We bought a new house last month. Our move took us just a few miles away from our old home: we purposefully stayed not only within our children’s existing school district but also within the school catchment. That meant that all three kids got to remain in the same schools as they did before the move which was important to us.
A few weeks before settlement, I sent letters to the schools confirming the move and providing our new address. I explained that I would follow-up after settlement with official documentation.
On the day of settlement, I showed up with documents in hand, including the settlement sheet and our new homeowner’s insurance policy. Despite the fact that the administration knew me – I volunteered as a coach and sponsored the annual Spelling Bee, among other things – and despite the fact that my kids had attended that school for four years, I was told that the documentation was not enough.
The next day, we contacted our realtor who suggested that we send over a notarized copy of the deed. It was still not enough. Fortunately, about a week later, we were able to sort it all out, problem solved.
The funny thing was, no one appeared to be shocked about the problems changing our address except my husband and me. Time and time again, we were met with understanding nods and more than once, “Well, property taxes are going up.” In fact, one school official explained that the increased scrutiny (we didn’t have the same experience when we moved into the district four years ago) was tied to tougher policies meant to discourage fraud. It was, folks whispered down the lane, not out of the question that parents would lie or provide phony documentation to get their kids into the district.
You might think we live in the toniest school district in the area: we do not. We do have excellent schools with amazing teachers and sufficient resources. I can appreciate the difference, having lived in the struggling school district of Philadelphia for more than 15 years. But I never imagined that parents would be clamoring to get into our middle-class school district. It turns out that I am wrong: parents lie about residency all over the country to get their children into better schools.
In 2012, Kelley Williams-Bolar of Ohio was convicted of lying about her residency to get her children into a better school district. Williams-Polar lived in a school district which only met 4 of 26 of school standards and wanted to send her children to the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn School District where all of the school standards were met. To accomplish this, she lied about her real address and asked her father, who lived in the Copley-Fairlawn School District, and with whom she claimed she lived part-time, to lie for her. That, said school officials in the district, was cheating. They hired a private investigator to follow Williams-Bolar and ultimately she was asked to pay $30,000 in tuition reimburse the district for the education her children received since she did not pay taxes in the district; when she was refused to pay, she was charged with a felony (her father, Edward L. Williams, was also charged with a felony). Williams-Polar was found guilty and sentenced to 10 days in county jail plus three years of probation. She eventually received some help from Ohio Gov. John Kasich who believed “that the penalty was excessive for the offense” and pardoned her, reducing the crimes to two misdemeanors. Kasich, however, qualified his act, by saying, “No one should interpret this as a pass — it’s a second chance.”
Tonya McDowell of Connecticut faced a similar problem in 2011 when she was caught sending her son to an elementary school in Norwalk, Connecticut, when she lived in Bridgeport – sort of. McDonnell was homeless, she claimed, but wanted better for her son. Her last permanent address before she became homeless was in Bridgeport, but she used a babysitter’s address in Norwalk to enroll her child in another school district. McDowell was charged with felony larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny for stealing an education worth $15,686 from Norwalk schools; the babysitter was also evicted from public housing for her role in the scheme. McDowell pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to five years in prison and five additional years of probation on unrelated drug charges (McDowell was no stranger to jail time, having served time previously for robbery and drug charges).
That same year, Olesia and Hamlet Garcia made news when, after they had separated, Olesia moved her 5-year-old daughter from Philadelphia to her father’s home in Montgomery County. The couple eventually reconciled but kept their daughter in Montgomery County schools for the last two months of the school year. The pair was originally charged with criminal theft of service charges; those charges were dropped, and instead, Hamlet Garcia was charged with a summary offense of knowingly and illegally enrolling a child in a school outside of the district. The couple could have faced up to seven years in prison on the initial charges; instead Hamlet Garcia pleaded guilty to the lesser charges (the charges against Olesia were dropped), and together with Olesia’s father, Grigori Sofitchouk, was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $10,752.81 to the Lower Moreland School District.
