alt Hacker NewsSuburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency
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Big flag error I can see right away is joint custody where a parent lives out of the zone.
Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged.
Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision?
What about paid caregivers or family members?
This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it. There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.
A surveillance tech company asserting that they know better, based on 'big data'. Shocking.
The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.
It still blows my mind when people tell me a car is "freedom". Yeah, the freedom to be tracked at all times by _multiple_ public and private organizations. So when you build a public institution that can only be accessed by car, congrats! Surveillance is the price of entry now.
School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there. It’s a big source of fraud that hurts those paying taxes in the districts. I’m all for strong enforcement of those rules, but this goes too far.
In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.
While the school is paying Thompson Reuters CLEAR for information about where their students supposedly live, CLEAR isn't limiting their data collection to just student families.
They are collecting information about everyone en masse and making up different problems they are "solving". Everyone in the US should realize that this is a story about themselves, not just some family in Chicago.
I think this is an entirely cromulent reason to forbid the car to attend the school. But perhaps not a child, who presumably doesn't live in the car.
What's concerning is not just the surveillance aspect but the idea that this kind of data is treated as authoritative enough to override traditional documentation like mortgage statements and utility bills
We had a similar problem some years back in the UK.
Surveillance powers that were justified as necessary because of terrorism were used to check on whether people lived in the correct area for a school - as well as a lot of other minor offences. The intent was obvious from the start because of the bodies that were given these powers (local authorities that run state schools are not involved in fighting terrorism). There was a backlash and the surveillance powers were trimmed down.
I got a bill recently from NYC for speeding through a red light, which was weird enough as it wasn't a car that I own. But the license plate listed is one I had years ago, when I lived in a different state. Clearly license plate databases even within government are inaccurate. I can't imagine how bad the private databases are. The fact that the government also leans on the private databases seems to compound the problem.
The school district uses Thomson Reuters Clear to verify residency. Thomson Reuters Clear uses LPR data.
"School District 126’s contract with the license plate reader company shows it’s paying a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract that began in December of 2024 -- the same month that Sánchez and her daughter moved into their new Alsip home."
Per a Google search my county: For the 2025–2026 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) charges nonresident tuition of $21,668 for elementary school and $20,214 for secondary school. Nonresident students must apply through the International Admissions and Enrollment office, and not all schools are open to tuition-paying students.
My wife worked in the office of an elementary school for 20 years and verified residency, custody, restraining orders and more. She shared many stories about people gaming the system. People will cross state and county lines to access a better school or one closer to work.
> The plate reader company touts “Accurate residency verification does more than protect the financial health of public schools—it safeguards the trust and equity at the heart of public education.”
There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.
How and why are license plates being tracked to children? That this is not the most twisted part of the story is insane. Just the fact that driving children to school has become so prevalent that ALPR is an effective tool should raise some questions. Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness?
Among the many takeaways from this case is that if you don't own a car at all, you will likely be summarily denied, therefore you "must" own a car.
Assuming she pays taxes on the house, who cares if she lives there?
a school district is a customer of the same ALPR data broker network that sells to law enforcement, repo companies, and federal agencies. the data doesn't care who's buying.
We are living in 1984.
I'm not necessarily against the school having this data, though it is creepy. But what the heck, her driver's license and proof of home ownership should be good enough. This is really a failing on the school district to apply any logic at all.
What if she owned a business in another area and registered the vehicle there?
What if the parent lived in one place, but the child was living somewhere else?
I ran into a similar problem with my child over a decade ago, his mother had bought a new house that needed work but updated her driver's license too soon. She still had my address on her checks, where she hadn't lived for years, and they randomly used that to launch an investigation. Afterwards they forced my kid to switch school. Which is made even crazier by it being the same district, like the taxes are going to the same spot, and they hadn't even moved in yet.
School districts being their own government is a big problem in general. It seems like the whole point of them is to enforce segregation.
Yeeeeeah, no school district needs or should have access to LPR databases. Period. Full stop.
Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law.
Fuck mass surveillance.
Laws and regulations require enforcement. If not, honest people have abide by them, but dishonest people do not.
If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies.
It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful.
Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction.
In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.
OK, it's lawsuit time.
Sounds like an easy-win lawsuit against both the district and the company.
Is there anyone, any person of power, in the USA, who is not committed to evil?
Besides AOC.
What kind of demented people are running that school district? Who comes up with the idea to use LPR data and gets other administrators to sign off on it? It just seems riddled with edge cases that no one in that district would be qualified to deal with or foresee.
If the parent has a legal title to a house in the school zone their children should be allowed to go to the school.
When you don't have a functioning government, while technology continues to advance, lobbyists and government come up with spurious reasons why previous absolute rights don't apply to almost identical circumstances when colored with new technologies.
I don't even care about this case. Probably 99.9% of the time this particular system comes up with the correct answer - but since it's tracking cars and not people, it screwed up when somebody (extremely unusually) loaned out their car for months to a person who lives where people often fraudulently claim residence in that school district in order to (unfairly) take advantage of their schools. For the 1/1000 that it gets wrong, let them complain and have it cleared up manually; is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate?
The problem is illegal searches, Congress has shown that it doesn't care, the Supremes since Scalia left don't care, and the Dem base don't care if it targets the Repub base and the Repub base don't care if it targets the Dem base; both of them have been trained to think that it is alt-left alt-right populism to have privacy rights (or any rights at all.)
Expecting the same people who think that the 1st Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have the internet or that the 2nd Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have machine guns to be any sort of meaningful speed bump on this almost complete project of complete public-private tracking of every individual at all times is silly. The Founding Fathers didn't have residency requirements for suburban public school attendance or property tax funding of it. They didn't even have public schools.
School zoning and funding schools from local taxes is one of those things that always perplexed me when I lived in NYC. Ghettos full of "self-fulfilling prophecy" kids continue to exist to this date and people don't see to care much. It's one of those things that warrant a "I am too European for this shit" comment, because even though catchment areas exist here too, and you can't exactly send your kid to any school you wish (although in many EU countries you still can), schools are NOT founded through local taxes.
This and private prisons exploiting inmates for cheap workforce are plain, old-school segregation, except diluted and less "in your face". US seriously needs to start fixing some of its shit because it's getting grosser by the day and you can't pretend to be such a developed nation anymore: the King is Naked and rest of the world just doesn't buy the Hollywood illusion anymore.
I dislike how LPR startups are confusing everyone by promoting "ontology" to mislead people that it's simply "surveillance".
The US spends billions and billions of dollars trying to police problems instead of spending the same money on addressing the root cause... collectively there's enough money to make this country an absolute paradise, but we're all acting like crabs in a bucket.
It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.
I'm getting strong "California uber alles" [1] vibes, even though it's Chicago.
Nobody hates ALPRs more than tax evaders. I love ALPRs because they bring lawless sociopaths out of the woodwork.
Can't wait to hear it is biased for flagging brown people
While I'll make no judgment specifically on whether or not she is telling the truth, because the article itself isn't enough validation to say she is telling the truth here; I'll comment more on the comments in this thread.
At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally.
A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair.
So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here).
But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end.
At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.
Interestingly US-based newsrooms are still geo-blocking EU users. Not even bothering to ask for cookies.
The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight.
> her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.”
The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?