GILROY—Just weeks after vowing to get tough on lying parents, Gilroy’s schools chief has refused to release names of hundreds the district says falsified legal forms to get kids into its flashy, newer $158 million Christopher High School instead of the older Gilroy High School.
In a February request to Gilroy schools superintendent Debbie Flores, the Dispatch asked for the names of the upwards of 300 parents in 150 or so cases found by the district to have falsified addresses—in what apparently is the most massive and on-going case of attendance fraud in the district’s history.
Citing state and federal laws that exempt student records from disclosure, the district’s lawyer in an emailed response this month to the Dispatch said Gilroy Unified School District “…does not have records it can disclose.”
The attorney, Mary Hernandez, of Garcia Hernandez Sawhney & Bermudez in Oakland, further wrote, “The investigation process for residency verification largely involves the drafts and notes of the person conducting the investigation…that are destroyed after the matter is resolved.”
Whether the district’s investigator was ordered to destroy records was unclear.
But school board member Mark Good, an attorney and former Gilroy police officer, said destruction of the investigation records “does not make sense to me.”
So unhappy has Good been with the nagging matter of parents falsifying addresses—and taxpayer money spent to investigate–—he might put the issue on the school board’s agenda for discussion, he said Tuesday.
“I have been pressing to have (the investigator) rehired. I would like every cent we
paid (for investigation) to be paid by the wrongdoers—I would like to see them prosecuted,” he said.
The district pays a part time enrollment investigator $40 per hour and he’s used on an as-needed basis.
What the parents did “sets a horrible example for their children…supporting the notion that Christopher High School is better than Gilroy High School, which is not true,” said Good, all of whose children attended GHS.
Falsifying school records is a violation of state law.
In the six years since Christopher High School opened, none of the 150 or so cases of falsified address forms has been prosecuted—and some who lied were not even district residents.
“I guess they escaped (punishment),” Good said of the wrongdoers after hearing the district refused to release the names—although he said that while morally he wants to see the parents prosecuted, the district still must follow advice of its legal counsel when it comes to the release of records.
If cases were referred to the county district attorney and prosecuted, the parents’ names would be a matter of public record.
All cases uncovered to date by the district have been resolved by reassignment of the student to GHS or the high school in his or her school district if it was not GUSD, according to Flores.
But in a sternly worded letter sent Jan. 29 to parents of incoming 9th graders, she called the falsification of addresses“shameful” and threatened civil action to recoup costs and referrals to the Santa Clara County District Attorney for possible criminal prosecution.
“The use of fraudulent addresses must stop and we will take all necessary steps to ensure that it does stop,” she wrote.
Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney John Chase, who heads the office’s public integrity unit, Tuesday said he is unaware of any in-district attendance fraud case prosecuted by the DA. He added that, “If a crime is committed, we’d look into it, investigate and prosecute.”
On the subject of inter-district enrollment fraud, he said in an emailed statement, “Because the law establishes the residency requirements for attending a particular school district, any violation of those requirements, by definition, is illegal. Whether enrolling a child in the wrong school district constitutes a crime depends on the specific circumstances of the case.”
