D.C. schools crack down on enrollment

In enrollment packets being sent to parents around the city, families are being asked to sign waivers to allow school officials to come to a student’s home to verify residency.

Jennifer Calloway, spokeswoman for schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, said the waiver stems from a long-ignored law that requires the school system to make sure every child is a D.C. resident.

“We only ask parents to permit home visits if they cannot provide the adequate residency verification documents,” Calloway said in an e-mail to The Examiner.

Parents from other areas can send their children to D.C. schools, but they’re supposed to pay higher “out-of-state” tuition.

In a $1 billion school system that has been racked with scandal, residency fraud has been a relatively low priority for the administration. Calloway said that officials opened a little more than 100 investigations last year and found fewer than half of the subjects were gaming the system.

But residency fraud rankles many citizens, especially in high-end neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, where bogus addresses allow suburbanites — most of them the children of city workers — to squeeze D.C. residents out of the better-performing public schools.

A D.C. inspector general’s audit earlier this year concluded that D.C. taxpayers spent nearly $3 million to educate dozens of students who had “questionable residency status.” Stung by the audit’s findings, Rhee promised a crackdown.

bmyers@dcexaminer.com