Bipartisan sponsors of a novel bill to combat chronic absenteeism want to take their cue from novelist Jean Shepherd’s advice: “In God we trust; everyone else pays cash.”
In the proposed two-year pilot program, Republican state Rep. Bill Seitz and Democratic Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, both of Cincinnati, said the cash transfers would be sent to kindergartners and ninth-grade students to revive school attendance, which has long been struggling in the state but has been exacerbated by the global pandemic.
“This is the number one issue we face in education,” Isaacsohn told the House Primary & Secondary Education Committee this week. “It’s an absolute emergency, and we have to act that way.”
According to Ohio Department of Education and WorkforceBefore the pandemic, the percentage of kindergartners considered chronically absent—missing 10% or more of the school year for any reason—was 11%. In the last school year, that rate skyrocketed to 29%.
Habitual first-year high school dropouts made up 15% of students before the COVID-19 pandemic, but that figure has now risen to more than 31%.
“It’s not just Ohio. There’s a culture shift across the country away from regular, 90-plus percent school attendance,” Isaacsohn said.
One part of the novel pilot program, if approved, would provide a total of $1.5 million over two years to provide eligible school districts with enough for up to two schools to distribute the transfers to students or their parents/guardians. Seitz told the commission that it will be up to the district to decide how the funds are distributed, whether it’s a biweekly transfer of $25 per student, quarterly transfers of $150 or an annual payment of $500.
The second part of the program would include a base award of $250 for qualifying high school graduates and an additional amount of $250 to $750 for students with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher.
School districts would be eligible if they received federal Title 1 funding and were in the bottom 20 percent of classic public schools in graduation rates, under the current bill. Any district that wants to be included in the pilot program would still have to apply.
Seitz said both rural and urban school districts must be included, and both types “must demonstrate chronic absenteeism in the highest quartile based on the most recent state report card assessments.”
“So we’ll pick the people who had the worst turnout and see if we can make a difference,” Seitz told the committee.
Seitz said that given Ohio’s long-standing struggles with keeping students in schools and helping them graduate, the program follows several other local initiatives aimed at attracting students.
“We’ve tried pizza day and we’ve tried playground hours and we’ve tried everything we can think of,” Seitz said. “It just doesn’t seem to work.”
The sponsors faced criticism from some Republican members of the committee who worried that paying students to do something they were supposed to be doing could send the wrong message.
“I don’t see it as rewarding good behavior, I see it as rewarding bad behavior and encouraging an entitlement mentality that a lot of our young people get,” said state Rep. Beth Lear, R-Galena.
State Rep. Josh Williams, R-Sylvania, questioned paying students “to obey the law,” even when the state has truancy laws and consequences for parents, and even weighed in on the long-term effects of the concept of financial incentives to comply.
“Are we going to get to the point where we’re paying rapists not to rape,” Williams asked co-sponsors. “Are we really going to start this trend where we’re going to invest to prevent crimes from happening?”
Seitz said the “deterrent effect” of laws against crimes such as rape is having the desired effect, but that is not the case for people struggling with chronic absenteeism.
“The deterrent effect of truancy officers is zero because most counties don’t have truancy officers, and if they do, they can’t even do their job,” Seitz said.
State Rep. Sean Brennan, a Parma Democrat and former teacher, agreed that creating incentives to allow teachers to influence students in classrooms only helps where enforcement of truancy laws — or the lack thereof — does not.
“To be honest, Ohio’s truancy and absence laws are not very strict,” Brennan said.
If the program is successful, the state would also benefit because students who repeatedly skip classes and don’t graduate are hurting not only their own financial health but also the state, sponsors say.
“They have lower lifetime incomes, so they pay lower taxes, they have higher rates of incarceration and interaction with the criminal justice system, higher utilization of public benefits,” Isaacsohn said. “So it’s a situation where we pay now so we don’t have to pay later.”
Seitz added that if data from the pilot program proves effective in improving absenteeism and graduation rates in the state, the money for future programs will pay for itself and there will be less need for funding for dropout schools.
Before the bill is voted on, there will be public hearings in the House Elections Committee, with both opponents and supporters expected to participate.
