Is residency fraud a real issue or is it overblown?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Someone has been using my home address to commit residency fraud for nine years. Their once 3rd grader is now an 11th grader at an application high school. I have reported it twice a year for nine years. No one has followed up once. I get this kid's report cards, truancy notices, forms, etc etc etc in the mail.

You reported it here?: https://osse.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/osse/publication/attachments/ResidencyInvestigation_18x24_posters.pdf

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've been living in the DC area for decades and know DC, MoCo, Howard and Fairfax public schools.

DCPS is an academic disaster compared to MCPS and FCPS (and some smaller, more homogeneous public school systems further out). Some charter schools are just OK, but none of them hold a candle to the best MCPS and FCPS school clusters.

Very few families are in such logistical straights as to want to place their kids in DCPS if they live in MD or VA.

I agree with this 100. I worked in DC schools but would NEVER send my kids there if I lived in Maryland or Virginia. I mean, why risk residency fraud for a lower quality school?

I think at least for NE charters or Cap Hill DCPS schools, you have some families coming in from nearby PG county. Since Maryland does not have much school choice, I imagine many parents feel like the options in DC are better than whatever they are zoned into, and it is on their to work anyway. And, like an above poster said, a lot of the families in MD grew up in DC and still have family living nearby so it probably isn't too difficult for registration.

[Anonymous]

I can think of a bunch!
-At my kid's school in NE DC, the parents live in MD and work in DC
-My neighbor's 2 grandkids live in MD and go to KIPP. Grandma picks them up after school, and mom picks them up after work in DC
-my coworker's grandkids use his address to go to Watkins
-a friend moved to MD from DC and kept kids at the same school in DC because they still work in DC

I raise my eyebrows... and then I MYOB.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Context - I have 2 kids at different EOTP schools and live near a third school. At all of these schools, probably a third to half of the license plates every day are from MD and some VA.

I certainly know families who have one parent in MD and one in DC (and I'm sure there are all sorts of different guardianship arrangements), so that's obviously not residency fraud. But is that THIS common? Wouldn't it be difficult to register without showing this proof of residency? I'm just genuinely curious; I know this was a big issue a few years ago but haven't heard as much about it lately.

It's school-by-school, I think. Some schools look the other way and/or don't really investigate. Others try to keep everything above board.

My DD went to a city-wide DCPS for PK3 and it was probably 40% MD kids. Really blatant, too, like I asked a teacher if I could get a mom's number to set up a playdate with a kid she couldn't stop talking about and the answer was "they live out in Upper Marlboro, you probably can't have a playdate with them." So the teacher knows, and doesn't care, and assumes I don't either. Maybe 1 in 20 cars at drop off had DC plates (but some kids walked, so that's not a direct correlation to the percentages of students). I think the school didn't care because it was underenrolled and more bodies = more funding.

Now we're at a school that's very nearly on the border of MD and the number of MD plates is a fraction of the previous school - I'm sure that part of this is that the school has a catchment area so the school fills up with actual residents first, but I also think they actually require the paperwork and cross their t's and dot their i's.

[Anonymous]

It was an open secret at our EOTP MS. Stories of the admins telling students to behave or “we’ll send you back to Maryland.”

I assume it was for commuting reasons.

[Anonymous]

The one family I heard about lost DC housing sometime during kid high school due to rent hike. With help of DC family they kept kid in school until she could graduate. New neighborhood was not great.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I can think of a bunch!
-At my kid's school in NE DC, the parents live in MD and work in DC
-My neighbor's 2 grandkids live in MD and go to KIPP. Grandma picks them up after school, and mom picks them up after work in DC
-my coworker's grandkids use his address to go to Watkins
-a friend moved to MD from DC and kept kids at the same school in DC because they still work in DC

I raise my eyebrows... and then I MYOB.

Report these fraudsters.

They are cheating DC taxpayers.

[Anonymous]

True story. I was asked by a colleague if she could use my address to enroll her 2 young kids in the JKLMM down the block from me.

She and her spouse live in PG and they already send these kids to a -different- JKLM, fraudulently.

However, her eyes lit up when she learned I am IB for a JKLMM that is more convenient to her work commute. She was exploring whether she could use my DC address to switch from one fraudulent DCPS situation to a different fraudulent DCPS situation. This conversation occurred recently.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:True story. I was asked by a colleague if she could use my address to enroll her 2 young kids in the JKLMM down the block from me.

She and her spouse live in PG and they already send these kids to a -different- JKLM, fraudulently.

However, her eyes lit up when she learned I am IB for a JKLMM that is more convenient to her work commute. She was exploring whether she could use my DC address to switch from one fraudulent DCPS situation to a different fraudulent DCPS situation. This conversation occurred recently.

And hope you answered NO!? Do people have no self-awareness nor self-respect at all?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Someone has been using my home address to commit residency fraud for nine years. Their once 3rd grader is now an 11th grader at an application high school. I have reported it twice a year for nine years. No one has followed up once. I get this kid's report cards, truancy notices, forms, etc etc etc in the mail.

You reported it here?: https://osse.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/osse/publication/attachments/ResidencyInvestigation_18x24_posters.pdf

Both to the osse hotlines, web forms, and directly to the schools at least twice a year.

[Anonymous]

Our family attends a desirable ES with PK3 + PK4. The school has a sizable OOB contingent starting in K.

What I've noticed:
A handful of white families doing boundary cheating in PK years. They will have an in-bounds rental for the PK3 or PK4 lottery for the oldest kid and then be in a nice big house in Upper NW or EOTP after that.

