Original Research by School Decision on Redford Union High School
Redford Union High School sits in Redford Township, an inner-ring suburb of Detroit, and serves students in grades ten through twelve. It is a regular public school, part of Redford Union Schools District No. 1, one of three separate public school districts operating within the township. The enrollment is moderate for a high school serving three grade levels, and the student body is predominantly Black, with smaller shares of white, Hispanic, multiracial, and a handful of American Indian or Alaska Native and Asian students. A substantial majority of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
The school's academic performance picture is largely blank in the data available here. State assessment results were not provided, and no proficiency index, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism figure was available for comparison against other Wayne County districts. The neighbor comparison set, drawn from county districts, could not place this school on any of its three metrics because the underlying values were missing. A parent researching this school will want to ask the school directly for its most recent state test results, four-year graduation rate, and attendance data, since none of those appear in the records reviewed.
Information on course access, discipline, staffing, and attendance was also absent. The same goes for special-population counts such as students with individualized education programs and English learners. Without those figures, it is hard to characterize the school's support structure or programmatic depth from the data alone.
What the data does describe clearly is the community around the school. Redford Township is a car-dependent, primarily residential suburb with no traditional downtown. Commercial activity runs along arterial roads like Telegraph Road and Grand River Avenue, while housing consists largely of postwar single-family homes. Civic life centers on the town hall complex on West Six Mile Road, which includes the police department, the district court, the township library, and the Redford Marquee, an amphitheater and open-air market space created from the old library building. The township has more than a dozen parks, including Lola Valley Park and Bell Creek Park, and runs seasonal festivals and recreational programs. Regional access comes via I-96, Telegraph Road, Grand River Avenue, and Eight Mile Road, with SMART bus service in the broader metro Detroit network.
The housing market in the school's zip code is affordable compared with state and national benchmarks. Home values sit well below the Michigan statewide figure and roughly half the national level. Listing prices in Wayne County more broadly have drifted slightly downward year over year, and homes are taking a bit longer to sell than they did a year prior. Rents, by contrast, have risen modestly. The estimated monthly mortgage on a typical home in this zip code is below the typical rent, which may interest families weighing buying versus leasing. The price-to-income ratio is low relative to the national figure, suggesting that homeownership is within reach for more households here than in many parts of the country.
Redford Township's population has shifted over the past two decades, becoming more racially diverse, with the Black population growing and the white non-Hispanic population declining. The township received charter status years ago to protect against annexation by Detroit, and recent civic investments have gone into the library and the Marquee rather than large-scale housing development.
At the district level, a construction bond passed in 2021 reshaped school options for families. Two elementary schools closed, one junior high building was repurposed as an elementary, and the junior high moved into the high school building. Redford Union High School now shares its building with the junior high, serving grades seven through nine on the same campus. That arrangement is a defining feature of the current school environment and something a parent would want to understand when visiting, especially regarding how shared space functions for younger and older students.
Taken together, Redford Union High School is a mid-sized, predominantly Black high school with a majority economically disadvantaged enrollment in an affordable, suburban Wayne County community. The academic data needed to judge its outcomes was not available in this record, and a family considering the school should seek that information directly from the district.
See more original research from School Decision →