D.C. education authorities are cracking down on residency fraud in the schools by trying to start conducting their investigations one month earlier.
Schools are slated to check students’ addresses in May and will hand over their information in the fall. If State Superintendent Deborah Gist has her way, though, schools will open their investigations April 1.
“Moving up the date would give the schools more time between when they start collecting documentation for their students and when the annual enrollment audit is conducted in the fall,” wrote Gist’s spokeswoman, Nicole Shaffer, in an e-mail to The Examiner. “This would provide the schools more time to collect the necessary documentation of student residency from parents, more time to audit their own files and more time to project how many students they will have for the coming school year.”
The District has struggled for years with out-of-town students illegally attending the city’s public and charter schools, which are already home to more than 70,000 students.
An inspector general’s report last year found dozens of cases of residency fraud and suggested the city was wasting millions of public dollars for services to students ineligible for enrollment. The report also found city officials hadn’t bothered to come up with an orderly system for enforcing residency fraud regulations.
An audit commissioned by Gist last year disqualified nearly 1,600 students from the public and charter schools’ rosters for the 2007-08 school year. Meanwhile, only a few dozen nonresident students were paying “out-of-state” tuition to the system, the audit found.
The school system, which has a budget of more than $1 billion, has struggled for years with waste and corruption, but few issues get parents more fired up than residency fraud.
“It takes away from programs and services for D.C. schoolchildren,” said Theresa Bollech, a public school parent and outspoken education reform advocate. “And everything’s on a budget, right? These families need to stay within their jurisdiction.”
Bill Myers can be reached at 202-459-4956 or [email protected]
