As school systems in the Washington area face rising enrollments and shrinking budgets, one superintendent has gone public with administrative penny-pinching.
Alexandria Superintendent Morton Sherman is making sure every last student attending the city’s schools is a bona fide resident.
“Evidence and data show that less than 1 percent of our 11,000-plus student population is ‘sneaking in,’ ” Sherman wrote recently on his superintendent blog. “Still, I will not tolerate this. It is a burden that Alexandria taxpayers should not have to share.”
Morton encouraged parents to send tips about students who might live outside Alexandria’s boundaries, and he said the district would use private investigators when necessary.
Instead of “sneaking in,” he said, the students ought to be paying out-of-district tuition. In Alexandria, that could be about $15,000 per year, said district spokeswoman Amy Carlini.
“It’s a big deal because we have a high per-pupil cost,” Carlini said. “Let’s say it’s just five students who are nonresidents and not paying tuition — that’s still a significant amount of money.”
Tuition in nearby districts — from Montgomery County to Fairfax — is about as costly. And the extent to which cash-strapped school systems go to collect on interloping students can be fierce.
In Montgomery County, Jeff Sukkasem sat out a year of middle school while the district carried on a legal battle over his residency, as reported in The Examiner last spring. Sukkasem’s mother had sent him to the county from Thailand for financial reasons. In June, the school system relaxed its stance and allowed him in, but after thousands of dollars in legal fees.
For that reason, Carlini said Morton, in the style of any good teacher, was trying to send a firm but fair message.
“You want to make sure you’re not spending more resources tracking people down than you’d receive in tuition,” she said. “And we need to keep it in perspective — every child who gets into a car with an out-of-state license plate is not necessarily sneaking in.”
Comments on Morton’s blog commended his efforts, but warned of overzealous tattlers.
“Thanks for addressing this,” one said, but cautioned of “too many sensitive situations and vulnerable students … and confidential information does have a way of leaking out.”
