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To the extent that many Michiganders know much about the schools in Inkster, a small, mostly blue-collar, mostly African American city in Detroit’s western suburbs, their knowledge likely revolves around the state government’s dramatic intervention that ultimately led to the dissolution of the school district in 2013. Inkster was one of several districts that had come under the scrutiny of then-Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration during a period in which the state appointed emergency managers to run several districts (and, in some cases, the cities themselves) or entered into consent agreements that required districts to financially restructure. The administration pitched the strategy as a tough-medicine approach to longstanding debt problems. But because the vast majority of the cities and districts Snyder pursued were majority African American, many residents, activists and policymakers voiced concerns, arguing that many white districts were also experiencing financial problems but were not subject to the same measures. Many cities eventually regained local control of their districts. Inkster was one of two places that did not. In 2013, the state declared that the Inkster School District, saddled with about $15 million in debt, was financially unviable and hence would be fully dissolved. Its approximately 4,000 students would be sent to schools in four neighboring communities. The state plan included $5 million in grants to cover costs associated with the district’s dissolution, including the demolition of all but one of Inkster’s school buildings.

Fleda Fleming, a lifelong Inkster resident who served as Inkster High School’s dean of students for 12 years prior to the district’s dissolution, says the fast-moving state action caught everyone in the community by surprise. Sure, Inkster had financial problems, as did many other districts, she says. But the narrative that Inkster was a failing school was, from her vantage point, not rooted in reality. Fleming, who had been with the district during some hard times in the early 2000s, says Inkster schools had actually been on a roll not long before the state dissolved the district. She attributes much of that to a young superintendent, Thomas Maridada, who came to Inkster in 2004 with a ton of energy and a new vision for public education in an urban community. Under his leadership, Inkster became one of the first districts in the state to adopt an “academies” model in the high school, a now popular approach in which students choose something akin to a college major to structure their academic experience. In Inkster, there were three concentrations: pre-health, business and entrepreneurship, and the performing arts. Inkster’s program also became the first in the state where academies students earned both a high school diploma and an associate degree in four years through a dual-enrollment partnership with Wayne County Community College.

Fleming says Maridada also dramatically shifted the culture of the schools. She recalls a day, for example, when he asked her to order trophies for a new year-end assembly to celebrate students' academic achievements. She thought it was a little curious he wanted two of everything. “It turned out he wanted one for the students to take home and another to put in a trophy case at the school so everyone could see them,” Fleming says. He rallied staff and students alike to the cause. Fleming remembers when she started in 2001, it was rare  to get 400 students in the high school for school count day. Five years into Maridada’s reforms, they had 1,200 kids in the building, many of them college bound, many of them school choice students from other cities. “It was amazing work,” Fleming says. “It was one of those jobs where getting up to go to school every day really did feel like a joy for students and staff alike. It was hands down the best time of my professional career.”

Maridada, who earned a nod as Michigan’s Superintendent of the Year in 2008 for his efforts, left a mark on the district. But his style of leadership also inspired Fleming personally. It showed her just how much leaders mattered, a lesson that was reinforced when he left the district in 2009 to lead a similar charge in Pontiac and the Inkster schools lost some ground. She credits him and that experience, in part, with inspiring her interest in what was then an all new Doctor of Education program at UM-Dearborn. Maridada was working on his own doctorate during his five-year tenure in Inkster and spontaneously developed a habit of referring to Fleming as “Dr. Fleming.” She initially enrolled in the doctoral program without a particular professional aspiration in mind. But it proved to be a profound experience. Fleming fondly recalls being academically challenged and personally galvanized by her initial dissertation chair, Assistant Professor Maiyoua Vang, along with her committee members Professor Les Thornton and Professor John Artis. Her dissertation research experience was particularly meaningful for her. Under Professor of Education Chris Burke, she took on a qualitative study of African American sibling pairs, one female, one male, where the former attained higher levels of academic achievement. This was a theme ripped straight from her own life: In her family, Fleming and her two sisters all attended college, two of them earning advanced degrees. Three of her four brothers never finished high school. Moreover, she knew this was a common experience in many African American families. She wanted to know why Black women were collectively faring so much better than men when it came to academic achievement.

