District No. 7 Beginnings

Imagine a school district with no schools in it. Sound unlikely? That was the situation for four years in District 7.

When the Dearborn Township section of old District 7 was all that remained after Dearborn became consolidated, Mayfair and Pardee opened as two-room school houses for kindergartners.  All remaining students had to be bused to schools in Dearborn.

District 7 as we know it today, formally called Dearborn Heights District 7, is only a remnant of what is used to be. In fact, few districts have had their boundaries changed as often as District 7. Its boundaries when the cities of Dearborn and Fordson merged in 1929 was the Rouge River on the east, Van Born on the south, Telegraph on the west and Wilson and Lawrence on the north. District 8 (Westwood) was west of Telegraph up to Wilson. Districts 2 (Coonville/Fairlane) and 4 (Crestwood) were on the north, District 5 (Henry Ford School District on east and Taylor on the south.

District 7 had already annexed District 6 (boundaries and dates are uncertain) and in 1926, annexed a school district in the far southeastern part of Dearborn Heights (district name is unknown). The latter district was home to the one-room Harvard School at Pelham and Van Born.

Records indicate that a small section of District No. 7 was south of Van Born in 1941, possible part of the aforementioned Harvard School district.

District 7 as we know it today was formed in 1944 when a portion of Dearborn merged with Fordson Public Schools. The idea was to create a school district with the same boundaries as the city. Three years earlier, the Fordson district annexed Dearborn District No. 5(Henry Ford School district). With the 1944 merger, all territory in Dearborn, except a small strip between the MCRR and Michigan Avenue west of Telegraph, became part of the Dearborn Public Schools. This strip remains part of the Westwood District.

This merger left the south Dearborn Township section of District 7 on its own. As the new unified school district was called Dearborn Public Schools, the remnants of old Dearborn District No. 7 retained the name District 7.

The newly created District 7 had 1,414 students but no schools for them to attend. It is uncertain whether Harvard School, at Pelham and Van Born, was still there, and if it was, District 7 did not make use of it.

Part of the agreement with the state involving the Dearborn school merger was that children in the D7 remnant in south Dearborn Township could attend Dearborn Public Schools for a reduced rate of $50 per student in grades K-8 and $188.50 for grades 9-12. State school aid was $113.50 for high schools, leaving D7 to pay the $75 difference as well as busing costs to the schools attended.

District 7 paid a lower fee than other districts sending its students to Dearborn Public Schools because of state laws passed just prior to the consolidation.  The law stated that the section severed should be provided with the same facilities after the consolidation as it had before, and based on the same tax rate. This special rate would continue until D7 was able to provide its own facilities.

The first meeting of the new District 7 board of education was October 14, 1944, at Whitmore-Bolles School.

The district built its own administration building at 19232 Van Born, which was dedicated May 19, 1947. Offices moved to Mayfair School on December 23, 1949. The library in the administration building was dismantled with the books reallocated among the schools. The new phone number was L02-2011. The original building was then used as an annex to the Van Born Community Center.

After the merger, District 7 looked at war surplus buildings for temporary schools, but deemed them cost-prohibitive because of their temporary nature, and they would soon need permanent structures anyway.

Voters in District 7 turned down a bond vote to build the district’s first schools Jan. 25, 1947. The rejected plan was to build a six-room schoolhouse at Tulane and Pitt (Vassar) and a 10-rrom schoolhouse in the Pelham-Southfield area, later specified in the newspaper as Pope (Polk) and Mayfair.

D7 voters finally approved a 17-mill tax addition for new building construction in summer 1947.

The ground-breaking for its first two schools, Mayfair and Pardee, was October 5, 1947. The schools were to handle kindergarten and Grade 1, but by the time they opened, enrollment had risen enough that the two two-room schoolhouses only housed kindergarten.

Additions were put on in later years as additional millages passed. In the late 1950s, more schools were built, including a junior high school.

In January 1960, District 7 announced plans to eliminate its mid-year promotions. Starting with the fall of 1960, most students who received January promotions would be bumped up a half-year. A few were held back.

It was not until 1967 that District 7 no longer had to rely on Dearborn Public Schools for the education of any of its students. This was when Best Junior High School opened and its former site was converted into Annapolis High School. Like other districts in Dearborn Heights, District 7 did have discussion on changing its name. District 2 chose the name Fairlane School District. District 3 renamed itself North Dearborn Public Schools. District 8 eventually became Westwood Schools.

At a school board meeting Nov. 29, 1966, when the board was also deciding on the name for its new high school, the board decided to change the district’s name from Dearborn District No. 7 to Dearborn Heights District 7. The thinking behind the move was that the District 7 name had so much history behind it, the name was worth keeping. This information was provided by the Dearborn Heights Press and Guide.