School Fraud- Cap Hill

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MYOB

Lol. NP but this is ridiculous. This is OP's business. If people from outside the city are committing residency fraud to take spots in her IB school, and her children are unable to attend as a result, that is 100% her business. Don't be obtuse.

OP, I have mixed feelings about this because I do think some percentage of the cars with Maryland tags doing drop off are not residency fraud -- it's kids from divorced homes where one parent lives in PG county, or a grandparent or other caretaker who lives in Maryland doing drop off to help parents with challenging commutes or work schedules. So I don't like assuming that just because I see one kid get out of a car with Maryland tags, that family is committing fraud.

But yes, the sheer volume is concerning to me. I don't think you can explain away dozens of cars with Maryland tags doing drop off with these explanations. Schools in DC are so challenging as is, and stuff like this erodes faith in the system and sows distrust among school communities.

If it is grandparent / babysitter / divorce - wouldn't you see similar patterns at other elementary schools? Why would it be centralized to Maury vs the neighboring elementary schools? What is unique there

How often are you observing drop off patterns at other schools? Maybe what’s unique is Maury parents are privileged enough to have extra time in their day to monitor license plates? Not how I would spend extra time, but I’m over here slumming it at my school.

This has nothing to do with privilege. Most Maury parents walk to pick up and drop off. It’s very easy to see at those times many MD cars rolling up.
We pay taxes and deserve the highest spot at our in bounds school compared to a MD family. This isn’t privilege and it’s not racist, just a simple fact. It’s our neighborhood school, how it should work in a normal functioning city.

Maury parent here. I’m really not concerned. I assume most of the MD/VA plates are caregivers from other states. Some may also be staff members getting rides home (saw that yesterday). Unlike Brent the Maury zone still has affordable housing, and I understand that there were more OOB slots opened up this year. Low income families are more likely to have care networks that cross state lines. I suggest you MYOB and focus your energy on more productive pursuits to improve the school & neighborhood.

Spoken like someone living in MD and sending their kid to Maury.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Has DC ever done an anonymous review of a school like Maury to see how big of problem residency fraud really is. More to just gain overall information, not to target individual families. I guess Duke Ellington had an audit a few years ago. But it is a different animal.

I work in social services (in PG county), and there are a lot of very convoluted custody and living situations that most of the snowflakes on this site could not imagine in a million years. I also agree that there are black PG county residents who feel entitled to send their kids to DC schools because family still live there and to them, it is "home".

School registrars aren't there to "investigate", they are just box checkers. How much do you want the district to spend on investigating residency fraud? Charter schools actively want as many kids as possible for count day so they get their money. Very little incentive there for investigation if a family can provide some sort of paperwork.

OP, I assume you have very young children. What is your end game? Charter school? Private school? How is that helping your community and local schools. You can be angry at boundary cheaters as yet another dysfunction of DCPS, but, ask yourself, are your hands clean?

This is a very balanced post, and I'd note that the bolded is part of why I don't think DCPS is overly inclined to start randomly conducting checks of every kid who gets dropped off with a Maryland plate. I think there's a calculation that some of these kids are kind of in-and-out of DC depending on family situations and it would be disruptive to force them to disenroll when they go to their grandma's in PGC for three months only to re-enroll them when they return to their mom's on the Hill. Moreover, for kids experiencing trauma, it would be traumatic to also be subjected to additional scrutiny. I suspect there is a little bit of a "Do No Harm" approach in play.

I work in social services in DC and agree with that PP. Many families are very transient and children sleep at different relatives depending on parents' work schedules and caregivers' availability. That is a level of instability that very few on DCUM can really understand. For those families (not all, granted), I think it's PERFECTLY reasonable for a family to choose the best school when your child really doesn't have a primary address.

