Anonymous wrote:As someone who works in a different DCPS school I'm surprised to see that an office is so far in processing their enrollment that they would get to this request.
sus.
+1. They’re not sending out investigators before the enrollment deadline. OP could be in Arizona still and legitimately enrolling. This is just a troll from the residency fraud brigade.
This could very well be a troll, but I submitted my kid’s JR enrollment last week and got an email over the weekend about my address verification documents (I attached the wrong thing after doing this for a million years). They are very actively pursuing early enrollment this year, and a staff member is working on them.
I had a similar thing happen with my enrollment (my pay stub file didn't upload fully)but what they did with both of us, it seems, is let us know we had something to correct. They did not immediately go to scheduling a home visit. That's why I think this is a troll.
I don’t think it’s a troll. I suspect OP is engaging in residency fraud and why they are scheduling a home visit.
+1. We also got a residency check in PK for a school that virtually never has a waitlist (and for which we were not only IB but lived almost right next to the school). I assumed there were just spot checks in the system and our name came up so they sent someone.
When it happened, I was totally unbothered because why would I be? We were IB, the check took 5 minutes. If anything it confirmed they had received all our enrollment paperwork and I didn't have to follow up to make sure we were set for fall. I definitely didn't post on DCUM about it or consider suing the school district. It was nothing, not really much different than being asked to re-submit health forms or other random administrative stuff you sometimes have to do for DCPS.
OP might be a troll trying to stir up boundary fraud controversy, but I'm betting that they actually are not IB for JR and are running some kind of scam (using someone else's address, renting a studio they don't live in) and panicking because they are about to get caught. It is definitely not unheard of for DCPS to do residency visits, though I think they fell by the wayside during Covid. Perhaps they are ramping them back up again this year and it's scaring people who were convinced that DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud (newsflash, of course they do, if it were rampant it would cause massive issues with overcrowding plus completely undermine the lottery).
That's an argument for why they *should* care about it, not why they *do* care about it! DCPS should care about a lot of things that they don't.
Fair, but there are also things DCPS actually does care about but is inept at fixing/enforcing. Boundary fraud falls in that category. It absolutely is a problem for the aforementioned reasons -- it contributes to a poor distribution of kids across schools (overcrowding the best schools and under enrolling the struggling ones) while making a mockery of the lottery which is basically the centerpiece of the current school system.
Some amount of boundary fraud is probably inevitable and likely DCPS accepts this. Also, DCPS, like most DC agencies, has some corruption and there are likely *some* people within DCPS who like a system that looks the other way on boundary fraud as it enables that corruption.
But that doesn't mean DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud at all, or that they don't do anything ever to address it. Home visits have actually been a feature of DCPS enrollment for a long time, and pre-Covid I knew more than one family (who was attending their actual by-right IB for their actual residence) who had one done when they first enrolled in a school. They don't do it for everyone and if you really want to skirt the boundary rules with an investment property or a tiny rental you don't live in, or a grandparents house (very common!), you will probably get away with it. But that doesn't mean DCPS *never* does home visits or that people never get caught. It just means it's not necessarily a priority and your odds of getting caught are relatively low.
I believe there are individual principals who care. But if DCPS cared about boundary fraud, I would expect them to at some point have actually used this phrase -- on a form, or in a press release, or something. Instead, the phrase "residency fraud" appears 619 times on the dc.gov domain and "boundary fraud" appears zero times.
The home visits are quite explicitly, in the law, an effort to get at residency fraud. If they happen to find that the kid is living somewhere else in DC then, sure, they'll get kicked out of the school, but if principals are doing investigations specifically for the purposes of investigating boundary fraud, they're doing that of their own accord and it's not what the law says these are for.
Oh did you miss this post up thread. When you sign, it specifically says below and you agree to it.
“I understand that if I provide false information or documentation, I can be referred to DC Office of the Inspector General for criminal prosecution or to the DC Office of the Attorney General for prosecution under the False Claims Act and under DC Code § 38-312 which provides that any person who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to payment of a fine of not more than $2,000 or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment.”