Though not a formal part of her study, the story of differential achievement in Fleming’s own family was, in many ways, indicative of the larger trends she would explore in her research. Her two oldest brothers started their high school years in Inkster schools, which she says were demographically pretty similar back in the late 1950s. But during her oldest brother’s junior year, the family moved from the west side of the city to the east side, which put the family in the Westwood school district. There, she says about nine in 10 students were white. It was a “cultural shock” for her three eldest siblings. After their move, her oldest brother actually secretly enrolled himself in his old school, which worked until the school discovered his east Inkster address. He chose to drop out rather than return to Westwood.

Her second-oldest brother eventually followed suit. But interestingly, her eldest sister made it to graduation. Fleming says her sister’s experience was not without difficulties: Fleming recalls one story where her “strong-willed” sister objected to the director of the school play casting her as a maid. But in the areas of discipline and expectations for academic achievement, Fleming says the situation was more difficult for young Black men. Moreover, by the time the three youngest children, which included another older sister, Fleming and her baby brother, reached high school, the demographics of the school district had shifted. Now, Westwood had just a small majority of white students. “I remember it was sort of like what Rodney King said: ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ We all just got along. Race was much less of a factor,” Fleming says. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, her baby brother earned his high school diploma and ultimately went on to college, earning a master’s degree in guidance and counseling.

Fleming says she was not conscious of these dynamics growing up. But viewing it now through the eyes of a researcher, several interesting takeaways emerged. The changing racial and gender politics of the era certainly were relevant. But she also became fascinated with how expectations, both within the family and in the schools, shaped her siblings’ journeys. In particular, she now found it remarkable that her parents, who were both college educated, didn’t blink at the three oldest boys dropping out of high school, though she says they would have been “outraged” had any of the young women in the family followed that course. That spoke to something profound about the way gender and economics interacted at that time. After leaving school, two of her brothers got solid jobs in the auto industry, and the third earned his GED and served in the U.S. Navy. They all ended up doing quite well for themselves. “The joke in the family is that the boys' income levels surpassed the girls despite our advanced degrees ,” Fleming says. “So it reveals how the family viewed education. My parents valued education very highly. They were sticklers about using ‘proper’ English and were equally adamant about ensuring that all of their children were highly proficient in the core subject areas. But the endgame of schooling was not academic achievement, it was employability. And if boys could find that at the factory without a high school diploma, then the educational system was unnecessary. But that same path was not available to young women. And my parents were more protective about their daughters’ working conditions, so formal education and post-secondary education became essential to their employment.”

Fleming collected dozens of such stories from sibling pairs over the course of her research, many with similar experiences to her own family’s. Notably, sometimes the outcomes were quite different. She documented how, as economic conditions changed and a high school or college diploma became a qualification for more jobs, young Black men paid a higher price for lower expectations for their academic achievement. Many of the men in the youngest sibling pairs, who attended high school in the 2000s, also noted how the educational and disciplinary modalities of high school left them feeling unmotivated or unchallenged. Several noted that their mostly female, mostly white teachers failed to find ways to connect with them. The depth of what she was learning and experiencing through this research, and in her program more generally, also left her feeling more personally inspired. Fleming may have begun her doctoral program without the common professional goals of EdD students, who typically find it a useful bridge to a superintendent position or policy job. But she now found herself dreaming of a somewhat poetic final chapter to her career: She’d love to become superintendent of Inkster schools herself and restore some of the momentum she’d helped build. Indeed, it even felt urgent as the school choice dynamics that had brought many students from outside Inkster into the district started to flip after Maridada’s departure, as students left, in some cases, to follow their favorite teachers. Bolstered by what she was learning in the program, she thought she could help finish what they'd started.

Then 2013 happened, and with the dissolution of the district, Fleming’s dream was essentially rendered impossible. She didn’t experience this so much as a personal setback. Because of the stage she was at in her career, she was able to fairly easily transition into retirement. But she and many residents immediately grew anxious over how Inkster becoming a city without schools would impact the community. Along with its churches, the schools were the thing that regularly brought families together, and there was a lot of pride in what Inkster had built academically. More kids were going to college. They also had a state championship football team, a state championship girls basketball team and a highly acclaimed performing arts department that the city rallied around. Now, its students would be scattered across districts in other cities. In some cases, where district lines divided neighborhoods, kids who grew up together would be attending different schools. 

