Waterford Today

At their Feb. 7 meeting, the South Lyon School Board was presented with a request to redraw some of its boundary lines for their elementary schools.

The proposal concerned the new Hasenclever Farms housing development, which is currently under construction and will soon be completed with a total of 50 homes in two phases of construction.  

The neighborhood is west of Griswold Road and north of 8 Mile Road. Eighteen homes are occupied of the 20 homes that are already constructed. At least one family in the neighborhood has a child in the district, although the boundary changes would not affect where the student attends.

The neighborhood is currently split between two schools, with the homes developed in Phase I set to attend Sayre Elementary and Phase II homes to attend Salem Elementary.

The move will improve the ease of transportation to keep all of the Hasenclever Farms development on one bus route. The school district proposed enveloping all of the neighborhood into the Sayre Elementary borders, attending the school to the north. Salem Elementary already has a much broader footprint than that of Sayre Elementary.

To ensure that any families moving into the new neighborhood would have no issues with their students joining a school, the district also took into consideration classroom space and enrollments before making this decision. The change does not impact the middle school or high school boundary lines, although Sayre boundaries are cut in half by both of those jurisdictions.

“Much cleaner from a transportation standpoint,” Superintendent Steven Archibald said in the meeting. “You know, when we make the decision as well, we talk to the principals in both schools, we talk to the pupil accounting department and we talk to transportation. So, we're looking at multiple factors because, as you know, so many things are interconnected that, you know, you may change something over here and the unintended consequence over here. But this seems to be a pretty straightforward, commonsense move.”

The board also made some amendments to the school code pertaining to children of nonresident school employees. Children of South Lyon employees are allowed to attend the school at which their parent works, and that will not change. The change they made will allow a student to finish out the year if their parent resigns, but after the academic year they would have to change schools.