contacting the district is the logical next step.
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