Detroit Public Schools Community District is betting that the most convincing pitch for its schools won’t come from a billboard or a canvassing team. It’ll come from a teenager with a phone.
District officials unveiled a plan last week to hire 23 high school students as paid social media influencers, tasking them with creating content that promotes their schools to prospective students, parents, and peers. One student from each of the district’s high schools would be selected, earning $250 per month in exchange for posts, videos, and event coverage on a rotating schedule.
The proposal still requires board approval, but applications are already open.
Assistant Superintendent of Family and Community Engagement Sharlonda Buckman introduced the initiative during last week’s board meeting. “Our students are at the center of everything that we do,” Buckman said. “They have real stories, real accomplishments, real growth.” Her argument: when families hear directly from students about what school life actually looks like, their perceptions of the district shift.
That’s a significant challenge. DPSCD has been losing students for two decades, and reversing that trend has proven stubborn even as the district has tried a range of tactics.
Twenty Years of Shrinking Rolls
The forces pulling students away from Detroit’s traditional public schools are well documented and deeply structural. Detroit’s overall population has declined steadily. Birthrates are lower than they were a generation ago. The district spent years under state emergency management, a period that eroded community trust. COVID accelerated departures that some families never reversed.
Charter schools absorb roughly half of all students in the city, operating as direct competitors for the same kids. Suburban districts actively recruit Detroit students, sometimes offering transportation and other incentives. DPSCD is fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously.
The district estimates its current enrollment at just over 49,200 students. That’s about 400 more than the official count at the end of last school year, a modest uptick the district is treating as a sign of momentum. But 400 students against a 20-year decline is a thin margin for optimism.
Traditional outreach has delivered what the district itself describes as modest results. Canvassing neighborhoods, hosting Summer on the Block community events, expanding pre-kindergarten seats, pushing hard on reenrollment rates, and putting up billboards have all moved the needle, but not enough. Last summer, board members pushed district leadership to think differently, asking for strategies that were both innovative and cost-efficient.
Board member Monique Bryant was direct about where she saw untapped potential. During a July committee meeting, Bryant said she wanted students doing more of the storytelling. “I think we have an opportunity to use our students more, and I think we get more bang for our buck than what we’re spending now,” she said.
The student influencer program is, in part, a direct response to that directive.
The Logic Behind the Pivot
The broader enrollment strategy the district is pursuing goes beyond social media posts. District leadership wants to reshape public perception of DPSCD, increase awareness of individual schools through targeted advertising, and build stronger connections with families across the city. Students and parents functioning as brand ambassadors fit into that larger framework.
There’s a practical logic to the approach. Traditional advertising tells families what a district wants them to believe. Peer content, particularly from actual students, operates differently. A high schooler showing their robotics team, their theater production, or their college acceptance letters carries a kind of credibility that a district-produced marketing video can’t replicate. Social media platforms that teenagers already use daily become the distribution channel, and the content creators already know the audience.
At $250 per month per student, the program is cheap relative to the cost of a billboard campaign or a paid advertising buy. With 23 students participating, the monthly outlay is $5,750 if all slots are filled. That’s a fraction of what comparable marketing efforts cost, which is precisely the kind of cost efficiency Bryant was asking for.
The students assigned to the program would receive specific content and events to cover each month, working on rotating schedules. That structure suggests the district wants consistency and coverage across the school year rather than a burst of activity that fades. The rotating schedule also keeps the program manageable for students who are, after all, still in school.
What This Asks of Students
The program asks students to serve a promotional function for an institution, which raises questions worth sitting with. High schoolers selected as influencers would be creating content on behalf of the district, shaping how their schools are perceived by people who haven’t yet decided whether to enroll. That’s real responsibility, and it carries implications the district will need to navigate carefully.
Students chosen for these roles will presumably be those with positive experiences to share. That’s a reasonable selection criterion for a marketing program, but it means the influencer cohort will represent a particular slice of the student experience. Whether students feel free to be genuinely candid, or whether the program tilts toward curated positivity, will shape how much authentic credibility the content actually carries.
The $250 monthly payment also makes these students paid employees or contractors of the district, at least in a functional sense. That relationship needs to be clearly defined, both for legal purposes and so that students and families understand what they’re signing up for.
None of this makes the program a bad idea. But the district will want to be thoughtful about how much creative latitude students actually have, and whether the content guidelines leave room for the authenticity that gives peer marketing its power in the first place.
A Crowded Competition for Detroit Families
Understanding why DPSCD is reaching for new tools requires understanding just how competitive the market for Detroit students has become. Charter schools are not a peripheral presence in the city. They enroll roughly half of Detroit’s school-age children, which means DPSCD is operating as something closer to a co-equal player in its own city rather than the dominant system it once was. Many of those charter schools have their own marketing operations and community ties.
Suburban districts add another layer of competition. Some actively target Detroit families, particularly those in border neighborhoods, with messaging about safety, resources, and outcomes. Detroit families have real choices, and they are making them based on a combination of reputation, convenience, word of mouth, and direct outreach from competing schools.
Against that backdrop, the student influencer program is trying to do something specific: put compelling, authentic voices into the information stream that families use when making school decisions. If a parent in Detroit sees a teenager from a DPSCD high school talking genuinely about a teacher who changed their trajectory, or a program that led to a scholarship, that carries different weight than a district press release.
Whether it translates to enrollment gains is a separate question. School choice decisions are complex, and a social media post is rarely the single factor that moves a family from one school to another. But it can shift perception over time, which is what Buckman was pointing to when she described the potential for families to see “possibilities for their children.”
What Comes Next
The board still needs to vote on the program. Board member Bryant has already signaled support, given that the proposal responds directly to the direction she gave last summer. If approved, the district will move forward with selecting one student from each high school, setting up the content framework, and getting the first cohort posting.
The district’s enrollment count, taken officially at a specific point in the school year, will be the hard metric everyone watches. Four hundred students of growth is a start, but district leadership knows the structural pressures haven’t changed. Population decline, charter competition, and suburban recruitment are ongoing realities.
The student influencer program won’t fix any of that on its own. What it represents is a district trying to compete on a new terrain, using tools that match how young people and families actually communicate in 2026. Whether 23 teenagers with phones can move the needle where billboards couldn’t is the question DPSCD is now paying $250 a month per student to find out.
