The Oakland Unified School District is paying students with chronic absenteeism $50 to attend class - with the caveat they must have perfect attendance to get the money, according to a report.
The aim of the pilot program, called the Equitable Design Project, which ended its second year in the school system in June, is to motivate students who are chronically absent to attend class by giving them $50 checks every Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
But if the high school students enrolled in the program are tardy, cut or skip class they forfeit the money.
This year, 93 students signed up for the program that ran the final 10 weeks of the school year.
It's an attempt by school administrators to turn around surging absenteeism after the COVID pandemic.
In the 2023-2024 school year, about 32% of students in the district were chronically absent, the report said.
"The money is a hook that gets them into school. It's the relationships, it's being valued that keeps the students in school," Zaia Vera, the project's leader and head of social emotional learning in the district, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
As part of the program, students have to check in and out of school by meeting with an adult.
The students must also fill out an assessment about their mental health and their classroom experience once a week.
School administrators said most of the chronically absent students identify as Black or Latino, noting that many of them are homeless or live in unstable family environments.
Even with the monetary impetus, some students are hard pressed to overcome their family situation.
"There's so much stuff happening with different kids at home, outside of school that trumps any educational learning that they're receiving," Jenell Marshall, an English teacher at MetWest High School who's involved in the program, told the publication.
She said of the seven students she enrolled in the program this year, only three of them attended school consistently.
