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Detroit Schools to Continue $100 Weekly Perfect Attendance Payments, Add $50 for Middle Schoolers
Detroit Public Schools Community District is expanding an attendance incentive that officials say helped improve turnout among high school students.
Students in grades 6 through 8 can earn $50 for each week of perfect attendance, while high school students can still earn $100 a week.
The expansion comes as chronic absenteeism remains widespread. In 2024-25, 61% of district students missed at least 10% of the school year. Click here to learn more.
Meta Platforms faces pivotal trial as opening statements begin in California
OAKLAND, Calif. — Opening statements started Tuesday in a pivotal trial for Meta Platforms in a California federal court, where states are seeking billions of dollars in damages for social media harms to children.
Attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey are seeking a financial penalty that could, in theory, total as much as $1.4 trillion plus changes to how the company operates Facebook and Instagram. Twenty-nine states sued the tech giant in 2023 over child safety and privacy — the other 25 will go to trial later. The company also faces lawsuits in state courts.
The lawsuit accuses the social media giant of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly and deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms. It also argues that Meta routinely collects data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of federal law. Click here to read more.
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Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed last month highlighted how his mother “taught me so much about both how to stand with others, and how to stand alone.”
In a video posted to TikTok, the former Wayne County health official chatted on a porch swing with Jacqueline El-Sayed, a highly accomplished engineer from Gratiot County, about how his stepmother helped shape his views on life as she helped raise the progressive firebrand in Bloomfield Hills, an upscale suburb of Detroit.
Jacqueline El-Sayed married El-Sayed’s father, Mohamed El-Sayed, not long after he immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1980s with Fatten Fathy Elkomy, the U.S. Senate candidate’s birth mother.
“They ended up getting divorced,” El-Sayed said of his birth parents during a 2017 speech before the Islamic Foundation. “And my mother, she remarried a gentleman who was working as a translator in the Middle East and moved back to the Middle East.” Click here to read more.
Alleged kidnapper posed as babysitter on Facebook group, warrant says; video shows children rescued
Lakesha Brown, 42, is charged with kidnapping and cruelty to children. Her arrest warrants state she posed as a babysitter on a “pregnancy mom group” on Facebook to get close to the family.
Police said Brown spent the past year building a relationship with the children’s mother, Elica Redding.
According to arrest warrants, Redding agreed to let Brown babysit the girls on Saturday night. Brown told the mother she was taking the girls to Walmart and Candy Utopia, but failed to show up at a designated grandmother’s house afterward. Click here to read more.
Where are Michiganders moving to? U-Haul has some answers
Michigan senior citizens are moving South. The state’s young adults are heading to Chicago or Detroit.
But there are also some surprises in new U-Haul data looking at one-way U-Haul rentals from July 2025 to July 2026. The data includes moves originating in metro Detroit and Grand Rapids.
The analysis breaks the data down by metro area and age group. It shows the top five out-of-state net-gain destinations for each age group, as well as the top five metro areas, which includes in-state moves.
Nationally:
Baby Boomers across the U.S. are heading to warm climes. Six of the top seven net-gain states for Boomers are in the Southeast and the other is Arizona.
Generation X and Millennials flocking to Florida and Texas more than anywhere else, although several Midwest states are in the mix for Millennials.
Generation Z is gravitating major metro areas, including those in Texas and California as well as New York City and Chicago. Click here to read more.