BTW it doesn’t define residency fraud as another state. It means you are falsifying where you live so why can’t it be applied to DC residency fraud.
The law explicitly defines residency as DC residency. This is the section on providing false information:
"The fact that a parent or caregiver of a student has provided satisfactory evidence of residency or other primary caregiver status pursuant to this chapter shall not prevent a principal or other school administrator, a chartering authority, or the Office of the State Superintendent of Education from establishing by information and other evidence that a student or the student’s parent or primary caregiver is not in fact a District of Columbia resident or an other primary caregiver. Any person, including any District of Columbia public schools or public charter school official, who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to charges of tuition retroactively, and payment of a fine of not more than $2,000, or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment. The case of a person who knowing supplies false information may be referred by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to the Office of Attorney General for consideration for prosecution."
Could you fine people because they lied abut something entirely unrelated to residency, as it's clearly defined in the law? I guess you could try. But they're not going to owe back tuition. And no one's ever done it. And it's a weird reading of the law.
If you think you can perjure yourself on official government documents, god speed to you, friend!
The penalties specific to out of state violators wouldn’t apply (tuition). But lying on the residency form even if it’s “just” lying about your DC residence is still “supplying false information in connection with student residency verification.” Because, ya know, you lied on the student residency verification form. There are absolutely penalties that cover this in the law - perjury and false claims.
I'm not advocating this. But the lie would not be material to the residency issue because of how residency is defined. Again, could someone try to make a thing of it? They could try. No one has.
There is so much wishful thinking about this topic because the stakes are high and it's unfair.
I'm thrilled that they're doing this. So many people cheat to get their kids into JR. It's a very open secret at the school. So many kids are registering as living with a relative or a friend.
Anonymous wrote:As someone who works in a different DCPS school I'm surprised to see that an office is so far in processing their enrollment that they would get to this request.
sus.
+1. They’re not sending out investigators before the enrollment deadline. OP could be in Arizona still and legitimately enrolling. This is just a troll from the residency fraud brigade.
This could very well be a troll, but I submitted my kid’s JR enrollment last week and got an email over the weekend about my address verification documents (I attached the wrong thing after doing this for a million years). They are very actively pursuing early enrollment this year, and a staff member is working on them.
I had a similar thing happen with my enrollment (my pay stub file didn't upload fully)but what they did with both of us, it seems, is let us know we had something to correct. They did not immediately go to scheduling a home visit. That's why I think this is a troll.
I don’t think it’s a troll. I suspect OP is engaging in residency fraud and why they are scheduling a home visit.
+1. We also got a residency check in PK for a school that virtually never has a waitlist (and for which we were not only IB but lived almost right next to the school). I assumed there were just spot checks in the system and our name came up so they sent someone.
When it happened, I was totally unbothered because why would I be? We were IB, the check took 5 minutes. If anything it confirmed they had received all our enrollment paperwork and I didn't have to follow up to make sure we were set for fall. I definitely didn't post on DCUM about it or consider suing the school district. It was nothing, not really much different than being asked to re-submit health forms or other random administrative stuff you sometimes have to do for DCPS.
OP might be a troll trying to stir up boundary fraud controversy, but I'm betting that they actually are not IB for JR and are running some kind of scam (using someone else's address, renting a studio they don't live in) and panicking because they are about to get caught. It is definitely not unheard of for DCPS to do residency visits, though I think they fell by the wayside during Covid. Perhaps they are ramping them back up again this year and it's scaring people who were convinced that DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud (newsflash, of course they do, if it were rampant it would cause massive issues with overcrowding plus completely undermine the lottery).
That's an argument for why they *should* care about it, not why they *do* care about it! DCPS should care about a lot of things that they don't.
Fair, but there are also things DCPS actually does care about but is inept at fixing/enforcing. Boundary fraud falls in that category. It absolutely is a problem for the aforementioned reasons -- it contributes to a poor distribution of kids across schools (overcrowding the best schools and under enrolling the struggling ones) while making a mockery of the lottery which is basically the centerpiece of the current school system.
