against the law.

should be able to attend any public school in America.

In the 70's for sure. Before that I don't know. But I remember kids using relative's addresses to go to school in another district. There had been a student riot at the high school our last year in jr. high and so there was a decent number of kids doing that. You went to the school whose district you lived in. I've never known that to not be the case.

In this case however, the child lives in the school's district. There is no reason she should not be able to go to that school.

I worked in a public h.s. both as a teacher and as a Guidance Counselor. Moreover, I had cousins in NJ who skirted this law by living with our Grandmother.

children attend, nor which public services are available.

Geesh.

Last edited Mon Dec 1, 2014, 02:22 PM - Edit history (1)

of where their children attend school. In California it is primarily property taxes that finance the local school systems and there are usually few if any other local taxes for individuals in most situations. So on that basis only parents who are property owners in California would be able send their children to public schools.

this is sick...

The OUSD blew it badly in this case and they have rescinded their previous determination. Vivian is still enrolled in an OUSD school.

"Paying taxes" isn't the basis for eligibility to enroll in a public school. It's primary place of residence.

The fact that schools choose to fund on a tax base isn't her problem.

If you live in an area where local property taxes pay for the school system, people who are renting are paying taxes.


This woman is working, and her rent is part of her pay.

employees pay a higher property tax for the size of the home, including the value of the rooms that the girl and her mom reside in.

and doesn't pay local taxers can't send their kids to school? Gonna be a lot of kids wandering the streets.

landlord's costs which include taxes so in effect renters are paying the taxes on the building they live in.

Districts can't keep them from attending their public schools.

That would solve the problem.

But would they?

For awhile it was frowned upon but this has become repukianly normal .

you're white and appear wealthy.

and all state and federal officials are Dems, I believe.

trendy-lefties. Robert Reich currently teaches at Berkeley and lives in the East Bay so he would know those suburbs quite well.

a five-minute BART ride from the tony Rockridge section of Oakland.

this isn't a surprise.

They may claim to be liberal, but are actually as elitist as anyone with any money usually is.

See post 26.

And some so called liberals are hypocrites.

Forbes magazine, on the table of the rich and famous.

to the less fortunate who may have a chance at bettering themselves with a topnotch education. Really sad. I know, I know they don't want a tidal wave of 'poor' children trying the same thing, lest their community and schools become less than they are, pristine enclaves of privileged assholes with no empathy for those less well off..... I would like to know the nationality of this child, I presume Hispanic after reading article.

Last edited Mon Dec 1, 2014, 04:33 PM - Edit history (1)

Because that is not a bad idea.

if the mother's employer legally establishes herself as the little girl's care giver

...is that Orinda is Pretty blue, politically. 2/3's registered Democrats to only about 30% Repubs. They're in a congressional district that a Dem won with 67+% of the vote. Jerry Brown took almost 70% of the vote from Contra Costa county.

Rich is rich, even if you're liberal I guess.

Here in Michigan, Ann Arbor is infected with them...just like Orinda.

God bless Robert Reich for calling it out.

This is the direction the country is headed, have and have not's. Very Sad

Pretty simple for me, if you are part of the 2% you best spend a big part of your time addressing inequality, somebody might be keeping score, you never know.

so lets see how this works...

I want to send my kid to what would be considered a good public school, lots of diversity, high expectations of the students to actually achieve, no gangs, drugs or chronic disciplinary problems. So what do I do? I take on a monthly mortgage of more than I really want, in a county where the taxes are highest in the state, so we can LIVE in the actual public school district of the public school we want to send our daughter to. My wife and I personally do with less so our daughter can have what she needs and what WE feel she deserves.

So tell me, amidst all the faux outrage here, how many of you actual parents out there would KNOWINGLY do less for your kids? SO tell me how many of you would KNOWINGLY send you kids to a public school riddled with violence and drugs?

And please don't give me all this smoke and mirrors about fairness in education, or the part about not being able to afford to move or live in a different school district. That is NOT reality.

Explain to me the fairness of me having to work my ass off in order to abide by the RULES so my wife and I can send our daughter to a good public school while someone else feels like they don't have to? If that's going to be the way it works, then I want to send my kid to Yale and only have to pay community college prices. yea, like that is going to happen.

town she lives in with her mother?

her legal residence is not within the school district of the school she is going to. Last I heard kids have to attend the school associated with the district of their LEGAL residence.

