[quote=FlyerInHi]BG, sure, people can afford to live in SD. They just have to pack in to a small house. . . . [/quote]They’re doing that already, all over SoCal. And also packing into small apts (as carli noted) and condos, whether the landlords initially understand that 2-4 people will occupy the unit/house … or not. However, only 1-2 people are typically on the lease. The rest are typically “guests” of the lessees. In South County SD, these “guests” typically amount to a group of people using the property sporadically on air mattresses and cots, as well as “couch surfing.” OR only using its address for school residency purposes and not actually living there at all (more common). These two groups gravitate between US/MX up to five times per week.
Without a parent’s name on a lease of a US-based living unit OR at least one (most recent) utility bill for that address in the parent’s name, it’s difficult to prove residency for their kids to attend school in the US. A single mom living in TJ with 1-6 kids they’re trying to send to US public schools typically can’t qualify herself to lease a dwelling unit in the US, ESPecially if she is undocumented.
Hence, the school districts have decided to accept (phony) “guardianship affidavits” from non-parents of kids living in MX who are seeking enrollment in US public schools.
In all practicality, only about 1-3% of all schoolchildren (depending on school) have legitimate “legal guardians” whom they reside with and who are not their parents. These guardians have court orders and some of them later end up adopting the kids (with the assistance of a county-issued “free or very low cost” dependency attorney) if their parent(s) can’t stay clean after being released from jail/prison/rehab. One of the duties of a county dependency attorney is to do whatever takes to keep more US citizen minors (in this case, minors residing in San Diego County, CA) from becoming (expensive) “wards of the state.”
The “affidavits” used for “residency” purposes for school districts are much more often than not “phony.” This is so, because for all intents and purposes, the affiant usually doesn’t have anything to do with the children. The parent of the children (whom they live with out of the district they are seeking school enrollment in or in MX) uses the services of the affiant (who resides in a the desired school district and/or attendance area) to obtain the right to enroll their kid(s) in their district and even their school of choice! These affidavits are used for the “sole purpose” of having an address of record in a certain school district and/or school attendance area and have been widely abused by parents residing in MX for this specific purpose for decades. The “affiant” purporting to be the minor’s “guardian” typically collects school mail for the parent of the kids and immediately notifies them of mail or calls about the kids originating from the school or district, often charging the parent a monthly fee for each kid. In the nineties, it cost parents residing in MX about $40-$50 per month per kid to “borrow” such an address with the full cooperation of the (non-related) tenant or homeowner. And they were only too happy to pay it WITHOUT EVER residing there.
Back in ’94, myself and two other co-workers turned in another co-worker to the Superintendent of CVESD who bragged incessantly about her “side job income” charging parents living in MX a monthly charge for each of their kids to use her address for school “residency” purposes. She was actually a tenant herself in a 2 bdrm/1 bath home in Chula Vista and had 2 kids of her own (the 3 of them lived there). But she had 25-30 elementary school students living in MX on any given month using her address for residency purposes to attend 7 different elementary schools in the district! She apparently rendered “guardianship affidavits” for all of them and was able to get zone transfers for several of them with that affidavit. In our letter, we named our co-worker, we took photos of the house she was renting, we gave the names of the 7 schools the border-crossing students were attending (per our convos with her) literally “spoon feeding” the super’s office so they could easily conduct an investigation.
About ten days later, the super’s secretary wrote us back, signing the 1.5 page reply on his behalf. She stated, in essence:
“Thank you so much for your very thorough and informative letter. [Superintendent’s name] wants you to know that our mission here at CVESD, first and foremost is to educate. Residency verification is done at the individual schools. He asked me to reply to you that we don’t have any way of knowing how many students in the district are using the same address because each school keeps their own records. We only have TWO employees in the district tasked with home visits to verify residency but we have had to utilize them in recent years as truancy officers because regular classroom attendance is also a top priority of CVESD. We are short staffed here at the administration level and cannot devote resources to this issue. I hope you understand and sincerely hope your own children are doing well in their respective schools.”
In short, classroom “head count” every single day is all that mattered to them. Of course, they were following the money from Sacramento, which is based upon daily “head count.”
I still have a copy of our 4-pg letter (with exhibits) and the original reply we got. I posted about this incident several years ago on this forum and I cannot now find the post.
So there you have it. It’s systemic corruption at the top. There is nothing anyone can DO about it down here because every superintendent before and after that was the same in every.single.school.district in South County SD. None of them will touch this issue with a ten-foot pole because if they did so … and began to fully understand the magnitude of the “problem” (its not a “problem” to them), it could greatly affect the district’s “bottom line” in a very short period of time.
