Detroit will blitz parents to get kids in school now

The Detriot Free Press reports:

With TV spots, newspaper ads, visits from truant officers and letters to parents, Detroit's city and school leaders prepared Friday for an all-out blitz this weekend and early next week to get kids -- about 25,000 of them -- back to class or face losing millions of dollars in state aid for the district.

If they fail to lure a large portion of that number back to schools by a statewide student count day Wednesday, it could potentially lead to dozens of schools being shuttered and massive layoffs in the already-strapped district, a prospect that drew concern from Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

To get students back, Detroit Public Schools planned to send letters to every parent in the district, pleading for them to get their children to school; at the same time, administrators were scrambling to line up Sunday visits to churches to ask congregations to do what they can to boost attendance next week in time for count day.

Those visits would be followed up with calls to homes and a push by city leaders to help out the schools.

"This is critical," Kilpatrick's spokesman, Matt Allen, said Friday. "We need to focus."

Detroit Public Schools is spending $500,000 to boost enrollment, and that figure could be a drop in the bucket compared with what the district would lose if an estimated 25,000 students who haven't shown up for classes aren't there by count day.

Twice every year, the state requires districts to count their students. The figures set how much per-student funding each district gets.

Though the per-student figure varies from district to district, in Detroit, each missing student means a loss of $7,459.

If the district were missing 25,000 students on Wednesday, it would translate into a potential loss of nearly $190 million, though it would be somewhat less when blended with the student count from the previous February, when more students were in schools.

An absence problem in general

The problem in Detroit is that the district has been bleeding students for years -- it expected to lose about 9,000 students already this fall. But then a 16-day teacher strike apparently caused many parents to enroll their kids elsewhere.

The failure of public education.I guess less people believe in it.