Hubert Elementary School was one of several educational buildings that the Redford Union Schools erected before the city of Detroit annexed part of Redford Township.
The school was named after Don Sherman Hubert, Redford Township’s first casualty in World War I. He was killed in action in France after being struck by a shell on Aug. 28, 1918.
The school was originally constructed as a one-story, four-room school, with work starting in the fall of 1924. The small structure was rushed to completion, and ready for students in February 1925. The architect of this original structure was Vernor, Wilhelm & Molby.
The area was growing so rapidly that even before the school was finished, the school district was pushing a $768,500 bond proposal - about $14.9 million in 2026, when adjusted for inflation - which was approved in January 1925. Among the proposals was a four-classroom addition and boiler room for Hubert at a cost of $50,000, about $968,000 in 2026. It was completed in February or March 1926. Meanwhile, Hubert became part of the Detroit school system in 1926 following residents of the area voting to be annexed by Detroit.
But in the rush to build new schools and additions, corners were apparently cut. On May 10, 1926, a ceiling at Hubert collapsed into a playroom. The school, which had about 500 students at the time, was ordered closed to ensure it was safe. At the time, the addition had been in service for only three months and the “older” part of the school was just 2 years old.
"Had the accident occurred a short time earlier, many might have been killed or seriously injured," the Free Press wrote on its front page May 13, 1926.
The plaster was fixed and the school reopened about a week later. Meanwhile, the Detroit school district ordered inspections of the 13 schools it had just acquired as part of the Redford Township annexation.
This recently annexed area, known as the Brightmoor neighborhood, continued to grow as small, single-family houses were rapidly built to serve the city’s booming population. This led to another addition to be built, which was finished in February 1930 at a cost of $165,000, or about $3.2 million in 2026 valuation. This section featured a gym, library and seven more classrooms.
Around this time, the Rayner Stewart Garden was opened on Hubert's grounds. Students tended to its flowers and vegetables. At the time, it was called a one-of-a-kind feature in the school district.
In the wake of the World War II “baby boom,” the Detroit Board of Education approved $914,000 (about $11.5 million in 2026) in 1953 to tack another addition onto the school. This work, completed in the fall of 1954, was designed by the architectural firm E.A. Schilling Inc., and increased the school's capacity by 665 students by adding six more classrooms, two auditoriums, two kindergarten rooms, two art rooms, a kitchen, a shop, a home economics room and a music room.
In 1959, the building began hosting junior high students.
The fight for integration
On April 6, 1970, white parents launched a boycott of Hubert, Arthur Junior High, Goodale Elementary and Murphy Junior High. They were angry over the Detroit school board’s decision to force integration between the mostly white Arthur Junior High and mostly Black Kettering High to bring racial balance to the district. The day of the boycott, only about 25 percent of Hubert's students came to school.
This type of protest was not limited to these four schools during this era, as racist whites also sought to stop the district's decentralization plan and attempt to integrate 11 of its 22 high schools by busing Black students to predominately white schools and vice versa. The Michigan State Senate passed legislation on July 7, 1970, that banned districts from changing school attendance boundaries, thus blocking the Detroit integration plan. Two weeks later, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a school desegregation lawsuit, Milliken v. Bradley. The case made its way all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and sought to determine whether federal courts had the authority to impose a multi-district desegregation plan on schools outside Detroit. The justices ruled against the NAACP and found that, "in the sense of dismantling a dual school system," it was not required to ensure "any particular racial balance in each 'school, grade or classroom.'" In other words, a school district could not force integration and segregation was legal so long as it was not part of an explicit policy of the district.
The end of Hubert
On Feb. 11, 2005, the district announced that 34 schools, including Hubert, would be closed at the end of the school year because of dwindling enrollment and soaring maintenance costs on aging buildings. Hubert had 404 students enrolled at the time.
To put the district’s struggles into perspective, in 2002-03, there were more than 156,000 students enrolled in Detroit Public Schools; a decade later, that number would drop to just 47,000.
Hubert would sit abandoned for 20 years, subject to scrappers, vandals and the ravages of the elements.
In October 2014, Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration and Detroit Public Schools (DPS) announced a deal to wipe out $11.6 million in district debt in exchange for 57 vacant school buildings and 20 vacant lots. DPS was burdened by a $127 million deficit at the time. The City said it would secure or tear down the buildings and attempt to market the least-dangerous buildings for sale, but found few takers. In 2020, an assessment estimated that it would take about $14.5 million to breathe new life into the school, and noted that fire and water damage were the biggest issues, though there were considerable masonry problems, as well.
In the end, no one wanted Hubert, and the City had the same struggles keeping the building secured that the school district did. The school would suffer several fires, which further exposed the building to the elements, worsening Hubert's decline.
Conversations about demolition picked up in the summer of 2024, and the 59,000-square-foot Hubert was gone around the end of 2025.