School Hires 2 Investigators to Find Falsified Addresses

Torrance school officials have hired two part-time investigators to track down students from neighboring areas who are using falsified addresses to attend local schools.

The investigators, hired this week, will check records and possibly go door-to-door in search of young people attending classes illegally in the Torrance Unified School District. The hiring of the part-time investigators brings to three the number of people working to find out just how many of the district’s 20,000 students are attending Torrance schools illegally.

School officials said those found in the district under false pretenses will be ordered to return to their home districts. Although officials have no idea how many students actually live outside the district, they suspect the phenomenon is increasing--in part because of gang problems and violence in nearby districts.

“Torrance is a very popular district,” said William R. Blischke, school board vice president. “As things worsen in some other districts, it becomes more and more tempting to get into Torrance.”

Outside students and their parents have grown increasingly creative in falsifying proof of residency, with some installing telephone lines in friends’ homes so they can produce a Torrance telephone bill, school officials said.

The officials described the hiring of the investigators as a pilot project that will produce a better understanding of how many students are providing false residency information.

The school board on Monday agreed to spend $6,000 to hire the investigators, who will each work 20 hours a week through March. The investigators are Cy Levine, a retired district vice principal, and William Forrest, a retired principal. They will join retired Torrance Elementary School principal Darold Kusch, who has been checking student addresses part time since April, 1991.

The investigators will focus on selected elementary and middle schools, said J. Richard Ducar, administrator of special services. He declined to name the schools.

“There are some schools that have more enrollment than we anticipated this year, and we want to find out why,” Ducar said. “We want to make sure that these kids are Torrance kids.”

Some school records show students from different families giving the same address, Ducar said. Investigators will visit these homes to see if the students actually live there.

“We want to make sure they’re legal kids when we start projecting enrollment,” said school board President Ann P. Gallagher.

The findings are important because the district uses enrollment data to determine its staffing and space needs, officials said.

The crackdown comes in the wake of an autumn controversy over the district’s policy of granting permission to about 1,200 outside students to attend Torrance schools. That policy provoked complaints from some Torrance teachers, who said many outside students were ill-prepared academically and could be causing discipline problems in the schools.

School officials disagreed, although they speculated that some problems might be caused not by the students with legal permits but by those using fake addresses.

“We have seen several cases where students who are illegal in this district are behavior problems,” said Gallagher, adding that it is best to deal with such problems “if you can cut it off at the pass.”

In recent months, the district uncovered about 40 students falsely claiming Torrance residency, including 16 teen-agers at Torrance High School. Three-quarters of them were Latino students, sparking some student complaints that the district was targeting minority students--a charge that school officials denied.