Reminds me of a Simpsons episode:
“Is it wrong to steal bread to feed your starving family?”
“Well … no”
“What if your family would rather have - say - a truckload of cigarettes, to sell and buy bread?”
Or, are the homes in “good” neighborhoods expensive because demand for good schools drive up the price?
Around here, there are differences of $1,000s per student from district to district, that doesn’t always correlate to student performance.
I do think this is a gray area. If the kid is living with said relative, then the kid should be able to attend school in the town in which the relative is paying taxes. However, using the relative’s address as a ticket into a school, while the kid truly lives elsewhere is much more clearly dishonest.
I have never heard of this. When TheKid was starting school, we lived in the country. I did not want her going to school out there, so we applied for open enrollment and she attended school in the suburban district I wished. It was a fairly simple application, asked why I wanted her here rather than there. Once agreed upon by both school districts, the suburban district received the funds allocated for her by the state, rather than the country school (or so it was explained to me 10 years ago). I had to renew the application every spring - until we moved into the district.
My mistake - I didn’t mean the father, I meant the grandfather, who the mother apparently does get along with and who she claimed she and her daughters lived with much of the time http://http://www.ohio.com/news/113686144.html
That claim is now causing her trouble with the housing authority, since if her children weren’t living in the apartment she should at least have been paying a higher rent and if she wasn’t living their she probably wasn’t entitled to the apartment at all.
And the issue for the suburb is not these two kids- of course the school district’s budget would be the same if they actually lived with the grandfather , it would be the same if some suburban family had four children instead of two and $15,000 is probably a rounding error in the school district’s yearly budget. The issue is that if the district does nothing , they will end up with hundreds or thousands of kids who don’t live in the district attending school there while whatever taxes the parents pay will go to a different school district. It’s not all that difficult for parents or relatives to agree to give the school a false address- it’s a lot more difficult for the parents to let the kid live with the friend or relative, or to get that person to agree.
According to this http://http://www.npr.org/2011/01/26/133246495/Parents-Cross-Lines-To-Get-Kids-Into-Good-Schools , the school district approached 30 or 40 families and told them they had evidence that the kids didn’t live in the district. That’s a minimum of thirty or forty kids that they knew about.
And I’m not so sure it had anything to do with race- certainly the article didn’t mention that the school was mostly white ( although I wouldn’t expect it to ) The grandfather’s township has a black population of 12.3% , and although it’s possible that the school they attended had lower proportion of black students than the population as a whole , it is also possible that it had a higher proportion of blacks than the population as a whole. Apparently, her kids were among the children who school bus drivers observed being driven to the bus stop which walking distance from the grandfather’s home.
It's government funded, but not on a state-wide basis. For example, I live in NYC. There is some state funding, but most of the funding comes from the city's general revenues. In the suburbs around the city, taxes and services are less consolidated- a property owner may pay taxes to a town, a school district, a water district, a fire district , library district etc. Each of those special districts provides those services, so that if I own property in School District A, I pay taxes to School District A (which also receives some funding from the state). District A can provide whichever services it wishes, so long as it meets the minimum requirements and set its taxes as high as the residents are willing to pay.
Some school districts have agreements, so the with the approval of both districts, my children who live in District A can attend school in District B. This often involves money being transferred from District A ( which no longer has to educate my children ) to District B.
So I’m interested in knowing what prompted the school to hire investigators to target this family in the first place then. It would be cost-prohibitive to scrutinitize every child in this manner, and I don’t think they zeroed in on them randomly. This plus the harsh sentencing associated with this case makes me think the school is more about trying to put certain people in their place than being fair and impartial. The cynic in me says they wouldn’t have locked up a white soccer mom for 10 days for doing something like this. Either they would have turned a blind eye or kicked her kids out. And that’s if she would have been found out in the first place.
I think I’d be less sympathetic if the family had zero connection to the district, but since they have a close family member who lives there who sometimes takes care of the kids, where almost talking technicalities here.
Copley, the district in question, has opted out of open enrollment, so this particular option wasn’t available in this case.
The gist of the many articles regarding this case is that the school district has a history of investigating students from out of the district , that in early 2007 they began receiving reports regarding a number of families from school bus drivers and from students talking amongst themselves and the district began investigating, including conducting surveillance. There was a residency hearing held by the school district in Oct 2007 ,at which Williams-Bolar was confronted with the evidence and a finding was made that the children lived with her in Akron. Perhaps if she had taken the children out at that point, that would have been the end of it. But she didn't. According to an ABC news video I found, 100 families were investigated. Three decided to pay tuition , and the others either proved they were residents or admitted guilt and presumably took their children out of the school. Only Williams-Bolar fought. According to the former superintendent. letters went back and forth, and the district sent an invoice for about S1600 in tuition to Williams- Bolar and her father. The response was that they were being harassed and wouldn't pay tuition to a public school. Then the grandfather claimed he had power of attorney for the children and they lived with him. The juvenile court determined that the power of attorney was not valid. The girls continued to attend the school until June 2008.
I wasn’t terribly sympathetic to Williams-Bolar to begin with, but based on the original articles it appeared she was just someone who wanted to send her daughters to a better school and didn’t mind breaking the rules to do so. But now that I’ve read more articles it seems that even after having been caught, rather than simply acknowledging to herself that she got caught and taking her kids out of the school , she instead acted as if her children were entitled to attend the school and fought to keep them there , apparently falsely changing her voter’s registration and driver’s license to help in the fight. When she gets to court she testifies that not only the children , but she herself lived with her father for most of the time period in question - apparently, the investigator just got lucky in choosing the days to follow her driving the children from Akron to school. And that testimony is now causing her trouble with the housing authority. Now she seems like someone who will say or do whatever she thinks will get her what she wants, with no thought even to the future consequences for herself. She wanted the kids in the school, so she lied. She got caught and she continued to tell more lies. She gets arrested, lies again in court, and apparently never considers that the housing authority might find out that she testified that she and the children were not actually living in the apartment that she was receiving a subsidy for.
