I overheard a friend of a friend recount an interesting story about the difficulty he and his wife were having trying to provide a quality education for their child.


They live in suburban Detroit, and wanted their child to go to a school in a well-regarded district. The problem was their district of choice was not the one they lived in, but rather a district with a top-rated high school that happened to be located a few municipalities away.



That was okay, they figured, they would rent an apartment in their targeted district thereby establishing residency. Well, sort of. In actuality they were merely securing an address, for which they paid somewhere in the ballpark of $7,000-$10,000 a year. They figured it was worth that much to send their child to a school that they were certain would provide a quality education.


I figured someone willing to go to such lengths to get a child into a public school was pretty determined. I was a bit surprised to see the district he was sneaking his child into was equally determined to keep non-residents out. Turns out, the district was investigating the couple and caught on to the apartment ploy.


I don't know what ultimately happened. I had to leave just as he began to talk about plotting his next move. But I recalled that conversation I overheard a while back as I read a Detroit Free Press article last week about residency fraud. I wondered what he and his wife eventually did.


Faced with necessary belt-tightening or looming budget deficits, districts like Birmingham, Dearborn, Grosse Pointe and Southfield are investigating hundreds of students a year who they suspect of attending their schools illegally, according to the Freep. Most districts require parents to provide some type of proof of residency by producing a mortgage or lease agreement, household bills and the like when registering their children. Parents use relatives, fake addresses, or find other ways to skirt the policies to get their children in to schools they see as more attractive.


Whether these schools actually do offer better educational opportunities or greater safety is another question -- parents are doing what it takes to get their children into them. And it's not just parents from Detroit, as indicated by the conversation I overheard. However, there are large numbers of them.


Living in a middle class neighborhood on Detroit's east side over the years I have seen teens walking around with letterman's jackets and cheerleading uniforms from schools as far away as Mt. Clemens.


Parents naturally want what's best for the children, particularly when it comes to education. Each time there is a report of a shooting at or near a school that desire is intensified, because nothing is more important than your child's safety. Gangs and dropout rates contribute to the problem because parents must fear having their children being threatened by, or possibly falling in with, either group.


There are quite a few districts, including Oak Park, Highland Park and Inkster, that welcome students from Detroit, the Freep reported. In fact, Oak Park has about 1,200 are nonresidents out of 3,800 students, and the school superintendent says most are from Detroit.


There are plenty of good schools in the city of Detroit, public and private among them. There are also plenty of safe neighborhoods. But the foreclosure crisis is really changing the game - and contributing to the ethical dilemma.


What happens when you can't sell your home in order to move into a better neighborhood and school? What do you do when you can't afford a private education?


As more parents feel they are running out of education options for their children I suspect questions like these will pose less and less of an ethical dilemma.