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Toward the end of the last school year, New Rochelle School District officials announced that they would be re-registering each of the district’s 10,700 students, though they were forced to amend their initial plan to give themselves “a more realistic timetable to complete the (task).”
According to the CBS report, a consultant involved in the residency verification who has verified enrollment in the district found that as many as 200 of the 11,000 registered students may not live in the city. The improperly registered students may be costing the district upward of $5 million annually.
One address highlighted in the CBS report is from an improperly registered student was 515 North Ave., the address of New Rochelle City Hall. Other parents have also taken extreme measures to enroll their children in the district.
The initial re-registration was announced by district officials early last year, following a pair of stabbing incidents involving students, including a fatal stabbing involving a student who lived in Yonkers. It was never released if the student was improperly registered in New Rochelle, though it led to questions from parents and officials alike.
“The Department has recently been made aware of public concerns and inquiries indicating that some school districts have instituted a practice of mandatory ‘re-registration’ wherein all parents and guardians are required to ‘re-register’ their students in such districts prior to the start of school in September 2018,” Jhone Ebert, the NYSED Senior Deputy Commissioner for Education Policy wrote in a statement last year. “At this time, the Department has confirmed the existence of this practice on the websites of two New York State school districts.”
Former Port Chester Schools Superintendent Charles Coletti had been tasked with leading the initiative, following a successful re-registration under his watch while he was at the helm in Port Chester. The district originally laid out an ambitious proposal to re-register all 11,000 students, but were forced to hit the brakes on that initial plan.
Click here to read the CBS New York report.
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