People have been asking relatives, who live in good school districts, to keep their kids for as long as I can remember.
You send your kids to live with their grandmother. They are then entitled to attend a good school. I knew kids who did this in the 1970’s. Weekends they were at their moms house.
This poor lady, used the kids grandfather’s address. Apparently, they did stay with him some and at her house.
The school district uses investigators to follow these kids around. They document how much time they are at the grandfathers. Now she’s in jail and charged 30 grand. For trying to get her kids a decent education.
All I can say, is they can’t lock up everybody. There’s probably hundreds of thousands of moms doing the same thing in this country. Heck, some parents do this, so their kid can play sports under a really good high school coach. It gives them a better shot at a college scholarship. Others do it for academics.
I don’t see this as fraud. The grandfather does live at that address. The kids did stay with him some. I guess the moms mistake was not leaving them there every weeknight.
What do you think?
Moms - did you ever do this with your kids? Be honest.
What she should have done was go to the school board and plead with them that the kids should be able to attend the school because they spend a lot of time with their grandfather. It’s not hard - my parents won a similar appeal when I was going into 4th grade, and it was my babysitter, not even a blood relative, who lived down the street from the school.
I don’t feel a lot of sympathy for someone whose first course of action is to try to game the system.
Our school district takes this very seriously, as our fairly decent district is cheek-by-jowl with another, dismal, crime-ridden district (in a different county). If you enroll a relative’s children using your address, you have to show legal guardianship papers or the child can’t be enrolled. When enrolling your own children, you must show current utility bills, apartment lease, and/or property tax reciepts, or the child can’t be enrolled.
The reason it’s seen as fraud is that the tax money from the one district is being used to educate a child from the other district. If you let folks do this willy-nilly, you end up with everybody’s kid going to the one district, and not paying any taxes to support it. You don’t think that’s unfair?
I never heard of this practice of using someone else’s address so as to enroll your kids in a better school, until I moved down here twenty years ago. Back home there was only one school, so the only other choice was private school.
Of course I haven’t done this with my kids. We bought a house in a decent school district specifically so that we wouldn’t have to play stupid games like this. And if we were stuck in a bad district and wanted to use a relative’s address to get the kids into a better school, I’d only do it if the kids actually moved in with the relative full-time.
A 30-grand fine seems excessive; you’d think they’d just throw her kids out of the school and send them back to their home district. (I didn’t watch the video in the link because CNN videos tend to crash my browser.) But yeah, I’m not hugely sympathetic either.
Were you actually crossing into another district, though? I can’t imagine that any of the big name suburban districts around here (Chicago) would take on an extra kid for free because they happen to get day care in their town. If that were the case then I’m sure lots of people would have figured it out by now.
And not to say that I think it’s okay to just sneak your kid in instead.
To me this shows the obvious need for school choice. It is considered a CRIME for a parent to send her child to school A because she lives in area B. She will risk jail because area B schools are so shitty, but we still send bales full of money to support shitty school B which doesn’t education our kids properly.
If we propped up a failing restaurant, grocery store, or shopping center in a similar way, it would be laughable. Yet we force parents to send their kids to failing schools.
I’m starting to think they made an example of her. Scare the crap out of those “people” in the projects and make sure they use their own run down, crime ridden school. I’ve heard the drop out rate in those schools can be over 60%.
My town has serious budget issues. High taxes, high expenses and the lions share goes to support the school district. I pay taxes to educate the kids that live in my town. Not kids who have relatives or freinds living here, kids who live here.
You want your kids to go to school here? Move here.
Granddad has a home here? Move in with him, save yourself some rent.
If you’re not willing to plant your roots here, raise your family here, and pay taxes here, your kids don’t go to school here.
The sad thing is that the woman now has a conviction on her record, which will impact her career and make it more likely she won’t be able to rise out of the projects. All because she wanted her kids to have a good education.
If I want my kids to have a nice steak dinner, can I just walk into a restaurant and take it? Or more to the point, what if I want my kids to have a college education from a first-tier school? Cool for me to falsify my financial information on the FAFSA so they can get enough financial aid to be able to attend? I’m just trying to get my kids a good education, after all.
This was tolerated in the past. I think, because the relative living in the school district does pay local taxes.
People without kids pay the same property taxes. But, get no benefit from the schools. If my nephew wants to live with me and attend school, then I’m using a benefit that I paid for.
Now, I would insist he stay in my house full time. He could visit his mom weekends. But, I wouldn’t let them use my address unless he stayed with me.
Btw, I myself can poke about 19 holes (that’s approximate) in the metaphor I used in my prior post. I’m just saying, her desire to give her kids a good education doesn’t absolve her of consequences for breaking the law in pursuit of such.
If your family was starving and that steak was the only food you could get your hands on to feed your kids and give them half a chance at life, I would not wag my finger at you for doing this.
I don’t have children of my own, but my mother did this when I was in junior high in the late 70s / early 80s. We used my paternal grandmother’s address so I wouldn’t have to go to the really bad crime-ridden school that wasn’t even in my neighborhood (but in my district). I also didn’t stay with my grandmother any, just told all and sundry that I lived there.
I don’t condone what she did, but I do understand why she did it. If she’d have wanted to move to where I’d have been able to go to the actual school I eventually attended, we wouldn’t of been able to afford it.
I really can’t wrap my head around what the big deal over this is. I guess it’s just not part of the culture I’m familiar with. It seems like this notion of “caretaker” is really firmly rooted in the belief that it’s the parents sole responsibility. Then it becomes about “I don’t want to pay taxes to educate YOUR kids.” I mean analytically, I suppose I understand this desire for “fairness”, but I come from a place where it’s not uncommon for the grandparents (or aunt and other extended family members) to be part of the caregiving and it can change from time to time, depending on what’s going on with each adult’s life. So is the kid supposed to change addresses every couple of months to reflect this? Or, is this one type of living situation that’s not common, and therefore the majority will respond with a “Naah, let’s not think too hard about that.”
I’m always a little conflicted by stories like these. Students who used a relative’s or family friend’s address was fairly common at our school and once a year or so, you’d find that someone in your class was kicked out because they didn’t live in the school zone. I’d always feel bad for them since it was probably a fairly stressful time for the students since they were being uprooted from their friends and most likely suffered quite a bit of academic upheaval.
On the other hand, my parents sacrificed a lot of time and money so that my sister and I could get a good education at one of the best schools in the area. We’ve never had new furniture besides mattresses, family vacations were nonexistent, and we never had cable television or other small luxuries. One small part of me feels that it’s not fair that we had to sacrifice so much while somebody else was able to get all the benefits without equal sacrifice.
Overall though, my parents’ decision gave me more stability than those other kids and I can understand and sympathize with these parents’ decision. Being poor often means making tough choices. My parents made the choice that they felt was the best for their kids and other parents made a rational choice about the risks they were willing to take to give their kids a better chance at life. Getting sent to jail however, is far too harsh for the crime committed.
Just because you don’t have kids in the local schools doesn’t mean you’re not deriving benefit from it. Education is one of those social goods that we have decided is desirable. Think of it this way: When you buy something at a store, the cashier most likely knows how to read, write and do at least simple math, skills they got from school. Are you not benefiting from that?
