Detroit Mayor Mary Sheffield launched an effort to curb absenteeism at four Detroit high schools by providing free rides for students facing transportation barriers.
The rideshare program through Lyft is available to select students who need transit at Denby High School, East English Village Preparatory Academy, Osborn High School and Pershing High School. Sheffield launched the effort Sept. 30 at the Coleman A. Young Recreation Center in a joint announcement with Detroit Public Schools Community District officials stressing the importance of students showing up to school for count day, a statewide tallying of student enrollment. Count day will be Oct. 7, which will determine 90% of the schools’ overall state funding for Detroit Public Schools Community District and charter
schools.
“This program is allowing for about 150 students that have barriers to transportation to get free rideshare services to and from school at four of our high schools here in Detroit, and this is a way for us, again, to not talk about absenteeism and transportation, but to actually take action to ensure that our young people are in the classroom,” Sheffield said.
The program is different from Rides to Rise, which allows all K-12 students to ride city busses for free. Detroit’s Director of Youth and Education Chanel Hampton said that in the first month of its program, 80% of students participating “are no longer chronically absent in their first month of school.”
DDOT had 3,900 riders in the student program every week upon launch, Hampton said. By the end of the school year in June, that was up to 29,000 riders. In the first month of school this school year, DDOT reported student ridership reached 44,000, Hampton said.
Sheffield allocated $500,000 to the rideshare program, using American Rescue Plan Act allocations, according to the city. Hampton said she identified the students based on data showingwhere the highest absenteeism is in high schools, then worked with school leadership teams to identify those in need, including students who have to transfer buses multiple times to get to school.
"They live deep west, but they're actually going to school on the east side, which we have some students in the cohort that do that. We worked with the teams and identified their exact list of students. Then we had family orientation with students, with parents and family members to walk through the program and see if they were interested in it. And then we started onboarding them from there," Hampton said.
Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of DPSCD, said count day results in $10,300 per student. The school district currently has more than 49,000 students enrolled.
"Based on the number of students that have already attended after about 25 days of school, we're trending above where we were after the pandemic, and getting really close to completely rebounding from pre-pandemic days," Vitti said, urging students to show up on Oct. 7 for count day to "get the funding to serve our students."
Dana Afana is the Detroit City Hall reporter for the Free Press. Contact: dafana@freepress.com. Follow her: @DanaAfana.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: City launches free rideshare for Detroit high schools
