What happened to “it takes a village?”
Via The Federalist:
Washington DC’s attorney general recently sued a married couple, alleging they had illegally enrolled their three children in well-regarded local public schools despite living outside the District, and demanding more than $224,000 in back tuition. Reached by the Washington Post at home, Alan Hill, the father named in the lawsuit, sounded bewildered: “We are in the middle of this process and still trying to understand it.”
“The issue of nonresidents enrolling in D.C. public schools is often heated, particularly as students compete for a limited number of seats in highly sought-after schools,” the Post reports. “Parents often talk of sitting on wait lists for schools while they see drivers with license plates from neighboring states lining up to drop off their children.”
Stealing from Taxpayers?
Clear across the country in Berkeley, California, the local school district also combats illegal enrollees at the behest of annoyed residents. Framed by poorer-performing school districts—most notably Oakland, a high-violence locale—Berkeley Unified School District has proven to be irresistible to parents desperately seeking a better life for their kids despite their inability to pay district housing prices.
Residents even started the Berkeley Accountable Schools Project, a community group that monitors and complains about enrollment fraud. They claim as many as 40 percent of kids attending Berkeley public high schools are illegally enrolled. They have posted anecdotes like these:
the mother of a BHS football player said she ‘spent an hour driving around Oakland’ when she offered her son’s teammates a ride home after practice.
A football player’s father carpooled team members out by Oakland Coliseum. In that particular year, he claimed that none of the starting players lived in Berkeley.
A Berkeley police officer, speaking off the record, said that about 80% of Berkeley High students who were picked up in connection with violent crimes in Berkeley turned out to live out-of-district. In some cases, these students provided the address of a Berkeley relation whose address they used on school documents, but with whom they did not reside.
In conversations with a school board candidate, a parent learned that 30%-50% fraudulent enrollment is the working range estimated by the people ‘with the best information.’
HT: Doug Ross