Some amount of boundary fraud is probably inevitable and likely DCPS accepts this. Also, DCPS, like most DC agencies, has some corruption and there are likely *some* people within DCPS who like a system that looks the other way on boundary fraud as it enables that corruption.
But that doesn't mean DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud at all, or that they don't do anything ever to address it. Home visits have actually been a feature of DCPS enrollment for a long time, and pre-Covid I knew more than one family (who was attending their actual by-right IB for their actual residence) who had one done when they first enrolled in a school. They don't do it for everyone and if you really want to skirt the boundary rules with an investment property or a tiny rental you don't live in, or a grandparents house (very common!), you will probably get away with it. But that doesn't mean DCPS *never* does home visits or that people never get caught. It just means it's not necessarily a priority and your odds of getting caught are relatively low.
I believe there are individual principals who care. But if DCPS cared about boundary fraud, I would expect them to at some point have actually used this phrase -- on a form, or in a press release, or something. Instead, the phrase "residency fraud" appears 619 times on the dc.gov domain and "boundary fraud" appears zero times.
The home visits are quite explicitly, in the law, an effort to get at residency fraud. If they happen to find that the kid is living somewhere else in DC then, sure, they'll get kicked out of the school, but if principals are doing investigations specifically for the purposes of investigating boundary fraud, they're doing that of their own accord and it's not what the law says these are for.
Oh did you miss this post up thread. When you sign, it specifically says below and you agree to it.
“I understand that if I provide false information or documentation, I can be referred to DC Office of the Inspector General for criminal prosecution or to the DC Office of the Attorney General for prosecution under the False Claims Act and under DC Code § 38-312 which provides that any person who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to payment of a fine of not more than $2,000 or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment.”
BTW it doesn’t define residency fraud as another state. It means you are falsifying where you live so why can’t it be applied to DC residency fraud.
The law explicitly defines residency as DC residency. This is the section on providing false information:
"The fact that a parent or caregiver of a student has provided satisfactory evidence of residency or other primary caregiver status pursuant to this chapter shall not prevent a principal or other school administrator, a chartering authority, or the Office of the State Superintendent of Education from establishing by information and other evidence that a student or the student’s parent or primary caregiver is not in fact a District of Columbia resident or an other primary caregiver. Any person, including any District of Columbia public schools or public charter school official, who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to charges of tuition retroactively, and payment of a fine of not more than $2,000, or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment. The case of a person who knowing supplies false information may be referred by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to the Office of Attorney General for consideration for prosecution."
Could you fine people because they lied abut something entirely unrelated to residency, as it's clearly defined in the law? I guess you could try. But they're not going to owe back tuition. And no one's ever done it. And it's a weird reading of the law.
If you think you can perjure yourself on official government documents, god speed to you, friend!
The penalties specific to out of state violators wouldn’t apply (tuition). But lying on the residency form even if it’s “just” lying about your DC residence is still “supplying false information in connection with student residency verification.” Because, ya know, you lied on the student residency verification form. There are absolutely penalties that cover this in the law - perjury and false claims.
I'm not advocating this. But the lie would not be material to the residency issue because of how residency is defined. Again, could someone try to make a thing of it? They could try. No one has.
There is so much wishful thinking about this topic because the stakes are high and it's unfair.
It IS material because you have lied about your address, and the purpose of the form is to verify the address. It’s the residency verification form and you have very much “submitted false information in connection with it.” And independent of that it is also perjury and a false claim.
Again people who believe they can lie to the government to obtain a benefit are just out of their minds. Will you get caught? Probably not. Is it a crime? Obviously.
Anonymous wrote:Oh my god, how often does this have to keep coming up?
It’s lying on a government form!
It’s not enforced.
It’s an open secret.
But it’s still perjury!
Repeat for 10+ pages.
I mean, as long as people keep doing it? There’s a subset of posters who appear to be offended when you point out their bad behavior is actually bad, and criminal.
Anonymous wrote:As someone who works in a different DCPS school I'm surprised to see that an office is so far in processing their enrollment that they would get to this request.
sus.
+1. They’re not sending out investigators before the enrollment deadline. OP could be in Arizona still and legitimately enrolling. This is just a troll from the residency fraud brigade.
