A school boundary error that long went unnoticed allowed some students living on one short street in Glen Ellyn to improperly attend schools in the Lombard district for at least nine years and possibly longer, officials said Thursday.
The street, the 100 block of Surrey Drive, is lined with apartment buildings and a few homes and is actually in Glen Ellyn. The misperception that it’s within the Lombard school district was so common that even the Lombard district’s website shows it to be within its borders.
Superintendent Jim Blanche said he is not sure how many students were mistakenly allowed to register in Lombard School District 44 or how long it’s been going on.
“We’ve been too easy,” said Blanche. “It’s been too easy to register in District 44.”
The mistake was discovered this year when the district decided to step up enforcement of residency requirements and hired a private firm to do checks.
One parent from Surrey Drive, whose son went through his entire elementary and middle school career in District 44, was stopped when she tried to register her kindergarten-age daughter at Madison Elementary School, Blanche said.
This girl now is enrolled in a school in Glen Ellyn Elementary District 89 — the district Surrey Drive students are supposed to attend, Blanche said.
“A mistake was made with the older child, but we’re not going to provide nine years of free education to the (younger) student,” he said.
Investigators, he said, discovered about a dozen students who do not reside in the district.
Some of those students have withdrawn from the district; others have cases that are pending.
Blanche said District 44 has a full-day kindergarten, which may explain why some parents were tempted to send their children there.
The district, Blanche said, does not intend to pursue anyone to recover the cost of educating a student who was incorrectly registered.
“We’re not going to try and recoup the money when it was our mistake,” Blanche said, adding that the district will continue to do residency checks and pursue anyone who registers a child who does not live there.
Parents who live outside the district have the option of paying tuition, which is about $11,000 a year.
Blanche said at least one parent is doing that and it wouldn’t be fair to allow other students who do not live in the district to attend without paying tuition.
On Thursday afternoon, a 16-year-old student hopped off the school bus taking him to his home on Surrey Drive from Glenbard East High School.
The teen said he is not surprised if many people in the neighborhood think they should be going to a District 44 school.
“They like it,” he said. “It’s more convenient.”
