San Leandro School District Residency Verification Inefficient and Counterproductive
By Andrew Kopp
The San Leandro Board of Trustees and the San Leandro Unified School District are facing some difficult choices in 2008. The District is currently in negotiations with the teachers’ union (the teachers have been working without a contract since last summer). Governor Schwarzenegger recently announced that state education funding will be cut by 10%. The district will be working with less funding while the teachers—the most important part of the educational process—are asking for more money. And this conflict is superimposed upon the backdrop of President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” Act, an unfunded mandate which requires the District to meet certain criteria without providing the resources necessary to meet such goals.
In the middle of this conflagration is the District’s residency verification policy, which is currently being reviewed. Residency verification is the process of verifying where a student lives to make certain that only San Leandro residents (and lawfully permitted inter-district transfers) are attending San Leandro public schools.
Residency verification is required by state law. The means by which residency is verified is, to a large degree, within the discretion of the individual district. The State’s motivation for residency verification is almost totally economic. School districts receive funding from Sacramento based upon average daily student attendance. The more children that attend school in the district, the more money the district receives from the State. Without verification, districts might hoard students to increase their revenues, to the direct detriment of their neighboring district’s balance sheet.
There may be other reasons for residency verification. Some people believe that when students travel to schools outside of their neighborhoods and cities there is a greater likelihood for discipline issues, since traveling students lack a tie to the community. If this were true, however, one would expect private schools to have greater discipline problems, since so many of their students travel from remote locations. And it is just as likely, for public and private schools, that if a student is motivated enough to travel to have a better opportunity to learn, that student is probably worth having in your school.
Unfortunately, other calls for residency verification stem from less virtuous interests, such as racism. There are members of the community who recall the days when San Leandro was almost exclusively Caucasian. Some of those residents resent the influx of children of color over the past 30 years, or associate the increase in diversity with an unwanted migration of children from Oakland and Hayward.
It is ironic that those who support residency verification cite economics in support of the policy. Worried more about San Leandro property tax dollars funding the education of Oakland students, these critics overlook the fact that more children (who attend school regularly) means more operating money for the district, regardless of where they come from. Under-enrolled schools create financial problems for school districts. It is more efficient for a teacher to teach 20 children than 18.
There is a tipping point at which the financial benefit of greater enrollment fails to offset the demands upon District infrastructure. For instance, if a school is designed to hold 1,000 students, adding another 10 students will increase the district coffers, but not so much as to fund construction to increase the capacity of the school.
Residency verification is, to a large degree, counterproductive to the district and to society in general. Residency verification is an impediment to education – a roadblock for a student seeking to attend school. Some may argue that residency verification only addresses which school the student attends, not education in general. This argument is shortsighted.
Residency verification is expensive to enforce, it is harassing and, in some cases, humiliating to the family. It is also an impediment to the student. Perhaps worst is that when successful, the residency verification process has the effect of reducing district revenues and blocking the enrollment of motivated students and involved parents. A student who wishes to leave his home district and travel to another district is demonstrating a commitment to his or her education. We want students like that in our schools.
Currently parents of enrolling children are required to submit documentation each year which proves their residency within the district’s borders. District employees must take time to review the documents to ascertain whether the documents are sufficient, genuine, and accurate. And this is for the easy cases.
The more difficult cases are those children of parents which have trouble documenting their residency. Currently the District requires either a deed or a rental agreement, plus utility bills. If you are a parent who lives without a lease, or are not on the lease, proving your residency becomes more difficult. If you are not on the lease, there is a good chance that the phone and gas bills are not in your name, decreasing the number of utilities bills that you might present as proof of residency.
The unfortunate nature of verification is that the process is more difficult for those who are less equipped to meet their burden. The more marginal your existence, the more hoops you must jump through to satisfy the residency verification requirements. Not surprisingly, this impediment results in delayed enrollment. There are children who, for a period of time, do not attend any school because their parents have difficulty verifying their residency.
In some cases the district must perform home visits to verify residency. This involves checking for clothing, toothbrush, toys, and other indicia of residency. District employees who already have a full plate of administrative tasks must travel from home to home, confronting parents and cohabitants who may be justifiably humiliated or confrontational. It is ironic that the government obtains entry in to the home of the parent and cohabitant through District policy when the police could not obtain similar access without a warrant signed by a judge.
Article 9 Section 5 of the California Constitution provides that, “The Legislature shall provide for a system of common schools by which a free school shall be kept up and supported in each district at least six months in every year…” This provision of our Constitution must be read in context—there is no purpose to establishing a “system” of free schools if the children of the state cannot attend them.
While some process of residency verification is necessary to ensure equity among the districts, an annual, burdensome and invasive policy serves almost no one. If a parent demonstrates that his first grader actually lives in San Leandro, is it necessary to check again in second, third, fourth, and fifth grades? Is it really appropriate to condition a child’s education on the surrender of privacy rights which the policy could not demand absent reasonable suspicion of the commission of a crime?
The District is currently reviewing its policy, and the changes will be discussed by the Board of Trustees on February 4. Interested parties should attend and make their thoughts known.
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