Published September 16, 2026 at 1:34 PM EDT

After two years of paying high schoolers for perfect attendance, the Detroit Public Schools Community District is expanding the program to middle school this year.

The school district has struggled with chronic absenteeism. Last year 57% of Detroit students missed 18 days of class or more, about twice the statewide rate.

The district has looked for creative approaches to increase attendance, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told Michigan Public, which he said is directly linked to student achievement.

“This conversation is about making sure students are coming to school so that they can learn at higher levels,” Vitti said.

The program runs for ten weeks from January through March, the time of year that attendance usually drops, according to the district. During that period, high schoolers can earn a $100 gift card for each week where they attend every class hour, every day. With the program expansion this year, middle schoolers will get the chance to earn $50 gift cards for doing the same.

Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins, President of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, said the financial incentive felt strange at first, especially because she wants “students to come to school because they love it.”

But, “as much as I would like to argue against it, there have been many positive results,” Wilson-Lumpkins said. “I think it is working.”

According to the district, attendance rose over two percent during the period, compared to before the introduction of the program. About a third of students who earned an incentive were students the district considered chronically absent. A participation summary indicates the program paid out about $7.7 million dollars last year.

Vitti said that socioeconomic factors, including the need to balance school with work, create barriers to attendance. He said the incentives program is part of a broader attempt to be “thoughtful and strategic about attacking the concentration of poverty and the impact that it has on our families.”

Vitti acknowledged the program “has had a more positive impact on those students that are in exam and application schools, that tend to be coming from more higher socioeconomic background classes.” But, he added, “our neighborhood high schools also showed a strong improvement.”

In addition to the perfect attendance incentive, the district has hired staff who monitor student attendance and conduct home visits and other interventions. They're also increasing bus services and providing more wrap-around family services.

But “the incentives get a lot of attention,” Vitti said, “because it is innovative and controversial.”

Vitti said that much of the criticism he’s heard comes from outside the city, “mainly from right-wing Republicans.” Last month, the New York Post ran an opinion piece calling the program a “desperate, last-ditch attempt to fix a much deeper cultural crisis.”

“They hear [about] a program like this, and they apply it to their middle class values and their middle class understanding of what they did when they went to school,” Vitti said. “Typically it’s people that have not worked through the challenge of getting our students to school every day and the challenges connected to the concentration of poverty.”

“It might be controversial. People may disagree,” Vitti said. “But is it making a difference? Yes. Kids are coming to school more frequently and chronic absenteeism is dropping.”