[Anonymous]

As someone at a school that appears to have a lot of residency fraud, I think part of the problem is that it has a serious impact on the school's ability to build community. Our school has a lot of IB kids but also a large portion of students that definitely live in MD. It's an open secret. I know some of these families and I get why they do it, and as others on the thread have explained, often situations are complicated. But also -- it's still fraud. These are not families who used to live in bounds and now live out of bounds in DC. They don't still have a parent living in DC and definitely not IBs. Some of them still own property or have family members near the school, but neither the kids nor the parents live in these houses and don't pretend to. Yes, many of them lived IB for a long time and grew up in the area and went to the school themselves. I get it and there are obviously gentrification and racial issues at play and I'm actually not judging any of these families. My kid is friends with some of their kids, and their kids are great. Many are very committed to the school and very active in activities and booster events.

But it still impacts the overall culture of the school. The fact that it's an "open secret" is a problem -- everyone knows what is going on and no one is saying anything but it's absolutely an elephant in the room, especially in situations where the school interacts with the neighborhood, coordinating for events or doing fundraisers. It creates awkwardness. It also undermines a major reason many of us choose to attend this school over a charter. We want to be in a neighborhood school, for our kid to attend school with neighbors and to have a sense of community in our neighborhood. So it was surprising and disappointing when our kid's first true school friend turned out to live in PG county. We're not going to tell on this family, who we love. But it's not what we thought we were getting into with this school and it was sad to discover it. No casual after school playdates or bumping into each other in the neighborhood on the weekend. And we think it will be hard for these kids to maintain their friendship due to the distance and the underlying issues.

Someone upthread said it's not fair for families to complain about residency fraud when they will just abandon the school for charters or private school. But I think this comment ignores how these issues are related. We do sometimes discuss moving to a charter, specifically to try and find a greater sense of community because our current school has a disjointed culture due to residency fraud. There are basically two communities -- the IB families and the MD families. They mix, but they are also distinct, and it's weird.

I'm not trying to deprive any child of an education. But it's kind of crazy we've all just accepted this as the way it has to be. That attitude is endemic in DCPS and I think it leads to a lot of the apathy and resentment in the system. It's not good.

[Anonymous]

I find this whole thread confusing. We lived very close to Maury up until a couple of years ago. If there were any “MD plates” they weren’t enough for me ever to notice. I think someone is trying to stir up trouble.

(That said, my personal view is that the rules are the rules and, yes, if you live in bounds you should have the right to attend the local school over an OOB kid with some historic family ties. Your plans for MS and HS are irrelevant to this Q).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MYOB

Lol. NP but this is ridiculous. This is OP's business. If people from outside the city are committing residency fraud to take spots in her IB school, and her children are unable to attend as a result, that is 100% her business. Don't be obtuse.

OP, I have mixed feelings about this because I do think some percentage of the cars with Maryland tags doing drop off are not residency fraud -- it's kids from divorced homes where one parent lives in PG county, or a grandparent or other caretaker who lives in Maryland doing drop off to help parents with challenging commutes or work schedules. So I don't like assuming that just because I see one kid get out of a car with Maryland tags, that family is committing fraud.

But yes, the sheer volume is concerning to me. I don't think you can explain away dozens of cars with Maryland tags doing drop off with these explanations. Schools in DC are so challenging as is, and stuff like this erodes faith in the system and sows distrust among school communities.

If it is grandparent / babysitter / divorce - wouldn't you see similar patterns at other elementary schools? Why would it be centralized to Maury vs the neighboring elementary schools? What is unique there

How often are you observing drop off patterns at other schools? Maybe what’s unique is Maury parents are privileged enough to have extra time in their day to monitor license plates? Not how I would spend extra time, but I’m over here slumming it at my school.

This has nothing to do with privilege. Most Maury parents walk to pick up and drop off. It’s very easy to see at those times many MD cars rolling up.
We pay taxes and deserve the highest spot at our in bounds school compared to a MD family. This isn’t privilege and it’s not racist, just a simple fact. It’s our neighborhood school, how it should work in a normal functioning city.

Maury parent here. I’m really not concerned. I assume most of the MD/VA plates are caregivers from other states. Some may also be staff members getting rides home (saw that yesterday). Unlike Brent the Maury zone still has affordable housing, and I understand that there were more OOB slots opened up this year. Low income families are more likely to have care networks that cross state lines. I suggest you MYOB and focus your energy on more productive pursuits to improve the school & neighborhood.

Spoken like someone living in MD and sending their kid to Maury.

