For the first time ever, Northville Public Schools invited a group of high schoolers to be a part of the sale of our 2023 school building and site bonds.
"I'm really interested in business myself so I loved seeing how a real bond would be sold. I'm in AP Econ and we did a lot of talking about bonds in general but it was all hypothetical, so looking at a $134 million bond being sold was really interesting to see how that whole process works and how it works out in real-life," explained Syona, 11th grader at Northville High School.
In the first round of sales, the bonds generated $67.3 million. The students got to watch orders for the bonds being submitted by investors. At the end of the order period, demand for our bonds exceeded the supply by 8x. The district's brokerage firm, Stifel, explained the order flow live.
"The result was very very strong and it’s a testament to the administration and Board of Ed and their fiscal responsibility to have the district upgraded into the AA category by Standard and Poor’s is very unique. That definitely helped in the marketability of the bonds today, so the credit should go to them. But also to the community, I mean, education is a foundation that’s so critical to the health of a community and obviously your taxpayers supported the bond with overwhelming support at the May election and it’s going to continue to reap rewards for generations to come," said Brodie Killian, managing director, Stifel Public Finance.
Northville High School business teacher Paula Stamoulis helped coordinate the event. She said, "I think it just brings a real-life experience to the classroom. There’s some things you just can’t learn on the computer or in a classroom and this is one of those things that probably opened their eyes a little bit to the areas to finance and construction and architecture and the whole behind the scenes of kind of what happens when a bond passes in the school realm."
"I’m a person who likes to see all the behind the scenes type of deals. I like to know how things work. For movies and stuff I like to see how everything runs behind the set, behind what you actually see in the final production. So it was really interesting to see how all of this unfolded slash panned out," said John, 11th grader, NHS.
The bonds will be used to create STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) spaces at all learning levels, major upgrades at Meads Mill Middle School, technology enhancements across the district and upgrades to aging infrastructure.