She has now established legal residency in the district. This whole thing is shameless elitism and morally depraved. Fortunately a public outcry did cause the district to back down - But under some bizarre condition that the little girl's employer legally establish themselves as her legal caregiver

She used to visit her grandmother on the weekend, she has since passed away. The mother told the PI she lived elsewhere because she recognized the PI's name (he said he was an insurance investigator, not that he's from the school district) and thought her abusive ex was looking for her. She has a restraining order against the ex.

then why in the county and state records it says her legal residence is elsewhere? Always an excuse...

you decide now is a good time to voice your wisdom on how to cut off a little girl from residency/lunches? I can't alert on your post because there's technically nothing wrong with your words, other than being completely heartless. But, man, it's obvious what you're doing here.

be kind enough to enlighten me as to "what I am doing here"?

Why is her legal residence someplace she only spends two days? THAT makes no sense.

Does that DETERMINE whether a reisdience is LEGAL or not?

but it DOES help the those who CANNOT understand the differences between LEGAL and otherwise to perhaps be able to make the DISTINCTION.

Do you realize that isn't the same everywhere? And while you're at it, what about those who don't have kids? Should they get their tax money back?

First you're well off and can afford a Lexus neighborhood. Then, in another post you aren't! You're lower middle class! Hmmm.

But anyway. That didn't answer my question. What is the distinction? What defines a child's legal residence when determining which school she should attend? Schools don't all determine that the same way. So what, you say? Well, that's the point of the OP. Some schools make that determination in ways designed to keep the poor kids out. You seem awfully steamed for someone who is NOT concerned by this matter.

I never in anything I wrote said I lived in a neighborhood with Lexus or Bmw's, so don't try and place me where your imagination wants to. What I said was if someone, including you, wanted to live in a place like that, it's your choice.

Postal address is what school districts use to determine whether a kid can attend a particular school. Tax records as well. What smokes me is when people decide that just because little sally's Mom works in one place, and that one place has a really good school district, that little sally should be able to attend that school, even though little Sally is getting a free ride while everyone else who is living there and paying the taxes there and playing by the rule there, is going to have to carry little sally's weight.

But I have to say, I'd love to have a life where things like that "smoke" me. Must be nice to have so little to be concerned about to waste your mental energy on that.

School districts are not all the same. I've never once shown a tax bill to a school in the almost 14 years I've been a parent to public school attending children.

ETA I don't have to re-read what you wrote. It's clear you meant to give a certain impression, but then got all indignant when you got called on it and tried to backwalk it to lower middle class. You're all over the place and it's obvious.

indignant..wow your crystal ball must be a good one to be able to see me and all that occurs in my head and my life Soooooooooo clearly..tell ya what..come back and talk with me when you grow up.

Guess what? Yale and the other Ivies give much better financial aid packages than other schools. due to their large endowments. So there!

K-A, Yale '85 cum laude

When it gets down to community college prices.....let me know.

So there

I mean, you wouldn't want your snowflake in class with a poor girl now would you?

Schools need to be funded EQUALLY everywhere. No rich schools, no poor schools. All schools funded through state sales or income taxes and NOT by who owns the biggest McMansion.

There should be no "good" school districts and no "bad". They should be equivalent. All funded equally from state funds. One pool, split among ALL school, according to some formula. In fact, I think poor school districts should get MORE money because they need to pay to feed the children as well.

And that's why California schools are so strapped for money, the LaRouchies, or whatever Jarvis and Gann were, conned people into voting for Prop 13 to freeze property taxes so long as they lived in their home, so though real estate was soaring the property tax base was not.

Property taxes are not the correct way to fund schools, the linkage is not there. People who have kids in public schools and people who own property are different sets of people, though of course there is a large intersection of the two groups. The general state (or even federal?) treasury is a better funding vehicle, and the poorer nieghborhoods should have their schools funded at least as well as the better neighborhoods, which doesn't happen with property tax school funding.

they are allowed to go up by 2% a year - and mine have done so every year. Communities can also vote in additional taxes, which is why I pay a parcel tax on top of the base property tax.

