This story has been in the news for some time, but the verdict came down and the mother responsible is going to see prison time. And not just a little bit. What, precisely, did this woman do? Well, after losing her housing, this woman used a friend's/babysitter's address to enroll her son in a public school in a neighboring district, not where she held her last known address.
The very notion of stealing a public education is wholly preposterous. It is at the very heart of structural violence. Based upon your address, and your zip code, your child will be enrolled in a school. Districts are often funded by local taxes; therefore the more wealthy the district, the more resources it can allocate to its public schools. Those who live in less wealthy zip codes don't have access to the high-quality public education that middle and high income communities enjoy. There is a fundamental link between income and the quality of your education, and there are laws reinforcing this inequality. If we view quality education as a human right, then laws restricting access to quality education (such as the Jim Crow laws) are inherently violent, and that violence is ingrained in systems of power and law (tax law, educational policy, etc).
I know all too well how this feels on a personal level. And I am not alone.
If you know me well at all, you probably know where I come from. I grew up in a rural community with a struggling and underfunded public school system. Already, when I compared myself to public school students in Seattle, a mere 45 minutes away, I knew that I was years behind. Due to years of sustained population growth to the entire region, the historically underfunded public schools were busting at the seams. The community could no longer deny the absolute necessity for new school buildings.
My parents moved to this community from an even further removed, even smaller town up in the foothills of the cascades. They moved, in part, because they believed their children would have access to higher quality public schools. The ability to move, to displace their entire family, to give their children a better chance was already an immense privilege not available to every family. And then they watched as the public schools in this new town became more and more crowded, the class size larger and larger.
And then they built a new elementary school.
I was going into 5th grade when the new school was to open. I remember that my mom dragged me to the PTA meeting where they were announcing which students got to go to the new school (with the better teachers, the better equipment) and which students would remain in President's Elementary. I remember my mother's anxiety as she stepped up to the map that related one's geography, one's address, to one's educational opportunity.
I remember the look in my mother's face when she saw the map. All the new developments, the shiny new McMansions that were bought up by folks commuting from down South, were on the part of the map that got to go to the new school. My house, on the side of town with the farms and the folks who had been around for a while, the folks who's property tax was significantly less, was on the side of the map that was stuck in the school that was built in the 1950s. The economics of the situation were not veiled.
And I remembered my mother's anger at the unfairness of the situation. Her child, for whom she had moved her family, was faced with a barrier to getting his best possible education. If my mother could have lied to get me into the better school, she would have.
Wanting the best for your child, and his or her future, and being willing to fight for that future should be a positive attribute. We hear all too often that poor parents don't care about their children's education. They don't ask their children to study, or teach them about the ethics of hard work. These are kids who watch TV and play video games, but don't read or study. But stories like this rub uncomfortably against this myth. Here is a mother willing to go to jail, quite literally, to give her child a better future. She cares, obviously, with all her life. And what do we, as a society give her? Do we fight for better schools in all communities? Do we try to break down the economic barriers between high-performing and low-performing schools? Do we remove the false boundaries that divide communities and schools? Do we give parents more flexibility to keep their children in the same schools even after their economics (ie losing a job) may force a change in their address or zip code?
No. We send them to jail. Because they didn't play by the rules.
But the rules are structural violence. Keeping children from their best possible education is not to be lauded. And fighting against that violence should not be criminalized.
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