This could very well be a troll, but I submitted my kid’s JR enrollment last week and got an email over the weekend about my address verification documents (I attached the wrong thing after doing this for a million years). They are very actively pursuing early enrollment this year, and a staff member is working on them.
I had a similar thing happen with my enrollment (my pay stub file didn't upload fully)but what they did with both of us, it seems, is let us know we had something to correct. They did not immediately go to scheduling a home visit. That's why I think this is a troll.
I don’t think it’s a troll. I suspect OP is engaging in residency fraud and why they are scheduling a home visit.
+1. We also got a residency check in PK for a school that virtually never has a waitlist (and for which we were not only IB but lived almost right next to the school). I assumed there were just spot checks in the system and our name came up so they sent someone.
When it happened, I was totally unbothered because why would I be? We were IB, the check took 5 minutes. If anything it confirmed they had received all our enrollment paperwork and I didn't have to follow up to make sure we were set for fall. I definitely didn't post on DCUM about it or consider suing the school district. It was nothing, not really much different than being asked to re-submit health forms or other random administrative stuff you sometimes have to do for DCPS.
OP might be a troll trying to stir up boundary fraud controversy, but I'm betting that they actually are not IB for JR and are running some kind of scam (using someone else's address, renting a studio they don't live in) and panicking because they are about to get caught. It is definitely not unheard of for DCPS to do residency visits, though I think they fell by the wayside during Covid. Perhaps they are ramping them back up again this year and it's scaring people who were convinced that DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud (newsflash, of course they do, if it were rampant it would cause massive issues with overcrowding plus completely undermine the lottery).
That's an argument for why they *should* care about it, not why they *do* care about it! DCPS should care about a lot of things that they don't.
Fair, but there are also things DCPS actually does care about but is inept at fixing/enforcing. Boundary fraud falls in that category. It absolutely is a problem for the aforementioned reasons -- it contributes to a poor distribution of kids across schools (overcrowding the best schools and under enrolling the struggling ones) while making a mockery of the lottery which is basically the centerpiece of the current school system.
Some amount of boundary fraud is probably inevitable and likely DCPS accepts this. Also, DCPS, like most DC agencies, has some corruption and there are likely *some* people within DCPS who like a system that looks the other way on boundary fraud as it enables that corruption.
But that doesn't mean DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud at all, or that they don't do anything ever to address it. Home visits have actually been a feature of DCPS enrollment for a long time, and pre-Covid I knew more than one family (who was attending their actual by-right IB for their actual residence) who had one done when they first enrolled in a school. They don't do it for everyone and if you really want to skirt the boundary rules with an investment property or a tiny rental you don't live in, or a grandparents house (very common!), you will probably get away with it. But that doesn't mean DCPS *never* does home visits or that people never get caught. It just means it's not necessarily a priority and your odds of getting caught are relatively low.
I believe there are individual principals who care. But if DCPS cared about boundary fraud, I would expect them to at some point have actually used this phrase -- on a form, or in a press release, or something. Instead, the phrase "residency fraud" appears 619 times on the dc.gov domain and "boundary fraud" appears zero times.
The home visits are quite explicitly, in the law, an effort to get at residency fraud. If they happen to find that the kid is living somewhere else in DC then, sure, they'll get kicked out of the school, but if principals are doing investigations specifically for the purposes of investigating boundary fraud, they're doing that of their own accord and it's not what the law says these are for.
Oh did you miss this post up thread. When you sign, it specifically says below and you agree to it.
“I understand that if I provide false information or documentation, I can be referred to DC Office of the Inspector General for criminal prosecution or to the DC Office of the Attorney General for prosecution under the False Claims Act and under DC Code § 38-312 which provides that any person who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to payment of a fine of not more than $2,000 or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment.”
BTW it doesn’t define residency fraud as another state. It means you are falsifying where you live so why can’t it be applied to DC residency fraud.
