New Jersey's Latest Crime Wave

     Sally Hernandez (I have changed her name to protect her
privacy) responded to the door bell at her South Orange home at
5:45 a.m.  "Who would be calling at this hour," she wondered, as
she made her way downstairs from her second-floor apartment.
     Standing on the stoop was a middle-aged man who identified
himself as an investigator for the South Orange-Maplewood Board of
Education.  He said he wanted to see her 5-year-old son.  She
explained her son was sleeping; but the man politely insisted that
he had to make sure that the child, whom Ms Hernandez had recently
enrolled in the local kindergarten, was living in the house.  She
suggested that he follow her upstairs and see for himself.  The man
said he was not allowed to enter the house; Ms Hernandez should
bring him to the door.  Reluctantly, she carried her sleeping son
downstairs.  Satisfied, the man left.
     Ms Hernandez is just one of thousands of parents and guardians
of school-age children in Northern New Jersey who have been
harassed and persecuted recently by over-zealous school officials
bent on combatting what they view as the state's newest crime wave:
theft of an education.  Other parents complain about investigators
following their children home from school or accosting them on the
streets demanding to know where they live; or of building
inspectors who show up unexpected with the excuse of checking for
smoke detectors or some other suspect explanation.
                                 *   *   *
     Time was when school boards hired truant officers to make sure
that all the kids who lived in town were enrolled and attending
classes regularly.   Occasionally, a parent or guardian trying to
self-educate a kid got nabbed and then had a dickens of a time
defending the behavior.  I even recall some old movie about this,
with a kindly old Wallace Berry trying to keep his young charge,
probably Shirley Temple, from the clutches of the educational
authorities.
     Not any longer.  It seems most school boards in these parts
like nothing better than parents or guardians who are satisfied to
let their kids sit home and watch television all day.  Most of them
are hiring detectives to see how many young miscreants they can
catch sneaking into school.
     Educating children costs money.  And there apparently is
nothing that a taxpayer hates more than the expenditure of public
money.  So school trustees looking forward to reelection are more
and more devoting themselves to reducing school budgets by keeping
kids out of school -- rather than determining how to get them there
and educate them.
     The Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers Law School has
been besieged by parents and guardians whose children have been
denied enrollment in the local public school where they reside. 
Others like Ms Hernandez have been outraged by intrusive
investigators demanding that they produce the body of a young
education-consumer alleged to dwell on the premises.  

     In Union City, town officials went so far as to require that
parents obtain a certificate of occupancy from the building
inspector as a condition of school enrollment.  City Hall officials
were dispatched to check whether students were living in
overcrowded apartments.  One family was denied a certificate
because the parents and their four sons were living in a one-
bedroom apartment.  The Superior Court Judge explained to the Board
of Education's attorney, in issuing an order forbidding the
practice, that resident children have a constitutional right to a
"thorough and efficient" public education whether they and their
families live in a palace, a hovel or on the street.  In Union
City, local officials seemed to believe that children without
adequate housing should be doubly victimized by also being denied
an education.
     Other towns in Northern New Jersey have developed other
schemes to reduce the student population by dictating to families
how they should structure their households.  
     In the good old days, citizens would be hailed as Good
Samaritans if they rescued some poor waif from the streets and
attempted to provide a decent home and school environment. 
Nowadays, such conduct would more likely be prosecuted as theft of
services.  Even blood relations -- grandmothers, siblings, aunts --
are facing such charges if they attempt to salvage young relatives
from broken homes.  
     One elderly couple in South Orange had raised their grandson
from birth.  When the child got to high school, the school
gendarmes realized they were not his parents, and decided to charge
them back tuition.  The grandparents, eager to continue to educate
their grandson, paid thousands of dollars they earned as a
custodian and housekeeper.  When they couldn't afford to pay any
more, the child sat home for several months until a 
sympathetic judge ordered the school board to educate the boy and
stop harassing the family.
     A woman in Bloomfield was convicted and fined $500 for
allowing her little sister to live with her and go to a local
school when their ailing mother was facing eviction from her Newark
home.  The younger sister committed the sin of returning to Newark
on several occasions to take care of her sick mother after the
landlord agreed to delay mama's eviction for several extra months. 
The daughter was unaware that a school board gum shoe was following
her home from school.  That case is now on appeal.
     In Scotch Plains, the high school allowed one of its star
athletes to continue on through the wrestling season even though it
was aware the family had lost its home and been forced to move back
to Plainfield at the start of the school term.  The day after the
state championships (two months before the student was due to
graduate) the youth was expelled and the parents ordered to pay
back tuition.
     Invariably, when these families come to the Rutgers clinic,
they have a happy ending.  If the school boards do not immediately
concede error, a court usually orders them to do so.   But we can
represent only a few of the numerous families victimized by over-
zealous, budget-conscious school administrators.  Many families
just give up in the face of bureaucratic oppression.
     It is beyond time for somebody in Trenton -- be it the
Legislature or the Department of Education -- to step in and put a
stop to this unjustifiable assault on children and families.  

(Printed in the Star-Ledger, Dec. 1, 1996)