It Pays To Skip School
At least it does in Camden, N.J., where officials have decided it’s a capital idea to hand out C-notes by the fistful to encourage school kids to, um, go to school. But first, you apparently have to a healthy record of truancy to qualify for the payout, or payoff as the case might be. This from the Philly Inquirer:
Nearly 70 Camden high school students will be paid $100 each to not skip school.
The city’s newest attempt at combating truancy – I Can End Truancy, or ICE-T – will focus on conflict-resolution and anger-management workshops and educational reinforcement during the next five weeks, ending Sept. 30.
Sixty-six youths, who range from incoming high school freshmen to seniors, filed into the Isabel Miller Community Center in Camden’s Liberty Park neighborhood Tuesday for their first anti-truancy session.
The program, which will be held three days each week, is being funded mostly through a $63,000 Community Justice Grant from the state Department of Criminal Justice.
…
The money needs to be used by Sept. 30 or the city would lose its chance at receiving the grant next year, city officials said. That is why the students who have enrolled in the program will be paid only three weeks into the school year and not at the end.
The only leverage the city has for these students after Sept. 30 is a pledge they signed, along with their parents, promising to not skip school. Officials involved in the program pledged, in return, to track the students’ attendance throughout the year.
Aside from the obvious problems of 1) naming an anti-truancy program after a rapper who made his bones with a song about killing cops and 2) bureaucrats burning through grant money to beat a spending deadline or risk the funding tap being shut off for future loot, there’s the program’s insidious underpinning of essentially rewarding truancy.
The Inquirer article informs that about 25 percent of the recipients “are considered “at-risk,” or chronically truant,” while the “rest are a mix of borderline truants.” How’s that incentive for skipping school, when you have a brain trust of bureaucrats giving kids $100 a pop for doing just that.
You can almost hear the wheels spinning in the “borderline” truant’s head, who didn’t land any payola this time around: “Man, I gotta bump up my game, make that leap from borderline to chronic, snag a yard next year.”
And then there’s the glaring quirk that kids who get rewarded for habitually skipping school, don’t necessarily even have to change their ways to keep the $100 payoff. It’s a money-up-front, hope-to-see-you-later deal. Sweet.
Meanwhile, the kids who attend school because they want to improve their education, suckers that they are, get zip.
Which begs the question: exactly what kind of lesson are the bright bulbs on the Camden school board teaching?
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