The law explicitly defines residency as DC residency. This is the section on providing false information:
"The fact that a parent or caregiver of a student has provided satisfactory evidence of residency or other primary caregiver status pursuant to this chapter shall not prevent a principal or other school administrator, a chartering authority, or the Office of the State Superintendent of Education from establishing by information and other evidence that a student or the student’s parent or primary caregiver is not in fact a District of Columbia resident or an other primary caregiver. Any person, including any District of Columbia public schools or public charter school official, who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to charges of tuition retroactively, and payment of a fine of not more than $2,000, or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment. The case of a person who knowing supplies false information may be referred by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to the Office of Attorney General for consideration for prosecution."
Could you fine people because they lied abut something entirely unrelated to residency, as it's clearly defined in the law? I guess you could try. But they're not going to owe back tuition. And no one's ever done it. And it's a weird reading of the law.
If you think you can perjure yourself on official government documents, god speed to you, friend!
The penalties specific to out of state violators wouldn’t apply (tuition). But lying on the residency form even if it’s “just” lying about your DC residence is still “supplying false information in connection with student residency verification.” Because, ya know, you lied on the student residency verification form. There are absolutely penalties that cover this in the law - perjury and false claims.
I'm not advocating this. But the lie would not be material to the residency issue because of how residency is defined. Again, could someone try to make a thing of it? They could try. No one has.
There is so much wishful thinking about this topic because the stakes are high and it's unfair.
It IS material because you have lied about your address, and the purpose of the form is to verify the address. It’s the residency verification form and you have very much “submitted false information in connection with it.” And independent of that it is also perjury and a false claim.
Again people who believe they can lie to the government to obtain a benefit are just out of their minds. Will you get caught? Probably not. Is it a crime? Obviously.
The purpose is to verify residency in DC.
The benefit is DC public education, not education at a specific school.
That's how DC sees it and how the law is written, which is why no one has been prosecuted even though obviously people have been caught and kicked out.
Anonymous wrote:As someone who works in a different DCPS school I'm surprised to see that an office is so far in processing their enrollment that they would get to this request.
sus.
+1. They’re not sending out investigators before the enrollment deadline. OP could be in Arizona still and legitimately enrolling. This is just a troll from the residency fraud brigade.
This could very well be a troll, but I submitted my kid’s JR enrollment last week and got an email over the weekend about my address verification documents (I attached the wrong thing after doing this for a million years). They are very actively pursuing early enrollment this year, and a staff member is working on them.
I had a similar thing happen with my enrollment (my pay stub file didn't upload fully)but what they did with both of us, it seems, is let us know we had something to correct. They did not immediately go to scheduling a home visit. That's why I think this is a troll.
I don’t think it’s a troll. I suspect OP is engaging in residency fraud and why they are scheduling a home visit.
+1. We also got a residency check in PK for a school that virtually never has a waitlist (and for which we were not only IB but lived almost right next to the school). I assumed there were just spot checks in the system and our name came up so they sent someone.
When it happened, I was totally unbothered because why would I be? We were IB, the check took 5 minutes. If anything it confirmed they had received all our enrollment paperwork and I didn't have to follow up to make sure we were set for fall. I definitely didn't post on DCUM about it or consider suing the school district. It was nothing, not really much different than being asked to re-submit health forms or other random administrative stuff you sometimes have to do for DCPS.
OP might be a troll trying to stir up boundary fraud controversy, but I'm betting that they actually are not IB for JR and are running some kind of scam (using someone else's address, renting a studio they don't live in) and panicking because they are about to get caught. It is definitely not unheard of for DCPS to do residency visits, though I think they fell by the wayside during Covid. Perhaps they are ramping them back up again this year and it's scaring people who were convinced that DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud (newsflash, of course they do, if it were rampant it would cause massive issues with overcrowding plus completely undermine the lottery).
That's an argument for why they *should* care about it, not why they *do* care about it! DCPS should care about a lot of things that they don't.
Fair, but there are also things DCPS actually does care about but is inept at fixing/enforcing. Boundary fraud falls in that category. It absolutely is a problem for the aforementioned reasons -- it contributes to a poor distribution of kids across schools (overcrowding the best schools and under enrolling the struggling ones) while making a mockery of the lottery which is basically the centerpiece of the current school system.
