Lowndes County School District Board Member Jacqueline Gray worries the district’s policy when it comes to affidavits of residency overcomplicates the registration process for LCSD parents and guardians.
Gray raised the point during the board’s meeting Monday during a vote to approve revisions to the student handbook for the upcoming academic year.
The requirement that guardians must provide extra proofs of residency on top of signing the affidavit makes registering unnecessarily difficult, she said.
“If I’m signing an affidavit, I’m swearing that somebody lives here with me,” Gray told the board. “If I sign an affidavit and I’m wrong, the prosecutor is going to do whatever he needs to do. But to make the parents supply mail at that person’s residence and all these other things, is really a civil rights violation. We’re keeping kids out of school.”
Per the LCSD handbook, guardians of students registering in the district are required to provide two current forms of residency verification, including examples like utility bills or mortgage documents.
Under circumstances when those forms cannot be provided, like if a student is living with friends or family instead of a legal guardian, an affidavit of residency can be signed that promises the student lives in the district.
LCSD’s added caveat, and Gray’s problem with the policy, is that in addition to signing the affidavit, a custodial parent must provide three more items to further prove residency, including forms like a doctor’s or dentist’s bill, a hospital bill or insurance policy.
Superintendent Sam Allison told The Dispatch after the meeting that falsified affidavits aren’t a huge problem in the district. The point in requiring extra proof of residency, he said, is to ensure students attending school are Lowndes County residents.
“Our taxpayers pay a lot of money for the kids who live in Lowndes County to go to Lowndes County schools, and we want to respect that,” Allison said to the board. “If you open the door and you don’t have some guidelines, then you’ll get run over.”
Board Attorney Jeff Smith said the board discussed the affidavit policy a couple of years ago and decided it was well within policy to request the additional items.
But Gray took issue with the policy itself.
“As long as we put it inside the policies, we can ask for anything,” she said. “I mean we could ask for the sky if we want to. Just because it’s in policy doesn’t mean it makes it easier to be able to go to school. An affidavit should be enough.”
Board Member Wesley Barrett read the list of 10 items that are acceptable forms of additional documentation and said parents and guardians could surely provide three of them.
“If you can’t figure that out, you need to go to school somewhere,” he said.
“It’s not that they don’t understand what you have to provide,” Gray said, raising examples of students experiencing homelessness and families who move into the district. “They don’t always have that to provide.”
Board Secretary Brad Fleming asked Allison if there’s any grace for special circumstances when it comes to accepting the affidavits.
“If you have someone that’s recently moved into a place, and they can show where they’ve left somewhere or recently moved in … we will give them the grading period (to update the affidavit),” he said.
Allison said the added proofs of residency are more of a deterrent for falsified affidavits, not an effort to make the registration process more difficult. He added that guardians who are unable to provide the additional documentation can schedule a meeting with him to discuss their options.
Fleming asked Allison to collect statistics for the board on how often affidavits are used and falsified. The board moved forward with no changes and voted 4-1 to approve the handbook, with Gray voting no.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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