I did this for a semester as a kid. I even told the school “I live in other-town, that’s why I’m late today.” My situation is different in that my family moved out of state mid-year and I wanted to finish out the year instead of being the new kid in the middle of the year. I see both sides of this issue and like most things, there are always extremes on either end that make sense, but what about all the gray in the middle? Where is the line drawn? Should my family have been sent to jail and fined huge amounts of money so I could finish a year which was already “paid” for? (My school didn’t do semesters).
I never falsified our address, or used that of a friend or relative, but I did request our lease from our last Evanston apartment be written to expire on the second day of school. That way, even though we moved into the north side of Chicago, about 2 miles away, before the first week was done, my son was able to “finish the year out” at his Evanston school. Legally.
And, in retrospect, I absolutely *should *have taken up my Evanston resident friend on her offer to use her address for high school. His CPS school (Sullivan) was absolutely a crime against humanity, and he suffered still uncalculated damage to his educational, social and psychological development, not to mention at least one outright physical assault, before I was able to get him into a better, safer charter school his Junior year. I was too afraid to take the legal risk, but I now realize that as a parent, I should have been willing to risk jail rather than sending my son to hell.
I’m sure it’s fairly common for grandparents, aunts, cousins etc to help out with caregiving. I don’t think it’s at all common for a child to change residences constantly, and in any event , the child can always attend school in the district where the parents reside, even if temporarily staying with relatives elsewhere. The problem comes up when the child is sent to school in a different district than the parents residence- unless someone else has custody or guardianship, in which case the child can always attend where that person resides, even if temporarily staying elsewhere
Regarding the woman in Akron, I have to wonder why she or at least the children didn’t move in with the father in the suburbs. They could have gone to the better school legitimately and apparently lived in a better neighborhood. The only thing I can think of is that she wanted to keep her subsidized housing, and would have lost it if it became obvious that the children weren’t living there and/or her job requires her to actually live in Akron.
BTW, the $30,000 is almost certainly 2 years of tuition for 2 kids at the rate the suburban district charges for out of district students. It’s not uncommon for districts to set such a tuition rate.
Wow, this is not that hard to do. Often the school asks for a utility bill to confirm the address of residence- all the parent has to do is have their name put on a relative’s bill so the parents names match the address. If they call/come by to ask if mom/dad are around, they say, “they’re not home right now”.
Had no idea they enforced it so rigorously!
I grew up in a town that borders on Chicago and there was a lot of this sort of thing going on. I graduated from high school in 1985, and even back then the school district did look into residency discrepencies. I remember a star running back who was a few years older than me got kicked out of school and had to transfer to a Chicago school, so I do not think this is anything new.
Depending on your area more or less local property tax goes to school funding, but I can certainly understand people not wanting their tax money paying to educate kids who do not live in the district (other than state and federal taxes of course). My property taxes are going up almost 20% this year, while the value of my house went down, so I am all in favor of anything the city can do to reduce costs, without denying an education to those entitled to one.
The problem with this sort of thing is that school resources are very carefully allocated based on expected student population and sneaking in extra kids fucks all that up. Those extra kids need desks and textbooks which you may or may not have on hand. They need to go in a class, and that class has to be under the state/district cap, which may necessitate hiring another teacher and finding a place to set up another classroom. (That may mean cannibalizing an art or music room or the computer lab, or renting a trailer.) They need room to sit in the cafeteria, transportation if they ride a bus, workbooks, lab equipment, all sorts of stuff.
None of that stuff comes free, ya know? You get enough free riders coming in from other tax districts, you wind up with the tragedy of the commons.
At least in my state, resources are allocated based on actual student population on day 10 of the school year. As long as she commits the fraud prior to day 10, that’s a non-issue.
That makes no sense, or else it’s completely beside the point. Stores don’t hire exclusively, or even largely fomr within their own school districts. Even if they did, the more educated cashiers you have, the wider range of choices among stores you have, which allows greater power as a consumer.
Also, above: a steak dinner is not a right. An education through 12th grade is. Maybe parents shouldn’t sneak around. A much better answer would be to disincorporate their school district, and send all of their children to the school in the adjacent town
Schools are in a real financial bind, and people who don’t pay for them don’t get to use them. And they shouldn’t. Lots of people are struggling to keep their homes and their property taxes should go up to educate kids from out of town? No.
That’s not true in my state. And the state aid covers very little of the actual expense. The state is too broke to actually pay the schools. The taxpayer is paying, classes are being cut, teachers and aides are losing their jobs, and class sizes are getting bigger.
