And we’re not able to say she didn’t do enough either. It’s quite easy to say she should’ve just moved in with her father, she should’ve done this and she should’ve done that, but none of us know how feasible these options were for her.
Regardless, if the difference between a convicted felon and a law-abiding citizen boils down to how many hours a week somebody’s kids stays at their grandfather’s house, I feel confident in saying the law is the stupid one here.
She still was willing to go through the trials and tribulations of getting caught and tried. Maybe she thought she was immune, and maybe she didn’t. Neither of us know. But I’ve never heard of anyone getting locked up for pulling something like this, despite knowing plenty who have done it unregrettably.
The law doesn’t say you have to spend a certain number of hours in town, it says you have to be a resident of the town. Since you’re only one person, you only get to have one principal residence. You don’t get to have one primary residence for your schooling, a separate primary residence for your subsidized housing, a third primary residence for your taxes, and a fourth for where you actually want to live.
I’ve never heard of anyone getting locked up for it either. Everyone I’ve heard of getting caught had the kids kicked out of the school and got a bill for the out-of-district tuition. But then again, I never heard of someone who continued to act as if they had some right to send kids to school in another district.
I am stunned that the first few responses act as if the wild disparity is quality of schools in the same city is unobjectionable. Have a central authority actually police quality of schools with an agenda of equality instead of “keep the outsiders down” and we could avoid this kind of problem.
The woman is being fined for not living in the right neighborhood? Is that it? Disgusting.
It’s not the same city. She lives in Akron, her father lives in a suburb of Akron. None of her local taxes go to fund the schools she was sending her children to.
Correct. I grew up in an area with alot of small school districts that only covered a single city/town or group of small towns. So depending on where you lived it was entirely possible that the closest school was in another district and you needed to pay tuition to send you kids there. I had a couple friends who’s parents did just that (the only available private schools being either further away or run by Christian Fundamentalists).
I also knew a girl who’s house was partly in our district, partly in another. For legal reasons her parents had to claim their dining room was her bedroom. I don’t think they actually had inspectors showing up to make sure there was girls’ bedroomy stuff instead of a dining table in there though.
All suburbs, by definition, are part of the “same city” as their centers. Not in terms of jurisdictional lines, but in the actual physical and human community. Suburbs are economically dependent on their center-cities; mutually supporting educational systems would only make sense.
In New Zealand (and, as far as I know, Australia) schools are funded pretty much entirely by The Government. Your rates (property taxes, rubbish collection, water etc fees) aren’t used to pay for the local school (at least not in NZ and I have no reason to believe it’s any different in Australia).
I’m just surprised the same isn’t true in the US, that’s all.
And I’m sure they exist in some cases. But it wouldn’t be practical in all cases - for example, a single school system covering NYC and it’s NYS suburbs would include everything from Suffolk to at least Rockland. And that’s leaving out the parts of NJ, Connecticut and Pennsylvania that really are a part of the metropolitan area.
The “better schools” might be better because the kids from the projects don’t go there. She might be helping her kids but she’s hurting the good school and all the kids with tax paying parents.
When I worked in real estate, we regularly had school investigators walk in, verifying the supposed home owner and whether the property was actually listed as a legal rental.
Regarding school funding, it is perhaps worth noting that Akron spends 48% more per pupil than Copley-Fairlawn (roughly $13,000 as opposed to $8,800). The amount derived from local taxes appears to be about the same, with the difference coming from different amounts of state funds.
Right? And then everyone comes in with their “I gotta get mine” comments about how how the benefited from the system, etc. It seems like nobody is thinking past their own family to see the larger problem, which is one that is frankly an insult to America.
I have absolutely no problem with her lying to give her kids a fighting chance in life. Some schools are hell on earth, and she may have been justified in committing even more crimes than she did to get her kids out.
At the same time, the good schools are good largely because they don’t have the kids from the bad schools. So people that do what she did may be hurting the quality of education in the good school, as well as hurting it financially by not paying taxes.
There may be no solution. The only thing I can think of is that we need a way to deal with the worst students. The seriously disturbed, violent, extremely disruptive ones. It doesn’t take many of these students to destroy a class or even a school. If her kids are not this kind of student, which I’m guessing they aren’t, then they should have had a way to be going to good schools all along. The trick is keeping the school-killing students out, when everyone is supposed to be guaranteed an education.
Anderson 360 talked about this last night.
My butt hurts because I’ve been fence-sitting on this all day long.
On one hand, I feel for sympathy for the mother. Everyone knows that 1) education is a key to success in this country, 2) wealthier places will always have better educational resources than poor places, and 3) sadly, where a kid goes to school can affect their whole lives. I was bussed to school across town for these three exact reasons. I can’t be sure because I never attended the neighborhood school, but I think my life would have been totally different right now if I had. And not for the good. 
Also, even though according to the superintendent, this had been a two-year long battle and she had been warned that they knew what she was up to, I can’t see how this is a felony crime, warranting jail time. The woman is now in school so that she can be a special education teacher (she currently works as an aide). Now her chances of getting a job are slim because she’s a convicted felon. She and her family are going to be stuck in the projects, unless a bleeding heart actively reaches out and offers her a position.
But on the OTHER hand, legality matters aside, according to the superintendent, it wasn’t like the mother had no other choice. He said that there were other schools in the area that were rated just as high or higher that her mother could have enrolled her kids in. The “Why didn’t she do this?” wasn’t covered in the Anderson 360 segment and I wish it had been. Surely she had a good reason. Maybe these schools had waiting lists or something? Or maybe they weren’t as good as the superintendent was making it out to be? Our standards are so low now that who in the hell knows what a school rated as “Excellent” means? If there were in fact good schools available to these kids that the mother purposefully chose to ignore, then yeah, I lose some sympathy for her.
But something tells me that the mother probably has a better assessment of the area schools and their reputation than the superintendent does. What was the superintendent going to say? “Oh, yeah, the mother was right. The schools in her district are crappy. But she still shouldn’t have broken the rules.” I’m sure Soledad would have let him get away with that, sure. :rolleyes:
I remember going to school with kids who would magically disappear out of the blue because the school had eventually “found them out”. Perhaps one student every year or so. Actually, one of my grammar school friends was never found out. And then there are all those “special” cases where kids can be enrolled in a school district if their parent simply works in it–regardless of where they reside. Another friend was in that situation. She lived in a different county, but her mother was a teacher at the school down the street from ours so that gave her an escape hatch. Theoretically, my parents could have further upgraded my education by allowing us to attend schools in posh East Cobb, where my father worked as a principal. But he “stood on his principles”, so to speak, and made us stay in good ole Atlanta Public Schools. (My oldest sis still still bears a big-time grudge against him for this because she had to attend an elementary school that made the high school in “Lean on Me” look like Institut Le Rosey. And though she carries a lot of childhood grudges, I’m with her on this one. Her life was hell at that school, poor thing. :()
So my experience says that finding these kids out is neither all that difficult, nor that their banishment requires the involvement of the criminal justice system–especially since exceptions are made all the time. I’m not saying they should have looked the other way–that would be unfair. I just don’t understand why the school system had to fight this so hard. They ended up spending more money hiring private detectives to come up with evidence on this woman than it costs to educate the two kids.
Suddenly, my butt doesn’t hurt so much! Thanks, Straight Dope!