The Princeton Public Schools is in the midst of a residency audit to make sure every student enrolled in the school system is legally entitled to a free education.
“I think it’s good housekeeping to make sure we are educating the kids who live in town,” Board of Education President Patrick Sullivan said on Oct. 31. “(An audit) hasn’t been in a done in a while and it’s time to do it just to make sure we are paying for the right people.”
The review by the school district’s student services office involves checking thousands of addresses of homeowners and renters, a process that started earlier this year and is ongoing, Sullivan said. He said he expects the audit to take a couple of more months to complete.
The idea to conduct the review grew out of the board’s personnel committee, said Sullivan, who serves on that committee.
“We were seeing residency hearings occur and we just wanted to make sure there wasn’t a broader issue we hadn’t looked into,” he said. “It’s fiscally responsible. We have to make sure that, in this time of rising enrollments, the people who are enrolled in the school have a legal right to be here and we have an obligation to educate them.”
To be eligible for a free education, a child has to reside in Princeton, the place where he or she sleeps every night, Sullivan said.
“The law is that you have to sleep in Princeton,” said board member Debbie Bronfeld, the chairwoman of the personnel committee, on Oct. 31.
“The residency audit is doing what it was intended to do,” board member Dafna Kendal said. “The audit has identified families that no longer live in Princeton.”
She did not have a figure for how many families, nor was there an immediate total for how many students are removed from the district in a given year after it has been determined they are not legally domiciled in Princeton.
Kendal said the district gets tips from members of the public about families suspected of “gaming the system” by having their children illegally attend the public schools. A district investigator follows up on the information to see if the allegation is credible, she said.
Kendal said the district focuses on residency issues all the time.
At a moment when student enrollment in Princeton is going up, Kendal said community members have expressed their concerns to her about suspected cases of students attending public school in town while living in another community.
Princeton has an enrollment of about 3,800 students, an amount projected to grow in the upcoming years.
“We want to make sure we are spending our resources on the students we should be educating,” Kendal said.
District administrators are also checking on Princeton Charter School students as well. They have to be Princeton residents to enter the school’s admission lottery, but they can move to another town after they have been admitted and continue to attend the school, Bronfeld said.
In such a case, it would be up to the school district in the child’s new community to pay the tuition for him or her to attend the Princeton Charter School, she said.
“But for the charter school, too, we haven’t confirmed in a number of years that the students who we are paying tuition for actually live here,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan said administrators would check on Cranbury students, too. Cranbury sends students of high school age to Princeton High School and pays tuition to the Princeton school district for those students.
