Renting but not occupying for DCPS in-boundary residency purposes?
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Anonymous
| Heard that rationale directly from a DCPS official at one of the Ward 3 overcrowding meetings. |
Anonymous
Why shouldn't doing away with OOB be an option in overcrowded schools? If schools are already full with IB enrollment, why on God's green earth should OOB slots exist to overcrowd the school further? The whole idea of OOB enrollment was to soak up excess capacity in schools where IB demand alone couldn't fill them. |
Anonymous
Because the school may be overcrowded in terms of the number of students inside the building but it really comes down to classroom by classroom. If for example, the school ends up having three third-grade classes with only 18 students in each of them the principal is under a lot of pressure to get those classes up to 20 or 21 students by going to the waitlist. Each of those additional 6 to 9 kids is worth 10 or 12 grand to the school’s budget. |
Anonymous
That’s a joke. I know of at least 5 families that go here and live in MD so I know they don’t check for boundary fraud. |
Anonymous
I've worked in DC social services. Residency fraud investigation results are not made public. These families may already have been investigated, including with home visits where an investigator was shown kids stuff in bedrooms. If all the residency docs are in order (especially tax returns) and the investigation reveals that the kids sleep in the address used for residency, at least some of the time, DCPS leaves the family alone. Parents who try to bust OOB or out-of-DC cheaters assume that if relatives seem to occupy an IB address, not the parents, no residency investigation has been done. Not a safe assumption. |
Anonymous
Fair point, but what's the real likelihood that PP knows this many MD residents at one school, and all of them are on the up and up? |
Anonymous
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If you strongly suspect residency cheating and it rankles you, go on, call the darn fraud hotline, or complain to your principal.
Playing CSI, coming here to slam fellow parents for cheating, and whispering about them in your school community isn't cool. You'd be surprised how many "people who live in MD" pay income tax in DC, and how many parents who "never lived" at IB house actually lived there. |
Anonymous
Reading comprehension. Nobody came here "playing CSI." OP posted about her fraudulent/unethical scheme. |
Anonymous
| That's how the thread started, right. By page 2 or 3, almost every DCUM residency related thread has taken on an unsavory amateur witch hunt tenor. I'd like to hear more PPs call out team CSI. The message should be report the family then, just do it. Alternatively, pipe down and lobby for policy changes to get what you want. |
Anonymous
Oh, yeah. That's quite a fraudulent/unethical scheme: paying income tax to DC, and her fair share of property tax for not one but two homes in different parts of town. A regular Al Capone this one. The single factor, in your mind, which determines whether she is an upstanding citizen or some sort of subhuman scum, is which of her two homes her child spends the night in. I can imagine you spying through her bedroom window every night and relaying your findings to exhausted fraud tipline workers trying to focus their limited enforcement resources on out-of-state residency fraud that drains our public school budget without contributing to our tax base. |
Anonymous
Caring that people cheat and undermine the system while others pay up to play by the rules "isn't cool"?! You sound like you're in high school. All of you completely unbothered by boundary cheating must not be at the overcrowded schoold that others of us make financial sacrifices to access. If it's unimportant to your school, so be it, but for some schools, it matters. And those defending OP and her proposed 2nd home, remember that's just aiming to rent a studio, ie, the cheapest thing she can get. She would not be renting a home comparable to what she has otherwise chosen for her family, just an address. |
Anonymous
The point was made that you can care all you want, take umbrage if you will, be bothered continually. You can also call the tipline anytime you like, and/or complain to your school's admins about suspected cheaters. What you shouldn't be doing is judging, hounding, hassling and trying to besmirch the reputations of parents who, as far as DCPS is concerned, aren't in their sights for whatever reasons. |
Anonymous
+100. I'd like to see DCPS hit back much harder at the financial fraud crowd, and the leave the others alone. When schools get crowded, plan ahead to add classroom trailers, build more school additions and even open more schools (rather than handing solid old school buildings off to condo developers). Close unpopular schools and auction the buildings off, or rent them out, to fund expansions of wildly popular schools. Provide parents with more incentives to use schools that aren't wildly popular, like attractive programming (including GT programming) and free or dirt cheap after care. Truth is, DCPS owns a good deal of dramatically under-utilized real estate. |
Anonymous
Actually DC law already dictates that DCPS has to surplus unused buildings, make them available to charter schools first, then sell to others. They don't follow the law, but it's on the books for a reason. |
Anonymous
Irrespective of what ideally ought or ought not happen, it happens. People talk. If these families believe their practices are legal and acceptable, then it shouldn't matter. I do think it hurts the school community when people do this. These families sometimes live far away and don't always show up to school events. Their kids are more likely to stay home on bad weather days, when those who actually live in the neighborhood all show up. Play dates are declined. I've seen all of this happen with families who are supposedly IB, but not really. |