Carpenter’s attendance area is cut up and scattered all over northeast Pittsfield Township, a location popular with people priced out of the Ann Arbor market. Carpenter is the only elementary school area entirely outside the city limits. It’s within the Scarlett Middle School and Huron High catchment areas.

The small frame and ranch houses in the original Carpenter School neighborhood were built around World War II. Several generations live on these quiet, flat streets, laid out in a suburban grid between Packard and Washtenaw. Stretches of condos, townhouses, and single-family homes have gone up recently along the south side of Packard. Another fifty to sixty homes are being built in the Arbor Woods subdivision. An older neighborhood of connected shady streets lies on the west side of Golfside.

Children along Christina Drive and adjoining streets north of East Morgan Road are bused to Carpenter. So are those in an area between Crane and Golfside along and south of East Textile Road, in the far southeast corner of the school district. South of Ellsworth and west of US-23, where the Carpenter area stretches south of Michigan Avenue (off our map), a few modest subdivisions alternate with individual homes. Although acres of farmland survive there, a few new subs and high-density housing are nibbling at the edges. Wellesley Gardens, on Michigan Avenue just west of US-23, has 426 new condos, lofts, and townhouses. It’s next door to the Arbor Glen apartments. To the west, on Stone School Road north of Morgan, nearly all the 200 units of Woodside Meadows’ “upper and lower ranches” are completed.