How do you incentivize going to class for a high schooler who doesn’t want to go?
Detroit Public Schools Community District had a novel idea to address the problem: pay high schoolers $200 for every 10 consecutive perfect attendance days.
The Detroit district’s new program Perfect Attendance Pays started last month and is running through March 21, 2025. If a student were to attend every school day during the program, he or she would receive $1,000.
Attendance is a big deal, especially in Detroit. Students who miss 18 or fewer days of school (the threshold to be considered chronically absent) are three to five times more likely to be at and above grade-level on state assessments, says the Detroit district.
In addition, as educators try their best to undo pandemic learning loss, every day spent in the classroom is crucial.
The impact of the Perfect Attendance Pays program
District superintendent Nikolai Vitti addressed the incentive program at the February DPSCD school board meeting.
“Right now, chronic absenteeism at the high school level has improved by 5 percentage points,” Vitti told the board. “That means that 700 high school students are not chronically absent where they were last year.”
“At least on the 97th day, our chronic absenteeism at the high school level is the lowest it’s been since the pandemic,” he added.
Almost 5,000 district higher schoolers have received the incentive so far, reports Chalkbeat Detroit. The Detroit district has about 15,000 higher schoolers total.
“90 percent of students who are getting the incentive did not have perfect attendance before, so this is not just rewarding students who already were going to school,” Vitti said.
Other efforts to improve attendance
The incentive program is just one tool the district is using to get kids in the classroom. Vitti told the school board that reaching those roughly 10,000 students who did not have perfect attendance in the first two cycles comes down to other tools the district already has in place.
Beyond the district’s effort to raise awareness about the incentive through principal announcements and robo calls and texts, Vitti told the board that attendance agents are hard at work reaching chronically absent students.
“What we’re doing as a district and at individual schools, that comes down to the attendance agent–calling parents, doing home visits, problem solving on why students are absent, whether it’s a transportation issue or whether it’s homelessness,” he said.
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