alt Hacker NewsSchool 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.
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The correct way to address this is to not have school funding be based on how expensive the nearby houses are.
> It’s a big source of fraud
This isn't 'fraud' in any meaningful moral sense, it is a rational reaction to immoral, unjust school funding models that perpetuate systemic inequalities based on the zip-code you can afford. I'm sure schools have a duty to police this in their mind, sure, but I side with parents trying to evade the boundaries they've been put because they weren't born rich enough.
If you have proof of home ownership and proof of legal guardianship of the child, what’s the problem?
I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!
If you own a house or rent in the district you are paying (or your landlord is) the taxes that fund schools.
Ok, how big of an issue? How many students? How much wasted on fraud? I went to a top school where sometimes students tried to fake residency. It was essentially a non issue in the grand scheme of the potential waste for a school district to generate.
I wonder if perhaps the noise of families ratting each other out is getting too loud. This sounds like a solution to cut through the noise and have their own data. Like you said, this does go a bit too far. It also does not seem to properly equip the school district with factually correct info. Metal on wheels isn't a good data point for "You live here".
> School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there
How does this work? Do parents use a friend’s address to register for the school? Is there no way for the state-run school to check against tax records?
If anything, LPR data might be a useful lead generator. But using it as decisive evidence seems like a stretch
We're either going to have to go to a voucher system or we're going to see students with spyware or tracking hardware attached to them.
Is using the surveillance state the solution to this problem though? I personally don't think so. There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will there be some number of people that cheat the system? Absolutely. Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely.
Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.