Some amount of boundary fraud is probably inevitable and likely DCPS accepts this. Also, DCPS, like most DC agencies, has some corruption and there are likely *some* people within DCPS who like a system that looks the other way on boundary fraud as it enables that corruption.
But that doesn't mean DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud at all, or that they don't do anything ever to address it. Home visits have actually been a feature of DCPS enrollment for a long time, and pre-Covid I knew more than one family (who was attending their actual by-right IB for their actual residence) who had one done when they first enrolled in a school. They don't do it for everyone and if you really want to skirt the boundary rules with an investment property or a tiny rental you don't live in, or a grandparents house (very common!), you will probably get away with it. But that doesn't mean DCPS *never* does home visits or that people never get caught. It just means it's not necessarily a priority and your odds of getting caught are relatively low.
I believe there are individual principals who care. But if DCPS cared about boundary fraud, I would expect them to at some point have actually used this phrase -- on a form, or in a press release, or something. Instead, the phrase "residency fraud" appears 619 times on the dc.gov domain and "boundary fraud" appears zero times.
The home visits are quite explicitly, in the law, an effort to get at residency fraud. If they happen to find that the kid is living somewhere else in DC then, sure, they'll get kicked out of the school, but if principals are doing investigations specifically for the purposes of investigating boundary fraud, they're doing that of their own accord and it's not what the law says these are for.
Oh did you miss this post up thread. When you sign, it specifically says below and you agree to it.
“I understand that if I provide false information or documentation, I can be referred to DC Office of the Inspector General for criminal prosecution or to the DC Office of the Attorney General for prosecution under the False Claims Act and under DC Code § 38-312 which provides that any person who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to payment of a fine of not more than $2,000 or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment.”
BTW it doesn’t define residency fraud as another state. It means you are falsifying where you live so why can’t it be applied to DC residency fraud.
The law explicitly defines residency as DC residency. This is the section on providing false information:
"The fact that a parent or caregiver of a student has provided satisfactory evidence of residency or other primary caregiver status pursuant to this chapter shall not prevent a principal or other school administrator, a chartering authority, or the Office of the State Superintendent of Education from establishing by information and other evidence that a student or the student’s parent or primary caregiver is not in fact a District of Columbia resident or an other primary caregiver. Any person, including any District of Columbia public schools or public charter school official, who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to charges of tuition retroactively, and payment of a fine of not more than $2,000, or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment. The case of a person who knowing supplies false information may be referred by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to the Office of Attorney General for consideration for prosecution."
Could you fine people because they lied abut something entirely unrelated to residency, as it's clearly defined in the law? I guess you could try. But they're not going to owe back tuition. And no one's ever done it. And it's a weird reading of the law.
If you think you can perjure yourself on official government documents, god speed to you, friend!
The penalties specific to out of state violators wouldn’t apply (tuition). But lying on the residency form even if it’s “just” lying about your DC residence is still “supplying false information in connection with student residency verification.” Because, ya know, you lied on the student residency verification form. There are absolutely penalties that cover this in the law - perjury and false claims.
I'm not advocating this. But the lie would not be material to the residency issue because of how residency is defined. Again, could someone try to make a thing of it? They could try. No one has.
There is so much wishful thinking about this topic because the stakes are high and it's unfair.
It IS material because you have lied about your address, and the purpose of the form is to verify the address. It’s the residency verification form and you have very much “submitted false information in connection with it.” And independent of that it is also perjury and a false claim.
Again people who believe they can lie to the government to obtain a benefit are just out of their minds. Will you get caught? Probably not. Is it a crime? Obviously.
The purpose is to verify residency in DC.
The benefit is DC public education, not education at a specific school.
That's how DC sees it and how the law is written, which is why no one has been prosecuted even though obviously people have been caught and kicked out.
We have just been asked to do a home visit for a returning student at JR. Recently bought a condo and had not yet changed address on driver's license, pay utilities through HOA dues, was told that mortgage payments receipts (only rental payments) are not acceptable, and a home visit would be more timely than requesting a certified tax return. Our prior address was also in zone for JR. Doesn't seem to be the best use of DC tax dollars!
