School Districts Crack Down on Illegally Enrolled Students

Five-year-old Quenten Kincaid used to get off the school bus every day and then climb into a car for the rest of his trip home.

That was all a bus driver needed to figure out the boy’s secret: Quenten lived in Cleveland but was illegally attending kindergarten in the Euclid public school system.

The driver tipped off school officials, and the boy’s mother spent five days in jail for fraud.

“I was just trying to put my son in a better environment, better education, smaller room size, so he can learn,” said Judy Kincaid, 36, a bus driver for the Cleveland schools.

For years, parents around the country have been sneaking their children into other school districts to avoid the often overcrowded, debt-ridden and crumbling urban schools in their own neighborhoods.

But as school funding becomes tighter, districts are cracking down to make sure they are educating only those children whose parents are paying for it with their taxes. It costs districts hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to educate kids who should be attending school closer to home.

In New Jersey, the state School Boards Assn. said 8,000 to 10,000 students statewide are illegally enrolled in suburban districts to avoid schools in Newark, Camden, Paterson and other urban areas.

In suburban Baltimore, county schools expanded their staff of investigators from three to five in January to hunt down violators.

“It’s equivalent to theft,” said Illinois state Rep. James Durkin, who has seen plenty of Chicago students enrolled in his suburban district of Westchester. He co-sponsored a law that took effect last month making fraudulent student registration punishable by 30 days in jail and a $500 fine.

“We are having a terrible problem in Illinois just establishing reasonable funding for schools,” he said. “When we have people cheating the system, it makes it more difficult and more frustrating for the property taxpayer.”

In Quenten’s case, the district spent about $275 a month to educate him, most of it from local taxes. Cleveland schools spend $340, but Judy Kincaid said Euclid offers more. For example, Quenten had his own workbook in Euclid; in his Cleveland kindergarten, he gets photocopies of work sheets.

In Cleveland, “it’s a little bit harder because there are more kids in the classroom,” Judy Kincaid said. There are 6,000 students in the Euclid district, compared with 72,000 in Cleveland’s schools.

Ohio state Rep. Michael A. Fox, chairman of the House Education Committee, thinks parents shouldn’t have to shoulder the blame. Urban schools should be improved so that students have no reason to flee, he said.

Still, educators say, there is no reason to break the law, and they warn parents they will be on the lookout.

Some parents, as in Judy Kincaid’s case, give phony addresses. Sometimes a child registers in another district using a relative’s address. Other times, parents moving out of a district don’t bother switching their children’s school.

Robert McLaughlin, director of pupil personnel in Euclid, has four secretaries watching newly registered students for inconsistencies. And the district recently hired a retired police officer to check on suspected scofflaws.

Judy Kincaid is surprised she got caught at all.

“I never thought it would go this far or go this crazy,” she said.