Detroit's yellow-bus experiment cut absenteeism at Henry Ford High, and the district is doubling it

Detroit's school district spent its first year testing a simple question: would putting high schoolers on yellow buses get them to show up more often. At one of the two schools in the pilot, the answer was yes.

Among Henry Ford High School students who rode the bus ten or more times, chronic absenteeism fell 8.5 percentage points this year compared with last, according to data DPSCD administrators presented at a board committee meeting. The students who rode between one and nine times improved by 7 points. The district counts a student as chronically absent when they miss 10 percent or more of school days.

The numbers come from a $600,000 program. Four buses ran two daily routes at each of two schools, Henry Ford and East English Village Preparatory Academy at Finney, across the full 2025-26 school year. Through April 2, Henry Ford drew 102 riders. East English Village drew 29.

That gap shaped the takeaway. Henry Ford produced a clear signal because enough students rode; East English Village's ridership was too thin to read much into. More than 300 eligible East English Village students never boarded a bus all year, per the district's figures.

The schools were chosen because they needed it. In 2024-25, 82 percent of Henry Ford students and 77 percent of East English Village students were chronically absent, both well above the district average of 60.9 percent.

One figure complicates the win. Henry Ford students who lived in the eligible zone but did not ride saw their chronic absenteeism climb 3.8 points. The same neighborhood produced the biggest gains and the biggest slides, depending on whether a student got on the bus. That leaves open whether the bus drove the improvement or whether the students who chose to ride were already heading toward better attendance.

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti framed the result as worth building on without overselling it. "I feel that the Henry Ford pilot can tell us that it's worth exploring," Vitti said at the meeting, per BridgeDetroit, adding that he "would not scale at every high school, but it is something to explore maybe at certain schools."

The district is taking that step. For 2026-27, DPSCD is keeping the pilot at Henry Ford and East English Village and adding two more neighborhood high schools, Pershing and Cody. DPSCD remains an outlier among large Michigan districts in not offering yellow-bus service to most high schoolers by default; many ride DDOT city buses instead.