Anonymous wrote:We have just been asked to do a home visit for a returning student at JR. Recently bought a condo and had not yet changed address on driver's license, pay utilities through HOA dues, was told that mortgage payments receipts (only rental payments) are not acceptable, and a home visit would be more timely than requesting a certified tax return. Our prior address was also in zone for JR. Doesn't seem to be the best use of DC tax dollars!
Anonymous wrote:If you care about overcrowding at J-R, then you should support this effort.
It'll be interesting to see the results. Maybe it will make little difference, or maybe lots of people are unable to meet the burden of proof.
I'm also curious about how widespread this is, and whether the issue is mostly DC residents or not. As well as where the kids will wind up going instead.
Anonymous wrote:If you care about overcrowding at J-R, then you should support this effort.
It'll be interesting to see the results. Maybe it will make little difference, or maybe lots of people are unable to meet the burden of proof.
+1. DC is the only place I’ve ever lived where people routinely get upset when the prospect of enforcing rules and laws comes up. I don’t understand why this is, but this is why we can’t have nice things. I’m not IB for JR but the amount of Maryland plates I see dropping kids off at multiple schools in my neighborhood certainly warrants further attention.
Anonymous wrote:As someone who works in a different DCPS school I'm surprised to see that an office is so far in processing their enrollment that they would get to this request.
sus.
+1. They’re not sending out investigators before the enrollment deadline. OP could be in Arizona still and legitimately enrolling. This is just a troll from the residency fraud brigade.
This could very well be a troll, but I submitted my kid’s JR enrollment last week and got an email over the weekend about my address verification documents (I attached the wrong thing after doing this for a million years). They are very actively pursuing early enrollment this year, and a staff member is working on them.
I had a similar thing happen with my enrollment (my pay stub file didn't upload fully)but what they did with both of us, it seems, is let us know we had something to correct. They did not immediately go to scheduling a home visit. That's why I think this is a troll.
I don’t think it’s a troll. I suspect OP is engaging in residency fraud and why they are scheduling a home visit.
+1. We also got a residency check in PK for a school that virtually never has a waitlist (and for which we were not only IB but lived almost right next to the school). I assumed there were just spot checks in the system and our name came up so they sent someone.
When it happened, I was totally unbothered because why would I be? We were IB, the check took 5 minutes. If anything it confirmed they had received all our enrollment paperwork and I didn't have to follow up to make sure we were set for fall. I definitely didn't post on DCUM about it or consider suing the school district. It was nothing, not really much different than being asked to re-submit health forms or other random administrative stuff you sometimes have to do for DCPS.
OP might be a troll trying to stir up boundary fraud controversy, but I'm betting that they actually are not IB for JR and are running some kind of scam (using someone else's address, renting a studio they don't live in) and panicking because they are about to get caught. It is definitely not unheard of for DCPS to do residency visits, though I think they fell by the wayside during Covid. Perhaps they are ramping them back up again this year and it's scaring people who were convinced that DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud (newsflash, of course they do, if it were rampant it would cause massive issues with overcrowding plus completely undermine the lottery).
That's an argument for why they *should* care about it, not why they *do* care about it! DCPS should care about a lot of things that they don't.
Fair, but there are also things DCPS actually does care about but is inept at fixing/enforcing. Boundary fraud falls in that category. It absolutely is a problem for the aforementioned reasons -- it contributes to a poor distribution of kids across schools (overcrowding the best schools and under enrolling the struggling ones) while making a mockery of the lottery which is basically the centerpiece of the current school system.
Some amount of boundary fraud is probably inevitable and likely DCPS accepts this. Also, DCPS, like most DC agencies, has some corruption and there are likely *some* people within DCPS who like a system that looks the other way on boundary fraud as it enables that corruption.
But that doesn't mean DCPS doesn't care about boundary fraud at all, or that they don't do anything ever to address it. Home visits have actually been a feature of DCPS enrollment for a long time, and pre-Covid I knew more than one family (who was attending their actual by-right IB for their actual residence) who had one done when they first enrolled in a school. They don't do it for everyone and if you really want to skirt the boundary rules with an investment property or a tiny rental you don't live in, or a grandparents house (very common!), you will probably get away with it. But that doesn't mean DCPS *never* does home visits or that people never get caught. It just means it's not necessarily a priority and your odds of getting caught are relatively low.