They get the same benefit everybody else does. The benefit of public schools, indeed their purpose, is to ensure a minimum level of education among all our people. It’s not really “about” any particular set of kids or families; it’s about the quality of our whole society.
Yes, but those people were educated somewhere, is the point. And you have to deal with them. Therefore you should be concerned not only with the quality of education in your own school district, but with all of them. A great many of the people you deal with will not have been educated by schools equal to yours. And that’s unfair to you, and to all of us. To meet their purpose of minimum standards for the whole society, naturally all public schools must themselves meet some standard.
So that’s a problem we need to try to address as a society, somehow. In the meantime, I don’t see any problem with kids attending a school in a district where any of their family resides. They are part of the community.
My mother did it every year after Kindergarten. She specifically bought a home in a particular district and they shifted the lines the next year, sending us to the far end of our section. It wasn’t in walking distance and she was unable to drive us so she lied and said we lived three blocks away with our grandparents. I think it was tolerated back then.
By the time my oldest was in school you had to have two photo IDs and two proofs of residency to transfer or to avoid being transferred for any reason.
On the one hand, I can understand this mother’s dilemma, but on the other hand, I think she committed fraud. A year ago, my husband and I looked and looked and looked and finally found a house in a neighborhood that kept my daughter in her school. We could easily have found something both cheaper and nicer, but we made the decision to “suck it up” and pay a bit more (and inconvenience ourselves a bit) in order to allow her to legally attend this school. Mind you, my parents live just a few blocks away, and we could have quite easily lied and said that she lived there, but… that’s just not the right thing to do.
That said, we plan to move next year, solely because there is no way on God’s green earth that I’m sending my son to the high school he would be assigned to in this district. If we couldn’t afford to move, I would seriously consider lying in order to get him into a different school. (Yeah, they did arrest the two guys who shot the kid leaving basketball practice at this school. And the janitor accused of molesting several girls at the school. And the kid who cold-cocked my former stepson two years ago, when he attended this school. And so forth. No way in hell would this be a good situation for my massively geeky son.) However, as much as either of us hate moving, Mr. Matata and I made the decision to rent a house for two years, so that daughter could finish her term at the fine and performing arts school she currently attends; and to later buy in another county - a bit farther from hubby’s work, but with a fantastic school system. And we will purchase a house in an area that will channel the kids into the largest high school in the county, because that school has a partnership with the local university and is a kick-ass school with lots of opportunities. We are likely to pay a bit more as a result of that choice, but again, we will happily sacrifice a few luxuries for that advantage.
Given all of that background, though, I can honestly envision committing fraud if it were a matter of my kids attending a truly bad school vs. a better one if I didn’t have the resources to make it happen otherwise.
Now that mom is in jail, where will the kids stay? At the grandparents house?
This story is the best argument for State funded education I’ve ever seen.
It seems that Brown v Board of Education is now financially defeated.
One of the reasons why homes in “good” neighborhoods are expensive is because those neighborhoods have good schools, which are expensive. And the expensive homes pay more in taxes.
I’d love to see every kid get a quality education. Unfortunately, education is expensive, and needs to be budgeted for. While I can sympathize with this woman’s desire to get her kids into a good school, she went about it illegally.
And in my part of the world, some of the politicos are trying to raise the cap on classroom size.
I’m surprised to discover that Secondary education isn’t State-funded in the US, actually.
Or maybe the father and her don’t get along very well (hence them not living together and being married), or maybe the father doesn’t want custody because he chooses to work a lot or has other issues, or maybe the kids would rather live with their mother because she’s the better parent. There are lot of plausible reasons why she’d prefer not to move the family in with the father. Keeping a home in the projects is probably the least plausible, seriously.
Using other family member’s addresses to send your kids to a different school is boringly commonplace, in my experience. The argument about her stealing the product of other people’s property taxes isn’t all that compelling when presumably the grandfather’s taxes have been supporting the school for years. So what that the kids don’t live with him the requisite number of hours? Even if the kids lived there 24/7, the school’s budget would be the exact same.
I suspect if her kids had looked more like the student population (e.g. white and middle-class), the school would not have bothered even looking into this “crime”. The amount of money that went into outing this family and prosecuting the mother probably far outweighs the costs of schooling these kids.
I agree- the real crime here is that we have such massive inequalities in our schools. A child’s access to quality education should not be an accident of geography in our country.