Can we talk about Count Day for a few minutes? Until this year, I had never experienced fall Count Day because Christian schools don’t have to do it and my student teaching at Grandville was during the spring. Count Day is the first Wednesday in October and the number of students that attend school on Count Day translates directly into funding from the state. In fact, Count Day numbers are responsible for 90% of the school’s annual funding. NINETY PERCENT.
On Count Day, every single student has an imaginary dollar sign on his or her forehead. Or, more accurately, 7,500 of them.
That’s right - students in many Michigan school districts are worth about seventy-five hundred bucks on Count Day. If a student doesn’t come to school on Count Day, he or she doesn’t count toward the school’s enrollment for the year, and since funding is based on enrollment, the school loses money for that student, even though the student probably comes to school most of the time. You can probably imagine what a problem this causes for school districts.
Count Day becomes a game - incentives for attendance on this day are offered in elementary schools, like getting to wear your PJs to school, or having your teacher do something fun and crazy if everyone comes to school, or ice cream sundaes at the end of the day for everyone who was at school all day. Middle- and high school teachers remind students for several days leading up to Count Day about how important it is for them to come to school so that the government will give the school money to spend on their education. Administrators get pretty peeved when a student enrolls the day after Count because they won’t get any state funding for the student because he or she wasn’t at the school the day before, even though they will likely be enrolled for the next eight months.
But incentives and promise of rewards don’t always get teenagers to come to school. At their age, most students could care less about helping their school get the money it needs to teach them. Schools that could really use the extra funding pull out all the stops on Count Day: they arrange robocalls on Tuesday night to students who have a tendency toward absence and tardiness, secretaries put together the master list of students who are absent for Count and organize them by the neighborhood they live in, administrators and teachers who have first or second hour prep periods divide the list up and go to students’ houses to pick them up and bring them to school. I’m not even kidding. The stakes are that high - if each student is worth about seven grand, aren’t you going to do everything you can to put them in school on Count Day?
Some school districts are so desperate for funding that they put suspensions on hold - students who are suspended in-house get to go to class, and students who are out of school for suspension get to come back to school for just that one day. Teachers are strongly discouraged from sending kids to the principal or to in-school holding because their presence in class translates to thousands of dollars, even if the student in question is derailing the whole class. Some teachers even have to assume that the day is going to be a wash - if they make some progress on a lesson plan, great, but if they don’t, it’s because the money is more important and they just have to deal with the troublemakers being back in class.
What message does this send to our students? Students even as young as middle schoolers know what’s going on - they know that on Count Day, we don’t promote attendance simply for the sake of attendance and doing well in school. They know that as much as we don’t want to, we see them with dollar signs on their foreheads on the first Wednesday of every October. We can dress it up with incentives and school spirit and enthusiasm for learning, but underneath, we know that the system is so messed up and we just have to deal with it for what it is.
On the surface, it makes sense that the state government would base funding of schools on how many students it serves. The more students a school has, the more money it will need to pay for educational materials, teachers, parapros, support staff, food, building upkeep, etc. This system breaks down, though, when it comes to the actual implementation: to base funding on the attendance numbers of one single school day raises the stakes so high that some schools have to shift their focus from education and achievement and making a better life, which is what we’re at school for in the first place, to what is really pulling all of our strings: cold, hard cash.
This system uniquely punishes schools with high enrollment in low- or low-middle income areas. The more students there are, the more money the school will need to do educate them effectively. On the flip side, where there are more students, there are higher numbers of absences and truancy. Unfortunately, where there are more students, there are not always more educators. Large schools are already stretched for personnel, which makes the annual funding that much more important. Schools can’t (and shouldn’t have to) dispatch employees to go and pick up missing students, even for Count, just to get the money they need to educate these students the rest of the year. School should be about education, not about jumping through hoops and having to play a sinister zero-sum game.
Public schools are not in the business of making money, yet the State treats education as a business. Its policies reward the districts that are already doing well and punishes the districts that want to do well and could do well with the extra funding. Punishing the school by cutting its funding is not a simple “Well, you didn’t get your students’ tests scores up with the money we gave you, so we’re not going to give you as much as last year. It’s just not a smart investment for us.” Yet this is the mentality in the State legislatures. Cutting funding doesn’t just punish the educators by forcing them to do the same amount of work and achieve the same standard with less funding than before. It punishes the students who need education as their ticket out of the lives their parents are living. We say that to our kids all the time - education is your ticket out of here. But how can that be true if the State puts up all kinds of hoops and obstacles and contingencies?
Schools are not businesses from which to cut one’s losses. Funding should not be contingent on the attendance numbers of a single, isolated school day. What if we did Count Week instead? Students get sick. Students make appointments to see doctors. Parents can’t always be relied on to bring their students to school every day and on time. But does that make them less deserving of a well-funded and well-managed education? While it’s true that some administrators and educators don’t care enough about their job or their students to crusade so diligently for funding, most are not like this. The educators and administrators at my school, for example, fall into this latter category. You can tell by the way they conceptualize education - they educate the whole person, not just the content area they are responsible for. They are united in their commitment to lifelong literacy and learning. They communicate with colleagues and advocate for the needs of their students.
And then, when even their best efforts can’t get kids into school on Count Day, they are punished by being forced to do more with less.
