Students as young as five could get paid to show up to class under a proposed Ohio law aimed at fighting absenteeism.
Under a pilot program, the state would make biweekly $25 cash transfers to select kindergarten and 9th grade students just for showing up to class nine out of 10 days in the two-week span.
Students who kept up a 90% attendance rate for the year would get $150 at the end of each quarter and $700 at the end of the year.
One of the sponsors of the bipartisan measure argued that cash would be a good incentive to fight truancy, which has been soaring in Ohio since before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The Statehouse News Bureau.
“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 ten percent of their school days. This is the number one issue we are facing in education,” said Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, a Cincinnati Democrat.
Co-sponsor Rep. Bill Seitz, a Cincinnati Republican, told the Ohio House Primary and Secondary Education Committee that other motivational techniques have fallen short.
“So, 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,” Seitz said, according to the report.
“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.”
Some $1.5 million has been set aside for the pilot program targeting at least one rural district and one urban district in the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years.
The program would also offer students $250 for graduating from select schools, and up to $750 for graduates with high GPAs, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
Other students in a control group would not get the cash.
If successful, the program could be expanded throughout The Buckeye State if it garnered the support of the legislature.
At least one Republican on the committee was skeptical.
Rep. Josh Williams, who earned a GED after failing to graduate high school, said he was supportive of creative ideas to increase attendance and performance — but that the proposal went too far.
“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 you can be penalized,'” the Sylvania lawmaker said, according to the report.
“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? I mean, are we going to get to the point where we are paying rapists not to rape?”
Seitz countered that there are not enough truant officers to stay on top of the problem, and pointed out that high school dropouts cost the state money in other ways.
“Kids today want, more or less, immediate gratification. You cannot say ‘Well, if you do all of this, we’ll give you a lollipop at the end of the school year.’ The way we have designed this with the $25 monthly cash payment provides a degree of immediacy,” Seitz said.
He also noted that perhaps the quality of pizza offered to students as an incentive had not been sufficient.
“Maybe the pizza’s not as good as it should be. I don’t know.”
Chronic absenteeism is reportedly twice as common among black students than white students in Ohio.