Attendance Detectives

Some Bay Area school districts are making a stronger effort to identify and remove students who are not eligible to enroll in a particular school.  It seems that a number of parents are trying to enroll their kids into better performing schools despite the fact that they live outside of the district or the designated school boundaries.

In the July 20 edition of the Mercury News, reporter Sharon Noguchi quoted Cupertino Assistant Superintendent Linda Denman: “People care because they feel like they’re paying an inflated price to live in Cupertino, and they look at someone who doesn’t pay that price and feel that the other families are burdening the system.”

According to Noguchi’s report, “Not every district embraces strict residency checks.  Last year, the Evergreen School District in San Jose resisted parent pressure to toughen its requirements out of fear that they might throw up a barrier to undocumented immigrants.”

Noguchi continues, “Federal law prohibits districts from requiring proof of residency that undocumented immigrants may not possess—such as a driver’s license or a passport.”

The schools go to great lengths to verify a student’s address, but when it comes to the question of legal status, it’s strictly, “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

10 Comments

  1. This is precisely why I will continue to vote NO on any school bond measure that comes up on the ballot.
    I’m quite willing to help finance the education of American children, ungrateful as school district employees are, but I refuse to believe that we have some sort of responsibility to offer incentives for the breaking and entering of our country.

  2. Let the kids go to school—

    An public education in Cupertino should not be measurably better than that of San Jose.  What’s the difference? (tongue firmly in cheek)

    As for illegal immigrants.  Children, no matter where they were born, should not have an illegal status.

    And I defy Mr. Galt to show where his ancestors obtained their green card from the Sioux, Apache, or Cherokee nations.

    We are all illegal immigrants.

  3. “We are all illegal immigrants,” is a very interesting comment, that could be debated for weeks.  If we are, how then should we organize ourselves?  Which laws matter?  And who gets to make the decisions?

    Pete Campbell

  4. When people say they don’t want to pay for schooling for undocumented children, what is their plan for where these children should be all day?

    If they are not allowed in schools, in the absence of any alternative, they will most likely end up hanging around on the streets. Having mobs of uneducated youths roaming the streets would probably cost us more in crime and additional policing than it does to educate them. Plus, as Rich says, it is hardly fair to make children take the blame for our social problems.

    I do agree with John to a certain extent, though. Keeping illegal aliens out of the country is not the job of local or state government, it is the job of the federal government.

    The federal government is obviously not doing this job very well. Whether or not this has anything to do with the fact that some wealthy people are becoming much wealthier because illegal workers can be hired much more cheaply, and wealthy people tend to have some influence in government circles, I leave for some other time to debate. (Maybe you are old enough to remember 30 years ago when there was a union butcher in the back of your local supermarket cutting up the meat?)

    But since the federal government is failing at the task of keeping illegals out of the country—a task which it is assigned by the Constitution—there is a very good argument that the federal government should be reimbursing state and local governments for additional costs caused by the failure of the federal government to do its job. Education and health care would certainly be such areas.

    But following this argument further, saying that the federal government should pay for something really means that the federal taxpayer should pay for it, and that is all of us. In other words, states that have a lot of illegals, like California, should be subsidized by states that don’t, like (I suppose) Wisconsin, because Wisconsinites benefit from paying lower prices for meat, produce, etc., thanks to illegal workers, so they should cough up some dough to support California’s bottom-of-the-list school systems.

    (“cough”, “dough”, how does anyone learn to spell?)

    I don’t know John, maybe he is scrupulous in these matters, but in general, people who hire illegals to blow their leaves or trim their trees because the price is right, should not be complaining about the cost of educating their gardeners’ children.

  5. #3- As a person who does “one of the jobs Americans just won’t do”, I feel the effect every day of having to compete directly with cheap, abundant, illegal alien labor.

    But it isn’t just my own self-interest that motivates me to speak up on this subject.
    Over the last several years, there is nothing that has had a more profound effect on the fabric of our society than has illegal immigration. And we’re not allowed to talk about it? Unlike most San Joseans, I don’t believe that the consequences have been overwhelmingly positive. 
    You are probably right in that there are powerful economic forces at work that have a vested interest in the continuation of the status quo. So we have more and more people getting richer and richer but this is dependent upon an ever growing army of the “working poor”. The result, which is apparent to those of us who haven’t yet been brainwashed to the point that we utter vapid idiocies such as “We are all illegal immigrants.”, is a country with a disappearing middle-class. And that, in my opinion, makes for a very unhealthy, corrupt, and divided society.
    As for the question of what to do with the children of illegal aliens. It’s simple. They’re parents are far less likely to bring them here if they know they will not be allowed to attend public schools. As you and I both know, all these people want is what’s best for their families. They certainly wouldn’t come to a country where they knew that their children would have no choice but to join gangs and get into trouble.
    The freebees are a magnet. They are also what’s bankrupting our State and local Governments.
    Stop the freebees.

    #2- Lay off the Kool-Aid!

  6. #9 Pete-
    Mr. Robinson doesn’t need to back up his position. He KNOWS he’s right. He is a member of an elite group that includes George Bush, who have an uncanny ability to draw sweeping conclusions based on sketchy intelligence.

    Face it. You are a bigot and so am I. You can take the enlightened Rich Robinson’s word for it!

  7. Pete,

    The less laws the better.

    First, stop the scapegoating of immigrants.  Unless Americans want to pay more for food, hotel rooms, janitors and the service industry sector in general—I would give everyone a pass.

    There are no real border problem between Canada and the U.S.  There are no “minute men” up there, nobody wants to build a fence in the north. We only hear of concern from the south.  Why? 

    The answer is simple; bigotry. 

    If we would help countries from the south become economically viable—instead of exploiting their resources and keeping their standard of living substandard—they would prefer to live in their own country.

    But then who would pick the vegetables, make the beds, do our gardening and sell us a cheese burger?

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