[quote=FlyerInHi]Children at the trolley station is no indication of anyone crossing the border to attend school.
Mexican license plates could just mean the cars cannot be registered in california.
Maybe a better test would be to cross the border with a child dressed for school in the car. How early would you have to get up in the morning?[/quote]
VERY early, and believe me, these parents don’t mind. They like to beat the rush hour and they’re used to leaving for the US early in the am. And the kids ARE dressed for school. The border agent can ask the kids anything they want. 95% of the time, these kids have their own documentation available. It’s not the border agent’s job to determine if these kids are attending school in the US using fraudulent addresses.
[quote=spdrun] . . . As far as the school issue … crack down on shills signing guardian affidavits. If they know they’ll be billed for two times the cost of school plus legal costs, they might think twice.[/quote]
True story:
Back in the early nineties, the going rate for one of those “shills” was $40 per month per student … not sure what it is today. It was a very attractive proposition for a single parent collecting aid, even one renting under a “Section 8” contract! That’s $360 year per student per school year in income to collect school district mail for the student and forward it to the parents in MX!
In this era (and even moreso after “welfare reform” was passed in 1996), able-bodied parents were put to work at least 24 hrs per week by their social worker, to gain work experience, as a condition of their continued participation in their aid program(s). As such, we had two “moms” collecting aid who were catching up our backlog of filing for us for a few months in my local govm’t office. They had known each other prior to coming to work for us and BOTH of them bragged during breaks and lunch how they were making money (under the table) hand over fist by “selling” their addresses to Mexican parents to fulfill the public school residency requirement (the “guardian affidavit requirement” as we know it today was not yet in place). One of these “aid workers” (both always well-dressed, lol) claimed that 27 students used her (2-bdrm) rental home’s address to prove their residency for the school district and the other aid worker claimed she had 43 students that year using the address of her (3 bdrm) rental home for a residency requirement. They got away with “sponsoring” so many students because EACH SCHOOL at the time only knew the addresses of the students which attended their own school and these shills “sponsored” kids (even within the same family) attending several different area schools.
So me and two coworkers (who had kid(s) enrolled in CVESD schools) eventually got together and wrote the then CVESD Superintendent, (the now infamous) Ed Brand a carefully worded letter, naming names and quoting them, documenting addresses, even giving him two very obviously boarded-up local homes to “look into” as being used for addresses for students attending certain after-school daycare homes so they (the after school-care students) could attend a “better” elementary school and the provider could pick them all up at one school.
About a month later, we got a polite one-page reply letter signed for him by his secretary essentially thanking us for the info but stating that a) the district doesn’t have the staff to check out every address on student residency verification forms for legitimacy or to see who actually lives there (we only asked them to check out 4 addresses); and, 2) the TWO employees employed by the district to check on students at home were hired solely for truant officer duties. He then stated that he would attempt to create a “task force” to develop a plan to “cross-reference” addresses used to attend one school against addresses used to attend other schools in the same district and thanked us for the “suggestion” (we didn’t make that suggestion, but ok). He further went on to say that even if CVESD could cross-reference addresses used from school to school this doesn’t fix the problem of the same address being also used for local secondary school residency purposes (SUHSD). However, he didn’t volunteer to forward our letter to SUHSD or even mention the problem to that superintendent.
Waaah … Brand’s poor “hands were tied,” folks, and, of course, he didn’t have to mention it to us but we ALL knew that it wasn’t in the District’s “best interest” to disenroll students who were regularly occupying their warm seats.
The buck stops with the superintendent, folks. If he/she’s not willing to do anything about the problem, then there is nothing any parent can do except take time out of their jobs to contact their representative (with evidence of residency fraud?) and/or periodically testify before the Legislature on this subject with same. In these parts, complaining to the school board (sadly) won’t do any good :=0
Of course, our infamous Ed Brand has since done the “super” stint three more times in two other SD County school districts (SUHSD twice) and was eventually forced out of SMUSD with a $410K buyout offer … just to get rid of him without facing a lawsuit. Then the (stupid) SUHSD Board took him back, much to the chagrin of the teachers and parents:
Finally, the SUHSD Board saw the light and voted (with “interim” trustees borrowed from SD County BoE casting 4 out of 5 votes, lol) to place their (two-time) Superintendent Brand on (fully paid) “administrative leave” three months before his ($252K annual) contract expired (he had already announced his “retirement” two months prior). This was nearly 23 years after our detailed letter of complaint (with attachments and photos), folks, and the student residency fraud problem still persists, in spite of a few minor “residency procedure” reforms (such as the bogus “guardian affidavit form”) which were enacted in the interim. I’m not blaming Brand for all of it, but he was definitely a big part of a (corrupt?) systemic dysfunction which completely looked the other way to this situation in a public school district whose southernmost schools were just over two miles from the US/MX border. Hence, the “ousting” of four SUHSD board members (and the super prior to Brand’s 2nd stint) due to their guilty pleas on various corruption charges.
When the rest of those (expensive) CFD’s in Chula Vista were built out after about 2003 or so, all h@ll broke loose among those homeowner parents who were paying very high Mello Roos for their local schools which didn’t have space for their own kids . . . and rightly so. By their sheer numbers, these parents seemed to be a lot more effective than me or my co-workers were back in the day. (The reality is that our kids didn’t attend schools built with MR bond money and thus we weren’t “damaged” enough to have our complaint taken seriously.)
If you have enough time and energy to fight “city hall” in bureaucratic Cali, spdrun, I say, go for it! I’ve already expended way too much of my talents/expertise in this regard with little to zero results to show for it and I’m done (and my kids are now long gone). Have at it. And Good Luck to all :=0
