From kindergarten to high school, a new Ohio bill could see students getting paid simply for showing up to class.
(Video: WLWT)
Seeking to combat “chronic absenteeism,” state lawmakers have introduced a bipartisan bill seeking to flash some cash to keep kids showing up at school. Eyeing a pilot program at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, Ohio House Bill 348 could see some students pull in hundreds.
Introduced by state Reps. Bill Seitz (R) and Dani Isaacsohn (D), the bill, if passed, would empower the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to select between four and eight schools, with at least one rural and one urban, to test incentivized attendance.
Within those schools pulled from the highest quarter of absenteeism in the state, kindergartners and ninth-graders would be divided into payees and a control group with those on the dole earning $25 bi-weekly for surpassing 90% attendance.
Additionally, $150 would be distributed for maintaining that rate for each quarter and another $500 would be awarded for doing so for the duration of the school year. For the little learners, the money would go directly to the parents while ninth-graders would have their incentives made payable to them and their parents.
“We’re not teaching them to read if they’re not there; we can’t teach them math if they’re not there,” Isaacsohn told WLWT which reported that in the previous school year, chronic absenteeism in public schools throughout Cincinnati was nearly 46%.
The lawmaker was reported to have told the Statehouse News Bureau when speaking about state figures, “We went from 15% pre-pandemic to over 31% in this most recent school year. That’s almost a third of our ninth-graders that spend their first year of high school missing more than 10 percent of their school days. This is the number one issue we are facing in education.”
Along with the attendance incentive, students would also be eligible for $250 for graduating from select schools along with up to $750 depending on their GPA.
“It is so much less expensive to invest and make sure that kids are getting to school than it is to pay the costs for when kids don’t go to school,” the Democrat lawmaker added to WLWT.
“So,” said Seitz to the Statehouse News Bureau, “we’ve tried pizza day and we have tried playground hours and we have tried all kind of foo-foo stuff. It doesn’t seem to work. So let us talk about the immediacy of a payment in cash. Cash is king. Cold, hard cash. In God we trust, all others pay cash.”
“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. That’s what we are trying to do. the stick approach to compel attendance has not worked,” he went on. “And the other incentives that we have handed out I guess are not sufficiently good incentives to get people to change their behavior. Maybe the pizza’s not good as it should be. I don’t know.”
State Rep. Josh Williams (R) questioned the need for an attendance incentive when state law already requires students to be in class.
“Why are we going to pay kids to follow the law? We have laws in place that say ‘You cannot skip school You cannot be truant. You can be criminally charged and penalized. Parents, your kids must be enrolled in school. If you don’t enroll your kids in school, you can be charged and penalized,'” he said.
“Is this going to set a precedent for our young kids as young as kindergarten that we are going to pay you to abide by the laws moving forward?” Williams asked. “I mean, are we going to get to the point where we are paying rapists not to rape?”
In total, $1.5 million was marked for the pilot program that has made it to committee and Seitz defended the legislation to WLWT, saying, “In seventh-grade social studies, our teacher used to say money isn’t everything kids, but always remember this: it’s way ahead of whatever’s in second place.”
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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