Imagine dropping your child off for school, only to find out a former cop was paid by the district to watch them — from your front lawn, from the corner store, from the bus stop. That’s not fiction. It’s KCPS’s newest job listing. Parents call it a dangerous escalation of school-based policing, especially in an era of ICE raids and state violence against immigrant families.
  • Fondots@lemmy.world
    8·
    17 hours ago

    Not that I particularly like this, but this isn’t exactly something new.

    For most of my life, my mom worked a clerical job at a local elementary school, so I got some decent glimpses behind the curtain of my local school district.

    Our district was all-around pretty well-regarded, some nearby districts, put bluntly, were not, and it wasn’t unheard of for parents in those other districts to try to send their kids to our schools. Maybe they moved out of the district and didn’t update their address, or they listed a friend or relative’s address in our district as their home address, etc. and every day their parents would drop them off at a bus stop in our district.

    And I certainly don’t blame those parents for trying.

    But our district did have someone whose job was to verify residency in those kinds of cases, they’d interview people and stake out bus stops and such. I imagine that a lot of districts do something similar.

    Now they weren’t doing random checks on students based on nothing, they only investigated if they had some credible reason to believe the student didn’t live in our district- they received a tip from someone, or a student told someone that it was happening (sadly a decent amount of them came from younger elementary school students who didn’t get what was going on and they let it slip that they lived in another town)

    Now of course, this article could be about something a lot more creepy and invasive, the article doesn’t really have much for me to go on.

    It’s a shitty situation all-around. Every kid of course deserves to have the highest-quality education possible. Unfortunately, educating children isn’t cheap, in general you’re looking at in the neighborhood of about $10-20k per student per year at a public school in the US (paid for out of taxes and government funding and such, we’re not that bad of a capitalist hellhole that you need to shell out 10+ grand out of pocket every year to send your kids to public school.) A handful of extra students in a district can add up to some pretty significant extra expenses, I can certainly think of a few things I wish my school could have thrown a few thousand at back when I was in school, and maybe they could have if we had less kids attending our school who didn’t actually live in our district (although I don’t exactly have great confidence that our district would have allocated those extra funds appropriately if that were the case, as always, the issues at play are many and complicated)