South Lyon East High School is designed around four academic pathways that are aligned with the State required Career Pathways Program for high schools. The four academic pathways are Health and Human Services, Design and Technology, Business and Computers and Arts and Communications. The elective courses that correspond to each of the pathways make up the center of the respective pathways. The four academic core areas, science, social studies, English/language arts and mathematics surround the center of each pathway.

The focus of the school and pathways is on the academics and not on careers. This design supports students and staff in making connections and finding relationships among the academics and link learning to the elective courses. To facilitate this link, the school selected an integrated/ universal theme (a theme that connects or unifies learning across all content areas). Students will learn how the essential concepts in each content area are related to the selected theme and understand the relevance of school learning to life beyond school. Members of the East High School Subject Area Committee (SAC) have selected "conflict" as the universal theme for the first year. Teachers have been developing the necessary teaching aids to assist them in guiding students as they link learning to this theme.

Students also have the opportunity to learn through the problem based learning (PBL) approach in some of their elective courses. The PBL approach is focused on experiential learning (minds on-hands on) and organized around the investigation and resolution of messy, real world problems. Students are required to complete at least one PBL unit within an elective course of their choice before graduation. A more in-depth PBL experience will be available to upper classmen who choose to enroll in a new class called Senior Project.

It is important to emphasize that while the design of South Lyon East High is different from South Lyon High School, the curriculum and expectations of the two high schools will be identical. The following list identifies some of the things that will be the same in both high schools: curriculum standards and benchmarks, resources and materials, required courses and credits for graduation, grading and reporting guidelines and procedures, opportunity to participate in extra curricular activities, student code of conduct, common course assessments within a course and across both schools, parent-teacher conferences, traditional teaching and learning, open house and curriculum fair, freshman opportunity day, and expectations for school improvement. Staff members in our two high schools work closely together to provide a quality education with common expectations for all students.