Since the COVID-19 pandemic, K-12 students across the nation have been missing more school.

The percentage of chronically absent students — referring to those who miss more than 10% of school days — nearly doubled from 2018 to 2022, according to The Brookings Institution.

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Last school year, Michigan recorded one of the highest rates of chronically absent students compared to other states, according to data from the state Department of Education. The rate among Detroit students was more than double that.  

Now through March, Detroit Public Schools Community District is giving high school students $200 gift cards every time they have perfect attendance for 10 school days in a row. That’s just one approach of many that schools are experimenting with to get kids back into the classroom.

We’ve addressed this topic before on the show. Today on The Metro, we took a deeper dive into the different approaches for combating chronic absenteeism with Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute; and Sarah Lenhoff, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Wayne State University.

Malkus noted how being chronically absent from school can cause a ripple effect in a student’s life that can affect them well into adulthood. 

“We know that kids who are chronically absent are less likely to read at the critical grade three, they’re more likely to struggle in middle school academically, they’re really less likely than their peers who attend regularly to graduate from high school, and the effects go into the future in the labor force as well,” he said.  

Lenhoff,  who also serves as the director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity & Research, led a study on chronic absenteeism and says solutions to the issue can’t only come from the schools. She suggested that one way to curb it could be creating a stronger school-to-neighborhood social connection in communities. 

“If a parent, you know, has something come up and they can’t get their child to school then they have people to rely on in their neighborhood, they have a neighbor, they have maybe a senior who lives across the street, maybe a friend who’s going to the same school,” Lenhoff said. 

482 Forward Communications Lead Imani Foster also joined the conversation. She is one of the community members who helped in the research project. Monitoring attendance and school engagement is mainly left up to teachers, but she says this wasn’t always the case.

“I think most of the schools fired their attendance agents because they cut a lot of different positions,” Foster said. “And so the teachers are now asked to be attendance agents. Attendance agents were normally the ones that kept up with families, right, that made the calls home, that maybe even made house visits to check on if everything was OK. Now that’s a gap that teachers are trying to fill.”

We also asked our listeners:

“Should we pay students to go to school?”

Nick in St. Clair Shores said: “Personally, I missed a lot of high school my final year, and I skipped a lot to go work at Red Robin. I would pick up a lunch shift instead of going to math class. And I feel like if I was paid to be in school, I wouldn’t have done that.”

Use the media player above to hear the full conversation, and other stories from “The Metro.”

More headlines from The Metro on Jan. 27, 2024: 

• Since 1958, the Jim Dandy Ski Club has been working to lower barriers for Black kids and adults to get involved in skiing, and to bring them deeper into connection with a broader community. This Friday, the club is hosting its annual “Black Out” ski event, which is open to anyone, not just members. Miles Maxey, former president, vice president, and board member of the Jim Dandy Ski Club, joined the show to discuss the event and how the club has made snow sports more accessible.
• “Techno: The Rise of Detroit’s Machine Music” is a new exhibit set to open at the MSU Museum on Feb. 4, that aims to explore Detroit’s role as the birthplace of Techno music and its connection to Afrofuturism.  The exhibition’s curator. Julian Chambliss, joined the show to discuss the project. We also spoke with John Collins, an important figure in Detroit’s techno culture, member of Underground Resistance and exhibition community curator.
• In President Donald Trump’s first term in office he made good on a campaign promise to cut taxes. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed by Congress and signed into law in 2017. The Biden administration did not roll back the tax cuts, so they are still intact. But a significant part of those tax cuts are set to expire at the end of this year unless Trump and Congress act to extend them. The Metro producer David Leins spoke with Bharat Ramamurti, senior advisor for economic strategy at the American Economic Liberties Project and former economic communications advisor for the Biden-Harris administration.

Do you have a community story we should tell? Let us know in an email at detroiteveningreport@wdet.org.