Greece [school district] officials hired a private investigator to look into Hill's claim that her children lived with their grandmother. According to his report, over four months this school year, Hill was seen driving her kids each morning from her home on Morrill Street [in an adjacent disrtict] to her mother's home, where they would board buses for various Greece schools. The school district says that the education provided for the children due to the filing of false paperwork was worth $28,000.
This makes perfect sense when we start with a society that's unusually and increasingly stratified by income, with residential patterns to match, and say "Hey, let's draw lines around our gated enclaves of privilege and create school districts that look exactly the same!" In a decent society that takes educational opportunity seriously, it's utterly insane.
This also raises some important points about "parental involvement," the lack of which is frequently cited as a reason to not expect too much from schools that enroll many poor and minority children. Ideally, it would be great if parents were able to invest a lot of time in helping their children learn. But if you're a single parent who didn't get a very good education when you were in school, and you have five children, and you're struggling to put food on the table by holding down multiple low-paying jobs (if you're lucky, given skyrocketing unemployment) then the best thing you can do for your kids--the best way to be parentally involved--isn't to spend three hours a night helping with homework or bake cupcakes for the PTA but to get your children into a good school, a school that has the resources and staff to give your children what you can't.
3 comments:
I am also very disheartened by the way that our good schools carve out special districts for the privileges and leave everyone else out. This creates a problem that spans generations and is getting worse. Unfortunately, I can't condone a mother breaking the law to get her kids into a different district. Fair or not, she is receiving an unfair advantage by sending her kids to a district other than the one she lives in. There are other ways to help her children that would set a better example for them as well.
$28,000 for two kids? That's not half bad, maybe her district should hire them to run their schools.
When I was in 6th grade, my parents decided that our school district was not right for me, and endeavored to send me to an adjoining one - but they had to pay a tuition bill to do it.
Since schools are primarily paid for by real estate taxes on district residents, it is perfectly reasonable that they are intended only for the children of residents. If she wanted her children in that district, she had a few legal choices: have them actually live with their grandmother, pay out-of-district tuition as my parents did, or move into the district. But what she was doing is generally regarded as theft of services, I believe, and no more justifiable that breaking into a neighbors house to get her children better clothing or food.
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