D.C. school officials may soon be making house calls.
In enrollment packets being sent to parents around the city, families are being asked to sign waivers to allow school officials to come to a student’s home to verify residency.
Jennifer Calloway, spokeswoman for schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, said the waiver stems from a long-ignored law that requires the school system to make sure every child is a D.C. resident.
“We only ask parents to permit home visits if they cannot provide the adequate residency verification documents,” Calloway said in an e-mail to The Examiner.
Parents from other areas can send their children to D.C. schools, but they’re supposed to pay higher “out-of-state” tuition.
In a $1 billion school system that has been racked with scandal, residency fraud has been a relatively low priority for the administration. Calloway said that officials opened a little more than 100 investigations last year and found fewer than half of the subjects were gaming the system.
But residency fraud rankles many citizens, especially in high-end neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, where bogus addresses allow suburbanites — most of them the children of city workers — to squeeze D.C. residents out of the better-performing public schools.
A D.C. inspector general’s audit earlier this year concluded that D.C. taxpayers spent nearly $3 million to educate dozens of students who had “questionable residency status.” Stung by the audit’s findings, Rhee promised a crackdown.
