Bonduel School District’s star is ascending, with enrollment numbers defying state trends, but popularity is causing problems with families skirting the district’s residency requirements.
Superintendent Joe Dawidziak said via a Facebook post July 22 that there has been a problem for the last couple of summers with families coming to the schools to enroll and claiming they’re living in the district when they don’t. Currently, the school district encompasses the villages of Bonduel and Cecil, along with some or all of the towns of Angelica, Green Valley, Hartland, Lessor, Maple Grove, Navarino, Washington and Waukechon.
Parents and guardians are required to sign a form certifying they are residents in the district, and Dawidziak warned that anyone who tries to pass off themselves and their children as residents of the district could be charged with perjury and/or fraud in court. If they’re found guilty, they will have to reimburse the school district for the expense of educating their children, he said.
Dawidziak pointed out that the average cost to educate a student in Bonduel public schools is over $12,000 per year, and he doesn’t like that local taxpayers are footing the bill to educate non-residential students. The state of Wisconsin has open enrollment windows that allow students from outside the district boundaries to apply to attend schools here, and if the applications are accepted, Bonduel gets state funding via the students’ home districts.
Families that register with Bonduel schools have to provide an original birth certificate or passport and proof of residency to enroll their children. The proof of residency includes closing statements on property sales or property tax bills, or signed lease/rental agreements and verification forms, along with current utility bills or insurance statements and immunization records.
In a phone interview, Dawidziak said he doesn’t have firm numbers on how many families have tried to skirt the system, but he said it usually starts the second week in July each year and there are usually one or two families per day that try to do this.
“Whether that’s somebody who calls or emails or stops in, it’s been almost daily,” Dawidziak said.
He believes the families doing this were unable to get in through open enrollment, with their applications rejected for any number of reasons. Some might have realized that even before attempting an open enrollment application, he said.
“A common theme has been marital problems,” Dawidziak said. “One of the parents will call and say, ‘We’re having martial problems and our son’s going to move in with grandma, who lives in our district. Then we’ll find out later that they never moved to grandma’s house and probably never had marital problems. There’s a lot of that.”
It is unfair for taxpayers to pay for students that don’t live within the district, Dawidziak said, and it has become enough of an issue to prompt him to put out the Facebook post. He noted that Bonduel is one of only a handful of school districts in the state dealing with this problem at such a level.
“Basically, our taxpayers have been paying for students who don’t live there,” Dawidziak said. “In doing some research and talking with law enforcement, they seem to think that if you put this (statement) out there ahead of time … later, when someone gets caught, it holds a lot more teeth.”
He added that two families were caught in June, over a month before the residency requirement statement was posted, and if the statement had been in place, those families could have been prosecuted for fraud.
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
