This was reported last week and I thought it was pretty sad having to bribe students to attend.

Guess I’m pretty calloused. I skipped a lot of school during my Senior years (yes, you read that right,two years) and I paid the price. Midway through my second Senior year I realized “boy did I screw up” and started to clean up my act. It took a lot of effort, summer school, night school over the next year, all while working full time. It was hard but I got through it.

Maybe it will help but I’m doubtful.

January 9, 2025

High School Students,

DPSCD is excited to launch our “Perfect Attendance Pays” initiative as students return from Winter Break! The District will provide high school students with the opportunity to earn a gift card valued at $200 every time they have perfect attendance during a two-week cycle (10 school days in a row) starting January 6-17. The two-week cycles will run through March 21, giving qualifying students an opportunity to earn up to $1000 in gift cards (see table below).



Cycle Perfect Attendance Dates (10 school days) Electronic Gift Card Issue Date
1 January 6- January 17 January 31
2 January 20-31 February 14
3 February 3-14 February 28
4 February 24-March 7 March 21
5 March 10-March 21 April 4


To qualify for perfect attendance, students must attend every hour of the school day. District-approved field trips count as attendance. Attendance will be monitored through the central office team based on attendance entered into PowerSchool by your teacher of record. At the end of each two-week cycle, the central office team will run the report of all students who had perfect attendance. Then, the central office will issue the electronic gift cards to the DPSCD email address of the qualifying students within 10 school days.

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. Because student average daily attendance and chronic absenteeism in our District are most challenged at the high school level, we are thinking out of the box and offering you direct payment for improved attendance during the months (January-March) when student attendance suffers the most and when teaching and learning is most critical.

wow...wonder how they are paying for that?

Attendance is stupid. At least make it something merit based like 50 percentile.

Here’s how it’s being paid for

Money for that program — about $2 million is budgeted this school year — is coming from the interest earned on federal COVID funds as the district executes its multiyear $700 million facilities master plan.

Vitti (Superintendent) said the funding for program also comes through interest earned with the district's facility funding in the bank as projects are completed

I don't get it. Why the fascination of schooling kids who have no interest in learning and will never derive benefits? Spend all resources on those who want to learn. And not on "things" but actual applied education.

I don't know about Michigan specifically, but in many states - including Arkansas - if the student isn't in school the public school doesn't get paid that student's portion of the state funding.

And if the overall daily school attendance drops below a certain percentage (I don't recall the exact percentage here, something like 80% or so) the school loses even more of their funding.

So they have a financial incentive to minimize absences. And it's literally significantly cheaper for them to pay a student $20/day to come to school that would be to lose even more from them not being in school each of those days.

Using some quick and dirty Arkansas numbers I dug up just now, looks like each student is worth ~$14,000 for a 178 day school year. That's about $78 per school day in state funding. So the district could lose $20 in gift cards for that student each day, or they can lose $78 per day... See what I mean?


When it comes down to it, school attendance at public schools is all about money. (As most things usually are.)

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
I don't get it. Why the fascination of schooling kids who have no interest in learning and will never derive benefits? Spend all resources on those who want to learn. And not on "things" but actual applied education.

Because those kids grow up to be adults with no markable skills and eventually end up in the criminal justice system.

I say try the program and see if it works.

So all they have to do is show up? They can fail all their classes and still earn this money? I feel like I’m missing something, otherwise this looks like a blatant attempt at a money grab by the school system..as noted by rogue, our state follows a similar policy about bodies in the chair and $.

They’re actually rezoning some kids in some schools here so the kids are forced to attend a school that needs more bodies for their budget, instead of the one the kids been attending since K.
Not cool.

I don’t like feeling as though my child is a pawn.

So they can lead them to water
But
Can you make them drink .

Whom ever dreamt this up is a fool,


My guess is funding is based on attendance not grades.

I wonder if they tried
Grade based funding before and it failed miserably?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: bendable,

You can bribe them to show up but that’s only half the battle. The paying attention and learning hurdles remain. Then there’s the expectation being created that showing up is enough to get you paid. Try that when school is done and you gotta work.

I mean, we wouldn't want a "child left behind." (Typo)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Vgex,

Unless they want to learn paying them to attend aka just being a warm body isn’t going to accomplish anything. I would tie it to a minimum GPA or some kind of indicator.

Count day for state funding here is usually in October/November from what I remember.

quote:

Originally posted by shovelhead:
Count day for state funding here is usually in October/November from what I remember.

That's typically for enrollment-based funding sources. Attendance-based funding sources don't just look at the beginning of the school year.

https://youtu.be/WFbonVv-bI0

The book is pretty good, the documentary is as well.

Well, there is that idea the 90% of success in life is just showing up.

I have my doubts that DPSSC is teaching anything useful.

They should order pizza.

"If I'm here and you're here, doesn't that make it our time? Certainly, there's nothing wrong with a little feast on our time."

quote:

They should order pizza.

Spicoli can bring it every day.

Stupid drivers aren't limited to people with nice cars, people with average cars and people with junk cars drive like idiots too.