I believe there are individual principals who care. But if DCPS cared about boundary fraud, I would expect them to at some point have actually used this phrase -- on a form, or in a press release, or something. Instead, the phrase "residency fraud" appears 619 times on the dc.gov domain and "boundary fraud" appears zero times.
The home visits are quite explicitly, in the law, an effort to get at residency fraud. If they happen to find that the kid is living somewhere else in DC then, sure, they'll get kicked out of the school, but if principals are doing investigations specifically for the purposes of investigating boundary fraud, they're doing that of their own accord and it's not what the law says these are for.
Oh did you miss this post up thread. When you sign, it specifically says below and you agree to it.
“I understand that if I provide false information or documentation, I can be referred to DC Office of the Inspector General for criminal prosecution or to the DC Office of the Attorney General for prosecution under the False Claims Act and under DC Code § 38-312 which provides that any person who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to payment of a fine of not more than $2,000 or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment.”
BTW it doesn’t define residency fraud as another state. It means you are falsifying where you live so why can’t it be applied to DC residency fraud.
The law explicitly defines residency as DC residency. This is the section on providing false information:
"The fact that a parent or caregiver of a student has provided satisfactory evidence of residency or other primary caregiver status pursuant to this chapter shall not prevent a principal or other school administrator, a chartering authority, or the Office of the State Superintendent of Education from establishing by information and other evidence that a student or the student’s parent or primary caregiver is not in fact a District of Columbia resident or an other primary caregiver. Any person, including any District of Columbia public schools or public charter school official, who knowingly supplies false information to a public official in connection with student residency verification shall be subject to charges of tuition retroactively, and payment of a fine of not more than $2,000, or imprisonment for not more than 90 days, but not both a fine and imprisonment. The case of a person who knowing supplies false information may be referred by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education to the Office of Attorney General for consideration for prosecution."
Could you fine people because they lied abut something entirely unrelated to residency, as it's clearly defined in the law? I guess you could try. But they're not going to owe back tuition. And no one's ever done it. And it's a weird reading of the law.
If you think you can perjure yourself on official government documents, god speed to you, friend!
The penalties specific to out of state violators wouldn’t apply (tuition). But lying on the residency form even if it’s “just” lying about your DC residence is still “supplying false information in connection with student residency verification.” Because, ya know, you lied on the student residency verification form. There are absolutely penalties that cover this in the law - perjury and false claims.
I'm not advocating this. But the lie would not be material to the residency issue because of how residency is defined. Again, could someone try to make a thing of it? They could try. No one has.
There is so much wishful thinking about this topic because the stakes are high and it's unfair.
It IS material because you have lied about your address, and the purpose of the form is to verify the address. It’s the residency verification form and you have very much “submitted false information in connection with it.” And independent of that it is also perjury and a false claim.
Again people who believe they can lie to the government to obtain a benefit are just out of their minds. Will you get caught? Probably not. Is it a crime? Obviously.
The purpose is to verify residency in DC.
The benefit is DC public education, not education at a specific school.
That's how DC sees it and how the law is written, which is why no one has been prosecuted even though obviously people have been caught and kicked out.
Anonymous wrote:If you care about overcrowding at J-R, then you should support this effort.
It'll be interesting to see the results. Maybe it will make little difference, or maybe lots of people are unable to meet the burden of proof.
+1. DC is the only place I’ve ever lived where people routinely get upset when the prospect of enforcing rules and laws comes up. I don’t understand why this is, but this is why we can’t have nice things. I’m not IB for JR but the amount of Maryland plates I see dropping kids off at multiple schools in my neighborhood certainly warrants further attention.
There’s a small core of white UMC parents in DC committing boundary fraud who sincerely believe they are entitled to do it because they deserve the “good” school where other white kids go. They can’t accept a scenario where their actual economic status means that their neighborhood school (here or in MD or VA) is not “the best” school.
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