Some parents will do anything to get their children into good schools, including lying about where they live. Baltimore County has long dealt with this problem as students who should attend city schools instead enroll in their safer and better county counterparts.
No one knows how many students fall into this category, but the increase in foreclosures is sure to drive the numbers higher. The reason: Some of those pushed from their affluent neighborhoods by financial problems will try to keep their children enrolled in their former schools ? even if they no longer live in the district. First Focus, a child advocacy group in Washington, estimates that two million children nationally will be affected by the mortgage meltdown. Statistics show the number of people at least 60 days late on their mortgage payments ? a harbinger of foreclosures to come ? have risen around the region in the past year. Research from TransUnion, one of the big three credit-monitoring companies, shows delinquencies jumped from 1.53 percent to 2.19 percent in Baltimore County from the fourth quarter of 2006 to the fourth quarter of 2007. Baltimore City?s delinquency rate rose from 3.11 percent to 4.11 percent during that time.
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Baltimore County school officials have not admitted foreclosures are the reason they will require public school students entering sixth and ninth grades next year to prove they live in the county with proper documentation. But they don?t have to. Districts around the country already have. Some are even hiring private detectives to root out those who don?t belong. A recent report in The Wall Street Journal quoted a Chicago-area private investigator whose work resulted in a suburban school district dropping 100 students from its rolls.
Their efforts are understandable. Those who pay taxes in a particular county should not have to subsidize the education of children whose parents live someplace else. And the deception makes it much more difficult for school districts to estimate enrollment and to hire and maintain the right amount and type of personnel, not to mention pay them. (Homeless children are exempt from the residency requirement by federal law.)
We agree school systems should not have to enroll students who do not live in a district. But the bigger issue emerging from this mortgage mess is why parents should be forced to send their children to schools that don?t perform. If money followed students in the form of vouchers to attend any school, public or private, of parents? choice, no one would have to lie, and school districts would not have to waste time, energy and money to cull students from their rolls. Living in an affluent neighborhood ought not determine your child?s learning potential.
