A free grocery store inside C.J. Hicks Elementary School in Conyers, Georgia, is being used as part of a broader strategy to reduce student absence by addressing one of the pressures that often sits outside the classroom: food insecurity. Since the store opened in December 2025, the school says total absent days have fallen 43%, from 1,286 to 733, while unexcused absences dropped 42%. The number of days students were present rose 26%, from 10,341 to 13,023. Those figures do not prove the grocery store alone caused the improvement, but they do make the program a useful test of a larger question for schools: how much can attendance improve when districts start treating household instability as part of the attendance problem?
Attendance Is Often a Household Problem
The store was created through a partnership between C.J. Hicks, Goodr and Kaiser Permanente. It serves about 200 families a month and offers fresh produce, dairy, meat, frozen foods, breakfast items and other groceries at no cost. Kaiser Permanente says roughly one in three Georgia families with children lacks reliable access to enough food. Rockdale County Public Schools also says the store was designed specifically to reduce barriers that can affect attendance, engagement and academic performance.
Schools often approach chronic absenteeism as if the core problem begins and ends with student behavior. But getting to school every day can depend on whether a household has food, transportation, stable housing, reliable work schedules and enough flexibility to manage family emergencies. When those systems break down, attendance can become the visible symptom of a much larger household problem.
C.J. Hicks is serving a population where those pressures are especially relevant. Black Enterprise reported that Black students made up about 71% of enrollment in the 2024-25 school year and that 837 of 878 students were eligible for free lunch. The school’s grocery store therefore is not operating as an optional perk. It is operating inside a community where many families already qualify for substantial food assistance.
The Early Numbers Are Hard to Ignore
School records cited by FOX 5 Atlanta show daily absences fell 33%, from 67 to 45, while enrollment increased 3%, from 785 to 810. The store itself is open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while additional food support is available through Friday distributions and a visiting food bank.
It is still too early to claim a direct causal line between the store and the attendance gains. School officials have not released a controlled study, and other factors could be affecting attendance. Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate fell to 17.7% last school year from 21.3% the year before, according to FOX 5, meaning nearly one in five students statewide was still missing enough school to trigger concern.
What Schools Are Really Testing
The more important question is whether programs like this can change how districts think about student support. Food access is usually treated as a nutrition issue. Attendance is usually treated as an academic or disciplinary issue. C.J. Hicks is effectively testing whether those categories should be separated at all.
That approach fits a broader shift toward whole-child policy, where schools are asked to account for the conditions surrounding learning rather than only what happens during instruction. If hunger, transportation gaps or unstable housing repeatedly interfere with attendance, then addressing those conditions can become part of an academic strategy rather than an add-on social service.
Goodr says it operates dozens of similar grocery stores nationally, which gives school systems a larger base of programs to watch. If the attendance gains at C.J. Hicks persist, the next issue will be scale: whether districts can sustain these stores without relying heavily on private philanthropy and corporate partnerships.
For SSC, the significance is straightforward. A school grocery store looks like a food program. The attendance numbers suggest it may also be an access intervention. If districts want students in class consistently, they may have to spend more time addressing the reasons families struggle before the school day even begins.