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Maine Township High School District 207 Superintendent Ken Wallace said the district has learned “important lessons” about verifying and enforcing student residency requirements in the wake of revelations that some of Maine South High School’s football players did not reside within district boundaries.
“We’ve learned some things, and we’re committed to, first of all, improving our [residency verification] processes on the front end,” Wallace told Chicago Tribune/Pioneer Press.
Earlier this month, the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) announced it would invalidate the Maine South Hawks’ entire 2022 football season after finding out that at least one of its players was not a legal resident of the district.
The news sparked uproar in Park Ridge and around the north and northwest suburbs, with residents taking to social media to express their concerns and disappointment about the situation and speculating about where to place blame.
At a special District 207 board of education meeting Monday night, Wallace said the investigation had taught “important lessons that we are already using to improve our process.”
He also stressed that “coaches, including [football] coach Dave Inserra, are not responsible for residency, and I want to make sure that is clear,” he said.
He also stated that he believes the issue of residency is “widespread, well beyond District 207.”
Typically, public schools like Maine South ask parents to provide proof that they live within the district with something like a lease, a utility bill or a driver’s registration bearing a valid address.
Establishing a second residence for the purpose of sending a child to school in a particular district is currently illegal under state law. Wallace said that people often present documents to make it appear that they are resident at an address even though they also maintain a different one elsewhere.
“Someone appears and they come into school and they’ve got a lease for an apartment, for example, they’ve got the utility bills they show, perhaps even if they’ve gotten either an ID or a license [linked] to that address, or they maybe have registered a car to that address,” he said.
State law tilts toward allowing students to register in schools even when their residency is suspect, meaning that in cases where the district is suspicious that a student is improperly registered, “we’ve had to enroll students and then turn around and start investigating as soon as we enroll them,” Wallace said.
The District 207 Board of Education approved the first reading of a change to its residency policy at its March 6 Board of Education meeting, two days before news of the IHSA investigation broke.
That update states that “a student who becomes a non-resident during the school term may attend school until the completion of the school term in June on a tuition-free basis provided the student was a legal resident on the first day of the school term and so long as there is no break in enrollment after becoming a non-resident.”
Wallace said the district approved the change to make the standards around residency clearer, noting that it spells out that students who started the school year as illegal residents will not be permitted to finish out the school year, but students who start as legal residents would be allowed to stay through June.
“We had reason to believe that it was being read to mean by some that however you got there, legally or otherwise, one could stay,” he wrote in an email.
The policy advanced to second reading with minimal discussion March 6.
In the case of the residency violations on the football team, Wallace said the district learned of possible violations at the end of the 2022 football season. He added that it had taken some time to research the tips.
“Between the investigation itself, which is weeks, if not months, and then the multiple levels of due process, you’re looking at a two-to-three month turnaround, which is why the penalties were just recently announced,” he said.
Wallace said he was unable to disclose the number of student-athletes who were residing out of district to protect those students’ privacy.
“Even though we have a duty to do the investigations and even disenroll students where the case has merit, what we also don’t want to do is violate their privacy rights,” Wallace said. “We would never name the students. But secondly, even identifying a number increases the likelihood that we would be revealing identities.”
District 207 uses a service called Thomson Reuters CLEAR to verify student residency within district boundaries. The district last approved a three-year extension to its contract with the company in 2021.
In 2021, the monthly charge for the service was $1,077.02. Under the updated contract, the district paid $1,991.62 per month for the first year, $2,051.36 per month for the second year and will pay $2,112.90 monthly for the third year.
According to meeting minutes, the Board of Education approved the contract update unanimously.
Wallace said the recent residency problems were not due to the verification service, but that the service only provides public records and that combing out potential violations can be an issue with such a high volume of students to check.
The district hired a full-time residency, security and transportation investigator this past October, Wallace said, which has helped the district do two things: “One, it’s helped us uncover cases right now that are active, but it’s also provided, I think, a really good audit of our practices for ways that we really need to improve the process.”
According to the board agenda for the meeting where the hire was approved, that investigator has a salary of $70,000.
Wallace said the hire had been “absolutely crucial” to improve the district’s process to verify student residency.
“My only regret is that we didn’t hire a full-time residency investigator years ago,” he said.
Going forward, Wallace said at the board of education meeting, he plans to contact local lawmakers about how to strengthen and enforce rules around district residency.
This story was updated to add more information from District 207 about its residency policy.
