District still validating addresses

Verification needed for magnet schools

A goal of Charleston County school leaders was to finish verifying magnet school students' addresses by the 10th day of school.

It's more than a month past that deadline, and officials still are trying to determine the veracity of students' addresses.

This is the first year that the school board's rigorous address verification policy has been applied to all of the district's 11 magnet schools. The policy was created in response to downtown residents' accusations that some Buist Academy applicants were lying about where they lived to improve their chances of acceptance.

Five magnet schools, including Buist, implemented the policy last year, although Buist only checks whether students live in the county, while other schools verify that students live in the same addresses that made them eligible to attend.

The five magnet schools didn't finish the verification process last year until the second half of the school year, and Doug Gepford, the district's interim chief academic officer, said the district is further along now than at this point last year. The volume of students whose addresses must be checked takes time, he said.

The district advertised for and tried to hire 11 temporary employees to help, but only three people responded, Gepford said.

"If we're going to continue doing this, we have to find a way to get more people to help," he said. "It's difficult."

Most schools had about 5 percent of students' addresses needing to be checked, but one school, the county School of the Arts, has about 25 percent of its verifications incomplete. The arts magnet school also is the biggest with more than 1,000 students.

Some schools have found students whose addresses would make them ineligible for the school, but Gepford didn't have any numbers on exactly how many students fell in that category.

Some of those families already willingly returned to the school where they should be, while others likely will appeal to the constituent school boards, he said. He didn't have numbers on that either.

Schools followed a standardized process to check addresses, which involved at least two letters sent to families and a phone call from school officials.

For those who haven't responded, the next step will be to visit students' homes or, if that already happened, to ask them to leave the school. Last year, the board allowed students who weren't eligible to attend to stay there until the end of the year.

Board Chairman Hillery Douglas said last year was a warning to parents that the district was checking addresses. The board ought to enforce the policy when it finds families not telling the truth, and children should be asked to move as soon as possible instead of waiting until the end of the year, he said.

"If we don't do it now, when do we do it?" Douglas said. "We're going to enforce the policy this time."