You’re right, most white soccer moms wouldn’t have gone to jail for this . Neither would most black mothers living in the projects on public assistance. Because most of the people in both groups have enough sense to give up when they get caught instead of digging themselves a deeper hole. Just as the other families investigated by this school district did - whether they were black or white, middle class or poor.
I don’t disagree with this sentence. But rather than seeing this as a bad reflection of her as a parent and a person, I see this as a sign that she was willing to do whatever it took for her kids to receive a solid education and counteract the disadvantage they–through no fault of their own–were born into. And I can’t really blithely fault her for that, honestly.
Man, this whole ‘stuck with a crappy school depending on where you live’ thing sucks.
My parents got to choose which school division got their taxes (districts were small enough to include the entire rural and city area, so the only division was by religion). So when I switched to the Catholic school division in grade 11, my parents just never moved their taxes to that division, they continued to pay the secular school division, but they also bussed me to the Catholic school so they figured it was okay.
No, she was willing to tell whatever lies were necessary for her kids to get a solid education. She could have legitimately moved into her father’s home (or another residence in his town) and given up her subsidized housing. She wasn’t willing to do that, was she?
No, but consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, her father didn’t want her and a bunch kids living in his home 24/7. Just because that is a theoretical option doesn’t mean that it was a true one.
Except that she didn’t seem to consider the possibility of being jailed and therefore away from her children ( for possibly much longer than 10 days), or losing her subsidized apartment or of being unable to work as a teacher. Forget the initial lie- that’s wrong but it doesn’t make her a horrible person or parent. I’m talking about after she knew she was caught. What kind of good parent acts without considering the consequences? And I suspect her father would have let her and the kids move in- he’s also charged with falsifying documents, so he was apparently willing to risk a prison sentence. Can’t see why he’d mind her and the kids more than that.
Very Interesting. I was wondering why filling out a school admissions paper got her prosecuted for fraud. That seemed pretty extreme.
But, if she had addresses on other documents (drivers license) changed, then I can see she foolishly dug a deeper and deeper hole.
It’s a shame. All she had to do was make certain the kids stayed at granddads house weeknights. She could have them weekends. That would have been enough to keep the school happy and off her back.
Assuming she even thought that doing this carried the risk of jail as a felon–and that’s a big assumption–she probably was willing to chance it because she thought the consequence of doing nothing (e.g. letting her kids go to their home school) carried a bigger a risk of harm. Teenage pregnancy, crime, apathetic teachers, dysfunctional classmates, drugs…all kinds of traps that her kids could fall into. So she took a gamble for the sake of her kids and ending up losing.
This isn’t justice, though. This isn’t the system “working”. This is a just a sad situation all around.
Except move in with her father.
And you know that he would allowed this…how?
Our school district has the same issue, since we border on crapville. One of the teachers told me that he had to adjust the curriculum and had behavioral issues that disrupted the class from the kids who came in from crapville. So my son got a watered down version of subjects (which bored the hell out of him) to accomodate these kids who likely had attended schools in the crapville district at some point.
It’s unfair to my son, who gets a lame education and to me, because the resale value on my home is affected by poor school scores. I think it would be easy to assume this lady put nothing into the district, no taxes, no volunteering, nothing. I’m the one who paid the tax hikes to improve the schools all these years. If I’d done what she did, I’d be in a lot better shape economically than I am now.
He was willing to get himself indicted over her plan, after all. And some of the articles point out that she was his everyday caretaker anyway, and lived with him part-time.
Look, I think it’s absurd to send her to jail, but I also don’t think we’re able to say that she was willing to do whatever it took in this situation.
I don’t think she was willing to chance it , and I can’t imagine that in all the back and forth with the school district after she was caught, no one ever mentioned it was a crime to falsify documents . I think she was just convinced if she continued to lie, at some point the school district would give in, and later, that the jury would acquit her. That’s not being unaware of the possibility of jail time. That’s just thinking it won’t happen to you, and if you believe you will not be charged or convicted, you aren’t going to consider the consequences of an arrest or conviction .
Her testimony didn’t help her at all. Had she not testified, she could have claimed to have been remorseful and maybe would have escaped incarceration. Instead, she denied everything, the jury didn’t believe her, she was convicted and sentenced to some incarceration. I’m sure the judge could have sentenced her more leniently- but why would she when the defendant won’t acknowledge that she did anything wrong.The only reason for her to testify would be because she thought she was a good enough liar to convince the jury . I have a feeling her lawyer tried to talk her out of it.
It’s a sad situation for her kids- I don’t feel sorry for her. And maybe this isn’t justice- but that doesn’t mean it’s just for the taxpayers in the district to pay for a few hundred kids whose parents lied about their residence. It’s not just for Williams-Bolar, who continued to lie to be treated the same as those who acknowledged that they lived out of the district when they were caught, and either paid tuition or transferred their kids. And it wasn’t just for Williams-Bolar to lie to begin with.
If you want to say she should have been given a lesser sentence, like a few years of probation, I won’t argue. But wasn’t unjustly convicted , she had no right to do what she did , and it certainly wasn’t a reflection of her good parenting abilities. (she might have them, I don’t know but this whole three and a half year disaster is not proof of them.)