Now back to the regularly scheduled argument...

you are hateful. Let me guess which side you are on in this:

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You aren't fooling anyone here. We can tell which side you are on.

and which side is that pray tell?

Your argument is that the rich deserve to be rich because they just are and those that do their laundry and clean their houses deserve to be poor and should be kept that way. This is be

No one cleans my house except me, my wife and my daughter. I do ALL the laundry and most of the grocery shopping as well. No one cuts what little grass I have except me or does my home repairs, except me. And when I am not qualified I pay a licensed plumber or electrician or HVAC guy to make the repairs.

Your asinine assumption that I am rich is as far off base as it could possibly be. I am most definitely a member of the ever shrinking and milked-dry middle class. And by middle class I mean the lower end of the middle class.

So no silver spoons here.

And oh yeah, I AM an American and I DO think this way.

Try again.

maybe you should do some actual reading on him. I know one thing for sure. He'd let the little girl eat (and I have a good idea what he'd think of the school officials as well):

along with Marx, Engles, Trotsky, Alinsky, Rubin, Ayers, Hoffman and others.

I grew up in the 60's and inhaled the revolutionary rhetoric and ethos with an ardor worthy of my youth. I marched, I protested, I sang the songs. I sing them still.

I served in the military and saw first hand the corruption and deceit.

But I look at what passes for protest nowadays and I weep for the sheer ineptitude of it, and feeble life it has and the whining and hand wringing it incurs. I have watched the movement of the 60's become a commercial enterprise, stripped of it's meaning and plastered across a tee shirt so snot nosed kids who think they know about revolution can wear them and spout quotes from a book they have no real understanding of.

Do not presume to preach to me about what Che would or would not have done. Che picked up a rifle....what have YOU done?

public school in the town where they lived, worked and went to church

heart to feed a child? Yeah. Spare me the BS.

That's what LIVE-IN help means -- her mother's primary residence is Orinda and the employer has acknowledged that the child also has her own, unshared bedroom with a private bath and lives there during the week, going to Baypoint on the weekend to visit relatives.

In CA, educational spending isn't as dependent on local property tax payments because of Prop. 13. The property tax payments are accumulated at the state level and redistributed to school systems based on head counts, so this child's enrollment in OUSD schools actually provided them with MORE money.

Do you think that the existence of poverty is not reality? And many poor people are also 'working their asses off'; they just aren't getting paid a fair wage for their work.

And if they can't send their children to decent schools, then their poverty will be perpetuated through the next generations.

What kind of fantasy world do you live in? Many people work 16 hours 6 days a week but get paid next to nothing per hour, plus getting skinned on either side of their assigned shifts in terms of what is actually demanded. Many people are holding down two or three jobs just to put a roof over their family and food on the family table. And sometimes they are extremely competent and responsible but get passed over for promotions anyway, due to employers' family or friends or somebody with some other unfair advantage. Plus somebody should tell people who are born into upper middle class families that you are all extremely POOR at telling the difference between dirty and old, between messy and shabby. between disrespectful and scared.
PS I am white, with a master's degree in a demanding field. And I am not whining. I am not complaining for myself. By unusual good fortune, my efforts paid off for me in the end. But I never forget how much of that I owe to an IQ that was given to me at birth. And to many good people helping and guiding me. I don't think you should have to have a high IQ just to get fair compensation for your efforts in creating the profit generated by a business. And I am happy to see some other people getting good chances, too.

Or it's the most colossal example of cognitive dissonance I've ever heard of.

had their schools run by republicans. Another poster suggested it was "champagne liberals", which I find more believable.

poor people. Greed is pervasive and reaches across all political spectrum.

schools etc.

but they think certain kids should go to that other public school and stay away from them.

these people just think they are better than others and will make bigoted stereotypical jokes about people in the south and other places.

and by "champagne liberals" it's not the usual limousine and mansions types. but the gluten free, organic , yoga types.

Snotty place.

Disgusting.

I worked there for a summer at a high end retailer. Lots of soccer moms in Lexus, BMWs and Mercedes. Sigh, the yuppies have really ruined Northern California.

