Arlington Public Schools officials are hoping to get funding for a full-time employee whose job will be to make sure that students attending the county’s public schools actually live there. While not a huge problem, the school district has developed a backlog of cases involving students whose residency still must be verified, district spokesman Frank Bellavia said.
The school district requires parents to present a mortgage statement, lease or deed to verify students’ addresses, Bellavia said. But occasionally parents from outside the district use the addresses of Arlington relatives so their children can attend school in the county, he said.
Proving that someone is skirting the law, however, is labor intensive and the part-time verification specialist employed by the schools doesn’t have enough time to sift through all the outstanding cases, Bellavia said.
“It would probably work itself out if the person had more hours in a day to look into this stuff,” he said.
In comparison to school districts across the region, Arlington’s residency investigation capacity is fairly limited. D.C. public schools employ two verification specialists to investigate residency issues. Fairfax County has employees in each school who do the same job.
But in Arlington, the district has identified $9.3 million in unfunded items on the 2013 budget, the residency verification specialist among them. The new position would cost the school district $85,300 for the year, but it’s up to the school board to decide whether it can afford to expand the position. Other unfunded items on next year’s budget include textbooks and annual salary increases for school district employees.
Bellavia said students outside the district could end up in Arlington schools for a number of reasons. Some have parents who work in Arlington and would prefer to send their children to school there, he said. Other parents might be attracted to the quality of schools in Arlington, he said. But when they’re found, students who live outside the district are dismissed.
