Just over a decade ago, Kelley Williams-Bolar made a decision that dramatically changed her family’s trajectory – both in ways she hoped and in ways she never imagined.
The decision? Using her dad’s home address to enroll her daughters in a school in another township a 15-minute drive away from where they lived in Akron, Ohio. The hoped-for change? At least for a moment, Williams-Bolar’s daughters were able to attend middle and high schools that were relatively safe, well-funded and just a short walk away from their grandpa’s home.
The unimaginable change? Williams-Bolar was sentenced to 10 days in county jail followed by three years of probation. Her father, too, was jailed, despite being in his mid-60s and in poor health. In fact, he never made it out alive.
Address sharing – in which parents or caregivers enroll their kids in school citing residences other than their own – is extremely common. But a new report shared exclusively with USA TODAY shows the extent to which families can be punished for the practice, which is sometimes referred to as enrollment, residency or district fraud.
In at least 24 states, according to the report published Tuesday, parents who address share can be criminally prosecuted. They often face steep fines and in some cases, as with Williams-Bolar and her dad, jail sentences.
How common is address sharing, aka enrollment or student residency fraud?
The vast majority of the country’s K-12 students attend public schools, and typically, they are assigned to a school based on where they live.
But public schools are usually funded in part by property taxes, which means their budgets tend to correlate with their respective community’s wealth. This incentivizes families with means to effectively buy their way into the best-funded – and what are perceived to be the highest-quality – public schools. Being located in a district with such schools can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the value of a home.
Some families that can’t afford those fancy homes opt instead to use the address of a relative or friend who does so they can still access the schools.
The crime, some argue, is not only misleading school districts but also using resources funded by a tax base a family isn’t a part of, even as others argue that access to high-quality public schools is a right. But while they fuel the inequities, property taxes these days account for a fraction of education revenues nationally, challenging the notion that families buy their seats into local districts.
Many parents, notably, engage in address sharing for other reasons. Maybe that school has a special art program or science lab; maybe its campus culture is a better fit; maybe it’s simply closer to where a student’s parents work.
Either way, anecdotal evidence and research reviewed by the report’s authors suggest the practice is pervasive. While precise data on the scope of the phenomenon is hard to come by (largely because the practice is illicit), Tim DeRoche of the education watchdog nonprofit Available to All stressed it’s not only widespread but also cuts across geographic communities, racial groups and income levels.
“Almost everybody knows somebody who’s done this or has done it themselves,” DeRoche said. “And what I’ve been surprised by is how widespread it is across the income spectrum.” He pointed to a mom in Malibu, California, who had a friend put her gas bill in her name so she could send her daughter to Santa Monica High; a middle-class dad in Milwaukee who used a different address to avoid sending his daughter to a very high-income school; and people like Williams-Bolar.
The communities are side by side:They have wildly different education outcomes – by design.
Where address sharing is a crime
Only some address sharers get penalized, of course. And they disproportionately tend to be families of color, the authors suggested.
As the practice has become more common, so, too, have efforts to crack down on it. The analysis of state laws finds most of the rules that criminalize address sharing do so by considering the practice a form of theft. And while prosecutions remain rare, especially after the fallout surrounding Williams-Bolar, the report highlights an uptick in the number of families being “targeted and harassed” by suspicious school districts. Some private investigators also report an increase in districts utilizing their services.
Connecticut is the only state with a law that explicitly decriminalizes the practice. Passed in 2013, the legislation was introduced in response to a high-profile case involving a homeless mother who used her son’s babysitter’s address. That mother, who like Williams-Bolar is Black, was ultimately charged with first-degree larceny, which is typically associated with the theft of goods.
“Almost every other federal law is prosecuted disproportionately … against people of color, especially Black people, poor people, people with disabilities, people perceived as outsiders,” said report co-author Hailly Korman, a senior associate partner at Bellwether. “And especially in something like (address sharing), I would not be surprised if we did find that this is used as a way to maintain a school demographic or a school ‘culture.’”
Students who require extra services – like special education or English-language learner support – also tend to come under more scrutiny.
‘We lost everything’
If Williams-Bolar had known what she’d done was illegal, let alone that she’d be followed by a private investigator and face prosecution, she said she would never have even considered using her dad’s address. “I had no clue I was breaking the law,” she said. “What normal, regular parent is thinking, ‘I’m going to cheat another kid out of a seat’? That’s not even part of our thought process as parents.”
For Williams-Bolar, it was primarily an issue of convenience. Her dad was sick and home pretty much all the time. It would be a good place for her daughters to go after school while Williams-Bolar worked as a classroom paraprofessional in another district.
That she could get her daughters out of Akron’s “inner city” schools was certainly part of the equation. Williams-Bolar’s profession, and her struggles as a divorced, single Black mom living in public housing, made her particularly invested in the promise of an education. “But I’m not the type of person who’s going to risk myself getting in trouble.”
Williams-Bolar said she couldn’t fathom how much trouble she would end up getting into, and how much it would damage the people she loved. “We lost everything,” she said. “My kids were destroyed.”
Since her story became national news, and after her dad’s passing in jail, Williams-Bolar has gone on to advocate for fellow “parents, grandparents, guardians, people who just want their kids to have an opportunity and a chance” and to fight against public school “gatekeeping.”
Is the solution more school choice, charter schools, vouchers?
Districts nationwide have begun adopting reforms that obviate the need to address-share: open enrollment policies, for example, and policies allowing a certain percentage of seats to go to out-of-district kids.
Where do school choice proposals fit in the mix? While concepts such as vouchers or education savings accounts (ESAs) have often been pitched as the antidote to geographically assigned, traditional public schools, separate research thus far suggests the resources tend to be used or doled out unevenly.
School choice remains popular post-COVIDWhat it means for students and schools.
“I just don’t think that education is a commodity with the dollar value,” Korman said. “Districts don’t own those seats.”
The simplest solution, according to the report’s authors: laws that actively decriminalize the practice. It’s “the only way to fully eliminate the risk of prosecutions,” they write.
Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aliaemily.
