Should the child of a live-in nanny be able to legally attend the “neighborhood” school of the home in which the nanny works?
Since last fall, this question has been debated in the affluent, mostly Caucasian Bay Area community of Orinda, even inspiring legislation to redefine school attendance zones for children of live-in housekeepers and nannies.
The unfolding debate, while illuminating education challenges of “the help” and the more-affluent families who employ them, also illuminates the bigger policy debate over how students in California are assigned to schools based on geographic default assignment – ZIP code – in the first place.
School attendance zone boundaries based on geography have perpetuated what can only be recognized as “education redlining,” continuing to grow trends of an increasingly segregated public education system despite passage 70 years ago of Brown v. Board of Education. To some extent, the assignment by ZIP code has also contributed to fueling a modern-day parent empowerment/civil rights fight whereby parents, who are predominantly poor and minority, have increasingly demanded rights to either transform or escape their “assigned” chronically underperforming schools.
Senate Bill 200 was introduced to redefine compliance with California’s residency to include any pupil whose parent or legal guardian resides outside the child’s school district but is employed and lives within the district for a minimum of three days during the school week.
Impetus for the law change is Vivian, a 7-year-old Latina second-grader, whose mother works as a live-in nanny for Miriam Storch. Vivian has her own bedroom in the Storch home. Vivian’s mother owns no property in Orinda. Mother and child return on weekends to a less-affluent neighborhood about 20 minutes away.
SB200 was written following media reports that Orinda Union School District officials had hired a private investigator to determine Vivian’s “true” residency, then disenrolling her after concluding she did not legally reside in Orinda. District officials have subsequently readmitted Vivian, but only after a media outcry in which Storch agreed to become Vivian’s legal guardian.
Vivian’s case renewed the discussion over geography and school enrollment policies in the United States. Nationally, several parents have been targeted by private investigators hired by local school districts to help them “weed out” nonresident students, enabling districts to allocate resources only on students living within recognized attendance zones.
Recently, a Pennsylvania father, Hamlet Garcia, faced up to seven years imprisonment for “theft of educational services” after an investigator hired by a wealthy Montgomery County school district determined his 7-year-old daughter continued to attend school based on her grandfather’s residence, where she and her mother had resided during the parents’ marital separation. Charges were eventually dropped, but Garcia’s case highlighted not only joint custody arrangements and school attendance zones, but shone light on the seemingly extraordinary steps taken by some districts to maintain school attendance zones by ZIP codes inextricably correlated with class and race.
Amending state laws is long overdue to allow for contemporary realities of living arrangements imposed by employment and divorce. But these are short-term solutions. Ultimately, legislatures should embrace ending a feudalistic system of assigning kids merely by ZIP code. These laws restrain parental choice in education, too often trapping kids in state-identified chronically underperforming schools with no opportunity to exit failing schools.
Until this occurs, we should not be surprised to see parents demanding increased open-enrollment policies, special opportunity scholarships, or “parent trigger” laws freeing parents to choose the best school match for them and their children.
Staff opinion columnist Gloria Romero is an education reformer and former Democratic state senator from Los Angeles.
Email: Gloria@parentempower.org
Twitter: @gloriajromero