Almost immediately, Fleming began using her retirement to try to fill the void. By winter the following year, she had founded a new nonprofit, EQUIPPED, the purpose of which was “to create a space and opportunity for kids to do some of the same things we were doing in the high schools,” she says. In practice, that included things like academic enrichment programs, after-school ACT prep courses, life skills classes, a traditional community baccalaureate celebration and anything she could think of that could help students transition to their post-high school lives. The Inkster community immediately bought in, funding it with personal donations. She says if anybody needed help with anything, they knew the first step was to “get Ms. Fleming’s phone number.” Fleming says that informal, grassroots vibe has always been part of EQUIPPED. She never aspired to open a formal space for the organization, opting instead to host workshops and events in libraries, churches and community spaces. That has helped her keep costs down so she can funnel all the donations into programming. But it’s also just been more effective to meet students and families where they already are.

Over the past 11 years, Fleming says the programming has evolved a lot. “Basically, wherever I see a need, I try to find a way to address it” is the simple mantra that guides her. In recent years, that’s often meant putting an emphasis on the arts to counter cuts in programming that many schools have experienced. Fleming, who regularly produces holiday pageants at her church and jokes that she may have missed her calling by not going into the arts, is a particularly big fan of performance. Over the years, EQUIPPED has produced multiple student-led stage productions, including “An’Dee”, an  Most recently, she partnered with Westwood schools to produce “Westwood’s Got Talent,” a variety show that featured performances by students, staff and community members. 

Through all that evolution, one of EQUIPPED’s most consistent offerings has been a scholarship for college-bound students. Over the past decade, she says they’ve been able to annually award at least $15,000 in scholarships to students mostly from Inkster but also in surrounding cities, all powered by donations from community members. She calls the application process “easy peasy.” Students have to have at least a 2.5 GPA, a limit she set so that the scholarship could “reach down” to serve students who traditionally wouldn't be eligible for other academic scholarships. Applicants have to submit a college acceptance letter and two letters of recommendation, one from someone at their school and another from a community member. Then, there’s a 500-word essay, the topic of which hasn’t changed in years. “It’s always the same: ‘What advice would you give to a ninth, 10th or 11th grader about how to be successful in high school?’” She says the straightforward prompt is intended to get students to think critically and consciously about all the things that led to their success, so they might impart that wisdom to others. But it’s also a perfect way to mine ideas for new youth-focused programming. 

Even as the ranks grow of young people touched by EQUIPPED, including many who’ve gone on to graduate from UM-Dearborn and UM-Ann Arbor, Fleming knows she can’t fill all the gaps. Despite the work, and that of other community organizations in the city, Fleming says the closure of the city’s schools has left Inkster a changed place. “We’re strangers now,” she says. “Because students were scattered across several districts, there’s this feeling that you don’t know where your kids are, you don’t know how they’re doing and you don’t know how to help them. We’re from a culture where we say it takes a village to raise a child. When you remove the village’s impact from your children, you’ve not only lost a sense of community but an avenue for perpetuating your culture.” 

In the immediate aftermath of the district’s dissolution, she says people in the community had many conversations over whether they could get their schools back. She says that fire never completely died out, and it’s recently started to smolder again. Not surprisingly, Fleming now finds herself as one of the people at the center of that effort. She recently teamed up with one of her former academies students and a ’96 Inkster High School graduate, both of whom have earned doctoral degrees themselves, to undertake a research project focused on the aftermath of the school closure. She says it’s not so much to investigate and relitigate the state’s decision-making process, which many think was racist, unjust and ignored alternatives, like the . (Notably, those funds also  were still paying off through their taxes, even though their schools had been closed for a decade.) Instead, the focus of their study is to document the impact the dissolution of the schools had on the students and families who lived through it, as well as the lasting impacts on the community. As in her dissertation research, Fleming is hoping that giving voice to these personal stories will help people understand that they form a common narrative — which she thinks could help motivate the community and policymakers to eventually do what she thinks is the right thing for the city.

Fleming knows any fruits of that effort, especially anything as dramatic as reestablishing the Inkster School District, could be years away. It’s likely too far off for her to ever fulfill her dream of becoming that future district’s superintendent. Moreover, the state’s decision to demolish the city’s physical school buildings obviously could make things far more complicated and expensive for the community to realize that vision. But Fleming remains resolved, plucky and cheerfully defiant. “They tore the schools down. That’s fine,” she says. “That just means our kids will get all new buildings, like the rose that grew from concrete.”

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Story by Lou Blouin