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When Janine Scott taught middle school, she had a student who often showed up smelling bad. She sent him to talk to a male teacher, thinking it was a hygiene issue.
It wasn’t.
“It’s not him, it’s his hoodie,” the teacher told Scott.
Scott, who now teaches mathematics at Davis Aerospace Technical High School and is a member of Chalkbeat’s reader advisory board, said she still sees at least a handful of students come to class in dirty clothes. But the problem is often more visible among younger kids, she said. That’s because older students know better how to conceal the problem, “or they just don’t come to school,” she said.
In Detroit public schools, where 84% of kids qualify for subsidized meals, district officials plan to put laundry facilities in all schools to help tackle one of the district’s most pressing issues: chronic absenteeism, defined as a student who misses at least 10% of the school year. Last year, two-thirds of Detroit students fell into that category, according to data from the Detroit Public Schools Community District.
More than half of the district’s 108 schools have washers and dryers so far. District officials hope all schools will be equipped with them next year. The initiative is funded through multiple philanthropic donations and an investment from GE Appliances.
“Through the GE investment, we can scale a strategy that helps address one of many causes of chronic absenteeism — students having access to clean uniforms or clothes due to concentrated poverty,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in an email to Chalkbeat.
Providing laundry facilities at schools is among dozens of strategies identified to address chronic absenteeism in the Attendance Playbook, a report issued by the independent think tank FutureEd at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.
Other strategies include greater engagement with families, strengthening student-teacher relationships, and investing in full-service community schools, where a school “becomes a hub for the community, providing access not just to education but to health care, social services, extended learning and other support for students and their families.”
Phyllis Jordan, an associate director of FutureEd and the report’s author, noted that adding laundry facilities at school “is a fairly new approach without much of a research base.”
However, she cites data from Whirlpool, a home appliance company that has donated washers and dryers to more than 100 schools, showing that “in the 2019-2020 school year, nearly 73% of the participating elementary students who were on track to be chronically absent improved their attendance after they began using the program.”
Whirlpool also found added social benefits. Both teachers and students “reported increased engagement in class and participation in extracurricular activities.”
Installing the appliances comes with some challenges, though, especially in the many older buildings where Detroit kids attend class.
“Most of the district’s schools were not built with washers and dryers in mind so additional new electrical infrastructure is needed and a room needs to be identified to provide the space,” Vitti said.
The district’s recent addition of “health hubs,” which are located at neighborhood high schools across the city, will also have laundry facilities. The hubs provide families with physical, behavioral, and mental health support and services.
DPSCD received $4.5 million in funding from multiple community organizations to launch the hubs over the next few years, with the first five opening last year.
Detroit’s “uniquely challenging” context for chronic absenteeism
Vitti has made addressing chronic absenteeism a central issue of his tenure leading the Detroit school district, where 66% of kids were chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year. That marked a 10 percentage point improvement from the previous year – but it is still more than double the statewide number of 30.8%.
The problem can feel intractable in school districts like Detroit where students must overcome more hurdles than kids in wealthier districts, from concentrated poverty to a legacy of structural racism and inequitable funding.
Researchers at the Wayne State College of Education found that a variety of factors were “significantly correlated with city-wide rates of chronic absenteeism,” including population change, asthma rates, poverty and unemployment rates, violent crime rates, and racial segregation.
Detroit’s rates of poverty, asthma, violent crime, and unemployment were among the highest in the nation for cities with 500,000 residents or more, researchers found, giving it a “uniquely challenging context for student attendance.”
Jeremy Singer, assistant research professor at Wayne State University and associate director of the Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research, co-authored the report and said many families could benefit from laundry facilities at schools – and it encourages families to engage with their kids’ schools “beyond the types of communication that families might be used to.”
“It’s a great way to lead with a foot forward, saying, ‘We have something to offer you,’” he said.
Installing washers and dryers in schools also acknowledges the families who struggle to keep stable housing in Detroit, he said.
Singer worked with researchers from several local universities to survey Detroit families about their living situations. They found that up to 16% of the K-12 students in Detroit’s public and charter schools were housing insecure or experiencing homelessness during the 2021-22 school year.
But schools tend to undercount these numbers, which means students miss out on vital support services and funding provided under federal law.
Singer said the addition of washers and dryers in schools could be crucial for these students.
Chad Audi, president of the Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, which operates multiple homeless shelters and food banks across the city and serves nearly three-quarters of Detroit’s chronically homeless families, told Chalkbeat the number of homeless families seeking help has spiked dramatically.
“In just the last two weeks, I personally received at least seven requests from single women with children who needed a place to go,” he said. “They called everywhere and were told every place was full.”
Audi said he fields calls on his cell phone at all hours of the day and night from city officials to police officers asking for his help in providing people with shelter.
He said he hasn’t seen this level of need since the 2008 recession.
“We’re seeing people who are exactly like you and me, who have just been one or two paychecks away from losing their homes or not being able to afford their mortgages or their rent,” he said. “Now they’re coming to the shelter.”
Every day, his receptionists answer phone calls from families living in their cars. They call in tears saying they have nowhere to go, that they have called multiple shelters, and no one has the space. (DRMM does not turn anyone away, but people must first call a helpline operated by the city called CAM Detroit at 313-305-0311. It connects people to shelters and resources, but it also can present another hurdle if no one answers, Audi said.)
He remembered one family who had been living in their car for a month.
“A lot of those kids, unfortunately, have had their clothes on them for a long time,” he said.
Meeting students’ essential needs in different ways
At Davis Aerospace Technical High School, Scott, the mathematics teacher, has taken over a project this year that goes hand in hand with the addition of laundry facilities and aims to meet the essential needs of her students.
When she takes them into “The Clean Closet,” an idea one of her former colleagues spearheaded several years ago, they stop in their tracks. Some cry when they survey the simple supplies stacked on the wooden shelves — deodorant, laundry detergent, toothbrushes.
Over the years, a few different teachers have overseen the closet and it has been located in several areas, from a spot near the washer and dryer to inside a teacher’s classroom.
“It was amazing to me that every single time I took a young lady in for a pad, she would ask, ‘Oh, can I get a toothbrush? Can I get a bar of soap?’” Scott said.
The closet also has things like socks and washcloths. Scott said both are in-demand items.
She buys a lot of the supplies herself and is building a patchwork network of donors, too.
“I’m very, very careful as an educator to not ask my teacher friends for anything, because all teachers give to their kids till the cows come home, till they’re dry. So my non-teacher friends are the ones that I’m like, ‘Hey, can I get $20 because I want to go buy some pads? Or, ‘Next time you see some detergent on sale, would you buy some more?’
Those donations get a lot of use — every day, kids use the closet, Scott said.
Sometimes they use the closet because they forgot to put on deodorant — they’re just being kids after all, Scott said.
“But a lot of times, in my head, in my heart, I know it’s because they don’t have it.”
Robyn Vincent is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit, covering Detroit schools and Michigan education policy. You can reach her at rvincent@chalkbeat.org
