Nikolai Vitti speaks during a session on education at the Mackinac Policy Conference. (Credit: Detroit Regional Chamber Flickr)
MACKINAC ISLAND – Beyond its struggles with chronic absenteeism and academics, another ongoing challenge for Detroit’s public school district is a “disruptive” proliferation of marijuana.
“It’s so accessible and prevalent now within the city and metro Detroit, it’s easy for everyday kids to come into contact with edibles,” Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told BridgeDetroit about an influx of dispensaries in recent years.
Vitti said the district has at least one incident a week when students between third and 12th grade are either experimenting with edibles or don’t know the products they are consuming are laced with marijuana.
“We haven’t lost any children, but it leads to vomiting, hallucinations, and kids being rushed to the hospital, which is traumatic and disruptive to the learning environment,” he said.
The Detroit public schools leader has been vocal about his concerns over the volume of marijuana businesses. In March, Detroit’s City Council approved an ordinance that bans advertisements for marijuana and nicotine vapes within 1,000 feet of schools, libraries, parks, recreation centers and other places likely to attract children. For its part, Vitti said the district is consistent with robocalls, letters, discussions with students and backpack checks – but a more aggressive campaign about the dangers of marijuana, responsible storage and edibles are in order.
In the last five years, the state’s poison control center received about 1,500 reports of kids under six being exposed to or ingesting CBD, THC, or other cannabis products.
“We need ads, billboards, similar to what we saw in the ‘90s with cigarette campaigns. That worked. As long as we can educate our families and our children, we can curb it,” he said.
Vitti detailed the concerns during a wide-ranging interview with BridgeDetroit during the 2025 Mackinac Policy Conference and discussed building repairs, plans to phase out low-enrollment schools as well as absenteeism, his future goals, and the expectation of a bond to continue capital upgrades.
With less than two weeks left in the school year, Vitti said things are trending positively.
Graduation and literacy rates are improving, and a high school attendance incentive program has yielded some positive results, too. The program offered students $200 gift cards for perfect attendance over certain two-week periods this school year. The district, he said, saw a 2% increase in average daily attendance and an 8% drop in chronic absenteeism. The effort will continue next year and there’s potential to expand it to middle school-aged students, he said.
During the 2023-24 school year, 66% of students in the district were chronically absent, which means they missed 10 or more days during the school year. Issues related to the city’s high rate of poverty have fueled the problem.
Vitti said the district has worked to attack concentrated poverty through health hubs, mental health support and medical services, family resource centers that offer canned goods and other nonperishable items, eviction prevention services and utility aid. It’s serving thousands of families, he said.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s the district that should be doing that. But this is how we’re filling the gaps in a society that still hasn’t built out the right social networks to fill the gaps of poverty,” Vitti said during the Wednesday interview at the Grand Hotel.
The services, he said, are privately funded for the next two to three years and “it’s something we hope to sustain and scale as we go into the future.”
Vitti also reiterated the district’s use of $700 million in federal pandemic dollars toward building upgrades. Part of that is phasing out schools with low enrollments, he said.
Some schools are upwards of 80 years old and there aren’t residency rate increases. The district, he said, wants to put students in the best buildings possible, but DPSCD is avoiding random school closures, which wasn’t the case under emergency management.
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