Lying about where you live Lying about where you live (August 31, 2005)

** Elementary districts don't plan to follow the high school crackdown on nonresidents.

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

Elementary schools in Woodside, Portola Valley, Atherton and Menlo Park would seem to be attractive targets for parents who want to get their kids into better schools and are willing to lie about where they live to do it.

Elementary school officials, however, say they don't plan to follow the Sequoia Union High School District recent decision to adopt tough new proof-of-residency requirements.

The opportunity to cheat in small elementary districts is substantially less than in the big high schools, they say.

"I think it's a matter of magnitude," said Mary Ann Somerville, superintendent of the Las Lomitas Elementary School District. "Sequoia (with 8,000 students) is a huge district. We're much smaller. Our families know one another much better."

In elementary schools, play dates and sports events tend to involve parents picking up and dropping off students at their homes.

Suspicions about residency trigger a call from the district to a local consultant to check into a student's situation, which can include a visit to the student's home at 7 a.m. to see if the child is there.

"The district definitely is on top of the problem," said Carol Metzler, executive assistant/secretary to the superintendent in the Menlo Park City School District.

"Once in a blue moon, we catch a child who uses a phony address, and we take action," said Tim Hanretty, assistant superintendent for both the Portola Valley and Woodside elementary school districts.
Not foolproof

The Las Lomitas procedure is geared to the level of the problem, said Ms. Somerville. "It's not a foolproof system. People have, over the years, cheated us (and) we do have a sense that there are some whom we haven't caught, if you will, (but) we don't think it's very many."

When discovered, nonresident students tend to come either from families who have moved without telling the district or families who have divorced and one parent has moved out with the children but the other parent still has a valid district address.

Have phony utility bills been used to gain admission to the Las Lomitas district? Not to her knowledge, said Ms. Somerville.

If the district appears naive, so be it, she said. "Our self-perception is that we're tough about it," she added. "If somebody is really, really out to cheat us, we're not the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. We're not in that kind of business and our families are good honest people."

Parents who live outside but near Las Lomitas boundaries sometimes request an inter-district transfer, but very few succeed.

Students in the Ravenswood City School District attend Las Lomitas and other local districts schools under the Tinsley Transfer program, a court-ordered plan to reduce isolation of racial minorities and improve educational achievement for Ravenswood students. About 90 of the 1,000 students enrolled in Las Lomitas district schools are there under the Tinsley program.
Proof of residency

In the Sequoia high school district, parents are now required to show three proofs of residency, such as lease agreements, property tax receipts, a photo ID, vehicle registration, and recent state or federal tax returns.

Utility bills are not accepted because they are too easily faked, the high school district concluded.

The district says that with these tougher standards, it may be able to reduce costs by as much as $2 million with staff cuts after winnowing out nonresidents.

The elementary districts accept as proof of residency combinations of utility bills and rental or property-purchase agreements. Live-in situations require a notarized affidavit from a property's permanent resident.

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