Haven't seen any complaints. One of my kids went to the school in our district and another went where there was a better Arts program. My youngest is in online school.

Because you wind up with families fleeing from poor schools.

on things like environment they would be one of the best.

but when it comes treatment of those who have less they can be assholes.

yes, they might support things like social security, medicare and maybe even taxes. but they don't want to live among those who are on a different class.

yes they will pay taxes so the poor can go to school over there away from them. just stay out of their area.

and this is not only true of the wealthy types in this op but middle class types also.

The grandparents lived close to a very good school. So the mother arranged for the child to live with the grandparents. The school district "investigated" and got charges filed against the mother, plus she was billed for the tuition she supposedly owed. Plus her conviction meant that her desire to become a teacher was permanently wrecked. Does anybody else remember this case. It seemed really unfair to me. I thought the children were supposed to go to school where they spent the most time, right?

Our state has a school funding equalization mechanism. The district that I live in sees most of its property tax based educational money leave the district. That's fair but it still doesn't create equal schools.

When my oldest turned 5, I looked around at the nearby school. Our neighborhood school was a language immersion school. I think that's a fine idea but DH and I had no desire to immerse our kids in this particular language. We could send our kid to a nearby school that was inline with our values (environmental slant). Living in a large school district (at the time) meant we could fairly easily transfer within the district to any school.

But that one - environmental- was expecting 32 kindergarteners that fall. And they had no art teacher, no PE teacher, a librarian only 2 days a week and no music program. Their language instruction was via videotape. I said hell no.

Dh found us a house in a nearby small district. The district is within a certain neighborhood's boundary. My oldest had a class size of 11 for kindergarten and a year later my youngest had a class size of 17. Full time art, music, PE and foreign language teachers. Full time librarian and counselor.

My house isn't upscale. I've often described it as my high-priced hovel. Luckily dh and I are into fixer uppers, even if we have to live in a house constantly in transition (or in disrepair depending on which part of the house you are looking at.)

The average income in the district is six figures, which includes a range of really rich folks to ordinary upper-middle class folks who still rely on a paycheck. It was a stretch for us to move here, but it was the choice we made.

So we are part of the problem. Dh and I were unwilling to sacrifice our kids' education. We didn't want private schools, so we naively selected the best public school we could find in the area and found a house that we could (at the time) barely afford. We were thrilled to find parents that really cared to be involved in their kids' education. We didn't think about whether it was fair or not that we could afford a house in the neighborhood. We were just happy to move to a quieter neighborhood with tons of kids within earshot. We didn't look at the demographics closely to see that there were no kids receiving a free or reduced lunch.

This district is public, but you have to live within the boundaries, receive a transfer from another district or pay tuition. The district has been accused of being quasi-private because of this.

Our school makes up the difference between what the state provides as a fair funding number (all tax monies collected, divided by number of students in state etc) by receiving donations from a foundation. The foundation is private, and families are encouraged to donate annually. The amount of the requested donation is not insignificant.

But what we get for that is: small class sizes. Nearly 100% of high school teachers with master degrees. Excellent test scores. A great college prep high school with a close to 100% graduation rate.

How do we make that fair for other students in the state? I truly don't know the answer (short of pulling a bunch of money from the military-industrial complex.) All kids deserve a fine education. Just like all kids deserve a safe neighborhood to live in, a reliable roof over their heads, and enough food to eat. Until we hit those marks as a society, folks with the means to do so will find a way to provide the best education they can for their kids.

All that being said, I'm utterly appalled by the actions of the district in the article. We've had some kids in the district that were kids of live-in help. I saw first hand how the district's schools made it as easy as possible for those kids to attend the schools with as little hassle as possible.

worth it: "short of pulling a bunch of money from the military-industrial complex"

Which is really what needs to be done. I think there should be a local school board to make RECOMMENDATIONS but that public schools should be run federally with federal funds. This will make some heads explode but in the end would be far more equitable. We all pay various amounts in to pay for that military-industrial complex - why should we not pay a sliding fee and allow everyone to attend decent schools? Same with health care. Time to remove the age restriction from Medicare and open it up. We are living like the dark ages in this country with only a few at the top profiting. It's ridiculous.