The top reported proficiency rate is 73% in Math. The lowest is 23% in Social studies.
Original Research by School Decision on Yake Elementary School
Yake Elementary sits on Carter Road in Woodhaven, a Downriver suburb of Detroit that grew quickly in the later decades of the twentieth century and has since settled into a steady residential rhythm. The city is car-dependent by design, with single-family neighborhoods threaded along arterial roads and a commercial corridor of big-box retail and strip malls where Allen Road meets West Road. I-75 cuts through the center of town, tying Woodhaven to Detroit and the broader metro. There is no traditional downtown to speak of; civic life clusters around City Hall on West Road and the retail centers that replaced older industrial sites. The Ford Woodhaven Stamping Plant remains the city's largest industrial employer, producing body panels and chassis components for Ford assembly plants. Publicly reported sources describe Woodhaven as family-friendly with newer housing stock, and the population has been essentially flat since the early 2000s.
The school serves kindergarten through fifth grade and is part of the Woodhaven-Brownstown School District. Enrollment is moderate for an elementary building in this area. The student body is predominantly white, with smaller Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations and a few students identifying as two or more races or American Indian and Alaska Native. A substantial but not overwhelming share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The district reports no IEP or English-learner figures for this school, so those populations cannot be characterized here. Yake is a regular public school, not a charter or magnet, and its Title I status was not reported.
On state assessments, Yake shows genuine academic strength, especially in the upper elementary grades. Fourth-grade math proficiency is strikingly high, with most tested students reaching proficiency. Fourth-grade ELA is also strong. Third-grade results in both math and ELA sit at a middling level, suggesting that students tend to hit their stride as they move through the building. Fifth-grade science, tested in the prior school year, lands at a solid level. The one clear soft spot is fifth-grade social studies, where proficiency is quite low. A parent may want to look into how social studies instruction is structured and whether this reflects a curriculum gap or a testing pattern common across the district. No participation rates were reported for any of these assessments.
Measured against its peer set, Yake performs well. Its overall proficiency index across tested subjects and grades places it in the top quartile relative to districts in Wayne County, well above the county median. This is a school where a majority of students are meeting state benchmarks in most subjects, and where math instruction in particular appears to be working. No multi-year trend data was available, so it is not possible to say whether these results are improving, declining, or holding steady.
Because Yake is an elementary school, there is no graduation rate to report. The data set also carries no chronic absenteeism figure, no discipline data, no course-access information, and no staffing details. These gaps are typical for a school at this grade band and do not by themselves signal a problem, but they do mean a parent would need to ask the school directly about teacher experience, class sizes, and attendance patterns.
The Woodhaven-Brownstown district passed a bond in 2022, publicly reported as covering security and safety upgrades, HVAC and boiler replacements, technology improvements, a new transportation facility, and building improvements across all ten of the district's school buildings. The district stated the bond would not raise the tax rate. For a family at Yake, that investment should translate into a maintained and modernized physical plant in the coming years.
Housing in the 48183 zip code is relatively affordable compared with both state and national benchmarks. Typical home values sit below the Michigan median and well below national figures, and rents are moderate. The price-to-income ratio and rent-to-income ratio both fall in a range that most families would find manageable. The county-level market shows a healthy supply of active listings and homes moving at a moderate pace, so families relocating to the area should have options without facing an especially tight market.
What Yake offers is a solid neighborhood elementary education in a quiet, car-oriented suburb where housing costs are reasonable and the local district has recently invested in its buildings. The school's math and ELA results in the upper grades are a real strength, the social studies result is worth asking about, and the broader community is stable, anchored by Ford employment and retail along the main corridors. For a family looking for suburban comfort without premium housing costs, this is a place worth a closer look.
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