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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

So why doesn't OSSE do this level of investigation?[/quote]
[b]
The Chancellor does't give them the resources. [/b]There's a lot of solidly middle class and UMC families that would get caught up in the investigations. These people are fellow church goers and relatives of DC pols, business folks, and bureaucrats. And there is certainly a very strong element that folks who left the District but grew up here still have "rights" to their old block and former schools. Lots of messy inter-personal relationships that just make it easier to ignore the problem.

Plus, DCPS is primarily spending Federal government money. The more kids in the system, the more DCPS pulls from Congress. They have every incentive to keep headcount high.

Finally, I think there is a feeling that kids in PG County are getting shafted by the MD state government. District pols feel the need to protect those kids and families by offering them District resources.[/quote]

I was going to say that you should have stopped with the first sentence because it was the only thing even approaching reality in your entire post, but even that sentence was the dregs of PulledOutofMyAss.com.

I'll confess that even I didn't know what the Office of the State Superintendent of Education did until your bullshit post set off alarms. If you can read text for the amount of time that it took you to post your made-up rationale, you might come to the conclusion that OSSE's mission has several high-cost priorities in front of catching resident fraudsters.

I realize that, in the Age of Trump,  I'm in the minority of American citizens who want to create [i]more taxpaying citizens [/i]than mouth-breathing, hate-filled, criminally-minded people who couldn't hold a job with a gun to their heads BUT it has to be said with purpose and whatnot that the creation of said tax-paying citizens is the primary objective of OSSE and I'm fine with that.  So fine, in fact, that I have no problem with them focusing on the tens of thousands of kids in my city of choice who have limited prospects of gaining or holding down a job that will actually pay taxes.  Fuck whatever the federal government will actually come up with because our passel of brainiac lawmakers can't even figure out that preventing birth defects (or HEY, unwanted births) is a cost-saving measure - for all of us.

All of which is to say, that I, along with the majority of your tax-paying comrades, have no interest in paying for the extra resources required to police residency fraud.  The funds cooped in penalty come no where near the the investment in resources.  You would need an entire department, pay their salaries, benefits, administrative costs to chase down 3-5 families per school, per year.  If you made it 10 families, the chances of you finding and capturing that much fraud actually goes down.  There would be fewer people caught.  Fewer still who would actually repay the debt.

The OSSE budget is not decided by the Chancellor.  The mayor submits a budget proposal each year, and our sorry-ass City Council decides what the budget will be.  If you tihnk that wastefulness and nepotism is just a character trait of the DC government, you're a naive little cog in politics much larger than your tiny existence.  But if you're going to gripe about how it all works, at least take the time to understand how it all works.

In the scheme of things, I think we would be so much better off if more people could at least do that.[/quote]

Not too much money at all. All they need is a DCUM task force of angry volunteer parents willing to pour over databases. When I was looking at fraud cases for court filings, it would take an average of 2 hours per person to go through all of their public records to see if they were filing under fake names or repeated filings that had already been dismissed. Get 100 parents to volunteer 10 hours a week. = 500 students a week, 25,000 students a year checked.  There are roughly 50,000 students (http://dcps.dc.gov/page/dcps-glance-enrollment). The project would go through all the students in two years. So no fraudulently enrolled student would be in longer than a year or so and it would probably take less time given that there are siblings in the same family.

Now, of course, there needs to be training and confidentiality agreements when dealing with confidential personally identifying information, since you would not want a parent "volunteer" stealing anyone's identity or financial information. But there are people hired in these positions all the time that do not abuse this trust.[/quote]

This seems like a project that could easily and affordably be contracted to an outside vendor. Security contractors do this type of stuff all the time for the intel agencies and private companies.

I think the solution is to take away the authority from OSSE, which is rife with conflicts of interest and political hackery. Give the responsibility to check residency and investigate fraud to an outside vendor. Also provide the company a bonus with every residency cheater it finds (50% of one years' worth of DCPS tuition per child). I think we will suddenly find that DCPS has plenty of money.[/quote]

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