As Detroit seeks to crack down on chronic absenteeism in its public schools, administrators are trying out a new incentive: pay students up to $1,000 to attend class. 

America’s public schools are seeking ways to reverse the uptick of chronic absenteeism, which has roughly doubled since the Covid pandemic closed schools. In the 2022-2023 school year, 26 percent of students were considered chronically absent, up from 13 percent in the 2019-2020 school year.

Michigan considers students chronically absent if they miss 18 days, or 10 percent of the 180-day school year. At Detroit, 66 percent of students were considered chronically absent in the 2023-2024 year. 

To try to improve student attendance, the Detroit Public Schools Community District is launching its “Perfect Attendance Pays” initiative, which gives every student a $200 gift card every time they have perfect attendance over a two-week period. 

In a statement, the school district explained that it will offer the gift cards over five two-week periods starting January 6 and running through March 21. 

“To qualify for perfect attendance, students must attend every hour of the school day,” the statement said. “As you should know, attending school every day matters! In fact, DPSCD students are three to five times more likely to be at and above grade-level performers on state assessments and to be college-ready if they miss 18 or fewer days of school a year.”

If students have perfect attendance for the entirety of the program, they could walk away with $1,000 in gift cards. 

The district noted that chronic absenteeism is the highest at the high school level, and administrators are “thinking out of the box.” The statement also said the school district is funding the program to “support high school students, who often have many competing priorities and challenges, that can create barriers to regular attendance.”

The superintendent of the school district, Nikolai Vitti, said in a letter to families, “Consistent attendance is an essential part of students’ success, and we know that when District students miss less than 18 days of school in our District, they are 3 to 5 times more likely to be at and above grade level in reading and math and to be college ready as defined by the SAT.”

A retired principal who used to work in the district, Dr. Tonya Norwood, told Fox 2 at Detroit she believes the initiative is a good idea because “a lot of our students have a lot of challenges.”

“When you’re going to school seven hours a day, you go home, and you have to now take care of your brothers and sisters,” Ms. Norwood said. “But oftentimes, our students go to jobs. So now they’re spending six or seven hours at jobs and then they come home after that, now they have to cook for their siblings.”

The law in Michigan allows for students to face penalties through the county court system if they are chronically absent. Parents can also have public assistance revoked if their children are regularly skipping class.

However, Detroit schools have been trying to roll out incentives for students to improve their attendance. In November 2024, the district implemented a new policy linking grades with attendance. Students in grades K-8 who miss more than 45 days of school might be required to retake the grade. High school students who miss 23 or more days of one class in a semester will have to retake that class. 

The executive director of an organization dedicated to ensuring students attend schools, Attendance Works, Hedy Chang, told the Detroit Free Press that incentives designed to boost attendance should be evaluated “in terms of how do they actually address the underlying reasons that are causing students to miss school.”

While students at Detroit seem excited about the opportunity to earn some money for going to school, the data does not necessarily show that such incentives will change students’ behavior in the long run.

A 2021 study from the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research found that incentives “do not necessarily address the contextual factors that are demotivating.” In one example, the organization noted a Detroit parent said her son takes public transportation and has become less motivated to attend school because of instances of missing the bus. The study said, “Motivation may play some role in missing school for this student, but it is not clear whether incentives would increase his attendance, absent other interventions that changed his relationship with the bus.”

Detroit is not the only school district handing out money to incentivize attendance. The Oakland Unified School district in California launched an initiative in 2022 to give students who were identified as chronically absent $50 to show, which is different from Detroit’s approach of allowing all students to qualify even if they did not have a problem with attendance. 

Educators say the Covid pandemic changed the way students think about attending school. Since 2020, students are more likely to stay home when they are sick, even if it is a mild illness, and are struggling to get into the habit of waking up on time to catch the bus.