Is the Count Day carnival suffocating dropout recovery efforts?

If the past is prelude, things are about to get a bit surreal in the Wolverine State.

Wednesday, Sept. 29 is “Count Day” in Michigan’s public schools — the day in which education officials take a census of students for the purpose of divvying up state education funding.

Detroit Public School students who attended class during last year’s Count Day were entered into drawings for a 42-inch plasma flat screen TV, laptop computers, iPods and gift cards. Free breakfast and lunch were provided to every student in every school in the district — and schools throughout the district offered pizza parties to classes with perfect attendance. Many individual schools held their own raffles — students at Mann Elementary School were entered to win a 12-speed bicycle; the kids at Detroit City High School had a chance to win fast food gift certificates. At Central High, Detroit Pistons Guard Rip Hamilton showed up to encourage students to work hard in school.

The efforts schools undertake to get students through the doors on Count Day are certainly understandable. After all, Michigan schools that manage to get a student into class for just this one day receive 75 percent of the total annual funding for that student — even if the child never steps foot in school again.   

But clearly, there is a bit of game playing going on here. And the carnival-like atmosphere in Detroit only serves to highlight a fundamental problem with school funding in the 20 states that use attendance on just one or two days a year to determine school funding.

It can all be summed up like this: What happens when the carnival ends?  

That’s the question that Michigan state Sen. Wayne Kuipers has been asking. The chairman of the state Senate's Education Committee told The Grand Rapids Press, earlier this year, that districts place too much emphasis on count days — and not enough on keeping students in school throughout the year.
   
“Kids need to learn, and they learn when they're in their seats," said Kuipers, who has advocated getting rid of Michigan’s 75-25  "They're already taking attendance everyday anyway. Let's get away from schools having pizza parties and things to get kids there on count day and get them in school every day."

Most states that use a single count day (or states, like Michigan, where the majority of funding is reliant on a single count day) generally tally up their students on or around October 1, which is when the federal government requires a count of the number of students
eligible for free and reduced-price lunches. The count day system is relatively simple to administer and minimizes state costs.

But states looking to fight the dropout epidemic might want to consider another cost.  

Because school districts receive either no funding, or substantially reduced funding, for students who enroll after count day, there is a tremendous disincentive to engage in dropout recovery programs that enroll out-of-school youth back into school at any point past count day. So, at a time in which efforts to re-enroll students are increasingly gaining traction as an important part of the fight to reduce our nation’s dreadful dropout rates, those efforts are being suffocated from the start.

There is no perfect solution, but there are better solutions. Last month, the Colorado Children’s Campaign published an indispensable report on the count mechanisms for school funding in all 50 states. Any state that relies on one or two “Count Days” each year should soberly consider how one of the other funding strategies discussed in the report might be a better fit when it comes to getting students into class on days that don’t include pizza parties, celebrity guests and 42-inch flatscreens.

Gregg Rosann is a founder and president of The American Academy, which partners with school districts across the country to offer former dropouts the opportunity to earn a high school diploma. For more information about the Academy and its programs, visit NoDropouts.com