So how are parents like the Garcias discovered in the first place? A guidance counselor calling into NPR reports a surprising source: “It’s the children that are turning the other children in.” They “tell their parents, you know, I can’t get into this particular class because it’s full, or I didn’t make this sport team or the drama team drama club because too many people tried out,” the counselor said, noting that she was also a parent. She says that the children point the finger at students who are not in the district and when school officials investigate, “sure enough, it’s true.” It’s such a common practice that, in some states like New Jersey, entire businesses are devoted to checking out so-called boundary jumpers (or district hoppers) for school districts.
So why do parents lie to get their kids into different school districts? And why are schools so very different from one district to the next? It comes down to dollars.
Many taxpayers believe that funds for public schools come from federal taxes. That’s not the case. The majority of funding for public education doesn’t come from the federal government – the feds only provide about 8% of funding for elementary and secondary schools.
The overwhelming majority of funding for public schools comes from state and local governments. That’s why you see differences in spending. Funding at the state level tends to be tied to income taxes which means that states which bring in more revenue (think New Jersey) tend to have better funded and thus, better performing schools. Within each state, however, there are even more differences in spending between districts since local funding is typically tied to property taxes. The result is typically the more property taxes you pay, the more likely it is that your child will receive a quality education.
Not sure how the math works out? In its Funding Gaps 2015 Report (downloads as a pdf), The Education Trust compared the revenues of the highest and lowest poverty districts across the country. Their findings? The highest poverty districts receive about $1,200 less per student than the lowest poverty districts. That means, they concluded, that for a middle school with 500 students, a $1,200 funding gap per student results in a shortage of $600,000 per year; for a 1,000-student high school, the shortage is $1.2 million. That example is per school, not per district. Multiply that across a district, and it’s easy to see why some schools might have brand new football stadiums while others can’t pay for textbooks.
In some states, the gap is even larger. The Education Trust found that the largest funding gap is in the state of Illinois where the highest poverty districts receive nearly 20% less state and local funding than the lowest poverty districts. New York and Pennsylvania trail behind followed by Texas, Maryland, and Michigan.
The idea that you can peg the quality of education to residency is often referred to as “zip code education.” But there are legal ways – other than moving – to get around the boundary requirements. As a nod to the cost of education, some districts allow students to “opt in” to schools in the district by paying tuition. The amount of the tuition is based on a formula based on the cost of sending children to school in the district, including the cost of salary for teachers and staff and maintaining the properties. Still, opponents argue, that still necessarily means that those who are in a position to pay more can buy a better education for their children.
You would think that kind of economic disparity in education would be worldwide: you get what you pay for, right? Only that doesn’t quite bear out statistically. According to an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report from 2013 (downloads as a pdf), the United States joins just Israel and Turkey in terms of countries where poorer students have lower teacher/student ratios than more privileged students. How that happens is apparent from flipping through the report: federal funding for education among other OECD nations tends to be significantly higher while the United States continues to rely on state and local government funding (again, largely from property taxes).
How to address the disparity in educational funding isn’t an easy problem to fix. Shuffling property tax revenue from a high property tax district to a lower property tax district doesn’t feel “fair” to those taxpayers writing bigger checks. And historically, throwing more money at struggling school districts hasn’t resulted in better schools across the board (just look at Chicago and Philadelphia). Making up the difference with new taxes – like cigarette taxes and soda taxes – isn’t popular or sustainable. That’s why school funding hasn’t changed dramatically in most school districts despite cries for reform.
For now, it remains a felony in a number states, including Illinois, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, to lie about residency for the purpose of sending your child to school in a different district. That doesn’t mean it won’t stop parents from trying. Yolanda Miranda of New York was jailed on misdemeanor charges (previously classed as a felony) for sending her four children to school in the district where her mother lived near Rochester, New York. But Miranda has no regrets, saying, “If I had to do it again 10 times over, I would.”