The school is about 40%-50% OOB so living outside the boundary is pretty normalized, especially after K. It's a good community and people willing to drive across the city are obviously committed to their kids' education. But there is definitely shady stuff happening in the PreK years.

Also, I don't think folks here in the US on diplomatic visas should qualify for Pre-K, even if they live in bounds. It's a ridiculous giveaway to well-off foreigners.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our family attends a desirable ES with PK3 + PK4. The school has a sizable OOB contingent starting in K.

What I've noticed:
A handful of white families doing boundary cheating in PK years. They will have an in-bounds rental for the PK3 or PK4 lottery for the oldest kid and then be in a nice big house in Upper NW or EOTP after that.

The school is about 40%-50% OOB so living outside the boundary is pretty normalized, especially after K. It's a good community and people willing to drive across the city are obviously committed to their kids' education. But there is definitely shady stuff happening in the PreK years.

Also, I don't think folks here in the US on diplomatic visas should qualify for Pre-K, even if they live in bounds. It's a ridiculous giveaway to well-off foreigners.

Are you proposing to start discriminating according to people’s employment? As long as they are legally residing in DC, whether they are diplomats or PhD students or in any legal capacity and visa, they deserve and qualify for public schooling opportunities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our family attends a desirable ES with PK3 + PK4. The school has a sizable OOB contingent starting in K.

What I've noticed:
A handful of white families doing boundary cheating in PK years. They will have an in-bounds rental for the PK3 or PK4 lottery for the oldest kid and then be in a nice big house in Upper NW or EOTP after that.

The school is about 40%-50% OOB so living outside the boundary is pretty normalized, especially after K. It's a good community and people willing to drive across the city are obviously committed to their kids' education. But there is definitely shady stuff happening in the PreK years.

Also, I don't think folks here in the US on diplomatic visas should qualify for Pre-K, even if they live in bounds. It's a ridiculous giveaway to well-off foreigners.

Are you proposing to start discriminating according to people’s employment? As long as they are legally residing in DC, whether they are diplomats or PhD students or in any legal capacity and visa, they deserve and qualify for public schooling opportunities.

Are they paying income taxes to the District or the federal government? If not, they shouldn't be getting free PreK3 or PreK4 given that its not guaranteed even for taxpaying US citizens of the District.

It's absurd to give people on diplomatic visas free PreK. It's super entitled given that vast majority of US citizens don't get the benefit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Context - I have 2 kids at different EOTP schools and live near a third school. At all of these schools, probably a third to half of the license plates every day are from MD and some VA.

I certainly know families who have one parent in MD and one in DC (and I'm sure there are all sorts of different guardianship arrangements), so that's obviously not residency fraud. But is that THIS common? Wouldn't it be difficult to register without showing this proof of residency? I'm just genuinely curious; I know this was a big issue a few years ago but haven't heard as much about it lately.

Yes, it's still very much a thing. In the three public schools my kid has attended, there have been Maryland residents at all three. And many are not shy about it. I've also observed lots of MD license plates picking up kids from school. The registrar at one of my kid's schools was even fired for helping facilitate residency fraud.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I've been living in the DC area for decades and know DC, MoCo, Howard and Fairfax public schools.

DCPS is an academic disaster compared to MCPS and FCPS (and some smaller, more homogeneous public school systems further out). Some charter schools are just OK, but none of them hold a candle to the best MCPS and FCPS school clusters.

Very few families are in such logistical straights as to want to place their kids in DCPS if they live in MD or VA.

If you've lived in DC for decades you know that residency fraud has been an issue. Lots of MD folks wanting to take advantage of free PK3 & PK4. Also convenience and being able to use grandma (who still lives in DC) for childcare. Close-in PG County schools are just okay.

PP you replied to. I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying it's not as dire as some would make it out to be.



I also have a theory on the marked decrease in residency fraud threads on DCUM: the average age of posters have gone up with time, so maybe in the past, there was a perfect storm of more posters with younger kids, who were noticing potential residential fraud at their DCPS schools, by families with preschool aged kids who then continued on to DCPS elementaries. But since DCPS gets worse the higher you go, middle school is a time of attrition to private or better suburban schools (and parents start to realize that MD or VA residency guarantees in-state tuition at UMD, UVA, etc), and kids become self-sufficient enough to not need adult supervision after school. So now that a plurality of DCUM posters are older, their kids have passed the age where they would notice such residential fraud.

All of this.

I have no special knowledge, but I think the city did a big data match a few years ago and that's why so many city employees were caught doing residency fraud. And that may have made people more cautious about doing it.

I also think that, aside from preschool, there are certainly DC residents sneaking into Maryland schools too. If we had to pay Maryland for that, and Maryland had to pay us for their residents, I'm not sure which state would come out ahead. This isn't necessarily the cost savings people think it is.

What you may fail to understand it that if Marylanders cheat DC schools, then that stops the poorer DC residents from any legal opportunity to go to a higher performing school. It’s not just money, it’s a moral failing on those families parts. And I can only imagine what it does to raise a child who knows they are cheating and is taught the rules don’t apply to them. It’s so gross.

No, I understand, but I think in actuality the number of MD residents at higher-performing schools and schools that don't take all applicants isn't that big. It's amazing how people will sneak into low performing schools but I suppose it's for logistical or family reasons. And again, the same logic applies to DC folks sneaking into MD schools.

A coworker's daughter + kids live in Laurel. The children go to KIPP (using my coworker's address). Why? First, for the free prek 3 and 4. Plus, she works in DC and her mom lives in DC and can help with pick up. The school day is longer and before/aftercare is also much cheaper.