Are we really going to do this?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I find this whole thread confusing. We lived very close to Maury up until a couple of years ago. If there were any “MD plates” they weren’t enough for me ever to notice. I think someone is trying to stir up trouble.

(That said, my personal view is that the rules are the rules and, yes, if you live in bounds you should have the right to attend the local school over an OOB kid with some historic family ties. Your plans for MS and HS are irrelevant to this Q).

I agree. People have too much time on their hands and are acting out after two hard years. Hard to imagine fixating on “MD plates” when we’re literally just 3 weeks into the school year and dealing with covid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MYOB

Lol. NP but this is ridiculous. This is OP's business. If people from outside the city are committing residency fraud to take spots in her IB school, and her children are unable to attend as a result, that is 100% her business. Don't be obtuse.

OP, I have mixed feelings about this because I do think some percentage of the cars with Maryland tags doing drop off are not residency fraud -- it's kids from divorced homes where one parent lives in PG county, or a grandparent or other caretaker who lives in Maryland doing drop off to help parents with challenging commutes or work schedules. So I don't like assuming that just because I see one kid get out of a car with Maryland tags, that family is committing fraud.

But yes, the sheer volume is concerning to me. I don't think you can explain away dozens of cars with Maryland tags doing drop off with these explanations. Schools in DC are so challenging as is, and stuff like this erodes faith in the system and sows distrust among school communities.

If it is grandparent / babysitter / divorce - wouldn't you see similar patterns at other elementary schools? Why would it be centralized to Maury vs the neighboring elementary schools? What is unique there

Maybe parents in-boundary for Maury have enough income to hire a nanny who probably lives in PG.

But why would the nanny be driving the kid to school? The boundary isn't that big.

Because if you hire a nanny for 4k+/month, you're busy working! That's what the nanny is for. When should the nanny come - 930am after kids gone?

??? Why wouldn’t the nanny be walking the kids to school instead of driving them??

[Anonymous]

As long as we’re just anonymously gossiping online, ever been by center city PCS on east cap during drop off? That’s a lot of Maryland plates.

[Anonymous]

Because if you hire a nanny for 4k+/month, you're busy working! That's what the nanny is for. When should the nanny come - 930am after kids gone?

??? Why wouldn’t the nanny be walking the kids to school instead of driving them??

Extra kids in the nanny share that don't want to walk.

Nanny with a physical challenge

Nanny just doesn't feel like it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As long as we’re just anonymously gossiping online, ever been by center city PCS on east cap during drop off? That’s a lot of Maryland plates.

Stuart Hobson is a mess of MD plates.

[Anonymous]

Most often it's just PLAIN FRAUD for the convenience of parents commuting to DC. Who believes all these "dog ate my homework" excuses.

[Anonymous]

In some cases the neighborhood versus non-neighborhood school is tricky. A case in point is JO Wilson versus Two Rivers 4th. I'd bet that Two Rivers is more of a "neighborhood" school than JO Wilson, since most of JO is coming from OOB (including MD it appears), while I see legions of Two Rivers families walking to school each morning.

Maybe SWS is similar, but I can't speak from experience on that one.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As long as we’re just anonymously gossiping online, ever been by center city PCS on east cap during drop off? That’s a lot of Maryland plates.

Stuart Hobson is a mess of MD plates.

SH is more of a mess period since the last principal, a fine leader, quit two years ago. I see slippage on various levels.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most often it's just PLAIN FRAUD for the convenience of parents commuting to DC. Who believes all these "dog ate my homework" excuses.

I mean, have your kids ever had a parent incarcerated? In rehab? Have your kids ever been in foster care? Kinship care? Informal family care due to a crisis?

Have you ever worked a shift job that wasn't, like, doctor or intelligence analyst?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most often it's just PLAIN FRAUD for the convenience of parents commuting to DC. Who believes all these "dog ate my homework" excuses.

I mean, have your kids ever had a parent incarcerated? In rehab? Have your kids ever been in foster care? Kinship care? Informal family care due to a crisis?

Have you ever worked a shift job that wasn't, like, doctor or intelligence analyst?

Have you been to the Maury district? Because those people don’t live there.