Reply to WaPo takes deep dive into DCPS residency fraud

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The DC auditor just released a new report -- even when someone is paying tuition, the District usually fails to collect it.

https://wamu.org/story/18/04/17/d-c-failed-enforce-residency-public-school-students-audit-finds/[/quote]

Excerpt

In a 28-page audit made public on Tuesday, Lucas outlined a number of shortcomings in the enforcement of the city’s residency law, the majority focused on the Office of the State Superintendent of Education:

For the 2014, 2015 and 2016 school years, the city admitted 85 non-resident students to public and charter schools, but in 82 of those cases did not collect the full tuition they were required to pay prior to the start of the school year. Instead, payment plans were extended to a majority of the students, even though they were not asked to prove that they had a comparable school option where they lived or were facing financial problems that prevented them from paying the tuition in full.

[b]Of the 79 non-resident students that were on payment plans, 51 were allowed to remain in their D.C. school despite having defaulted on what they owed. [/b]The amount of uncollected tuition over the three-year period amounted to $169,127.

OSSE failed to report 46 of 67 of the residency fraud cases it uncovered to the city’s attorney general, which prosecutes the cases, or to the city’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability when they involved the children of city employees. It also did not notify D.C. Public Schools and the charter school system, “which limited the school systems’ ability to proactively identify similar cases.”

[b]In 32 of the 46 fraud cases, OSSE had no settlement agreements with the families found to have violated the law. In the 14 cases for which it did, it only collected $73,090 of the $454,727 in unpaid tuition it was owed. And when that tuition wasn’t paid, OSSE didn’t take steps to let schools know so they could discontinue the students’ enrollment.[/b]

Due to a number of shortcomings within OSSE, the city is owed at least $550,764 in unpaid tuition by non-residents.

The inspector general’s audit also found that compared to school systems in surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia, “District residency documentation requirements were less stringent than those in neighboring school districts.”

In a response to the audit, State Superintendent Hanseul Kang said that in 2017, D.C. centralized residency fraud investigations within OSSE and has strengthened the rules around auditing school records and investigating whether or not certain non-resident students are attending D.C. schools.

“Not only do we now review 100 percent of student residency verification forms, we have changed our policy to lower the threshold to trigger a full review of supporting documents families submitted to prove residency,” she wrote to Lucas. “For schools that fail our sample review, we automatically initiate a residency file review on all students attending those schools.”[/quote]

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