CPS wants former student’s family to pay $56,000 over allegations of lying about residency

Chicago Public Schools officials are trying to recoup more than $56,000 from a family who’s accused of living in the northern suburbs but lying about their residency to send their daughter to a highly competitive city high school.

The student attended Northside College Prep, a selective enrollment school on Chicago’s Northwest Side, from 2019 until this past December, according to a report released Thursday by the CPS inspector general’s office.

Investigators found the student and her father violated the district’s residency rules by reporting that they lived in the basement of his cousin’s home in Chicago when the girl actually lived with her mother in suburban Lincolnwood, the report said.

Children who live outside Chicago are required to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year in non-resident tuition to attend the city’s taxpayer-funded schools. In this case, that added up to $56,337.13 for three school years and one semester.

“We have to look at these cases because every seat that is taken by a student who doesn’t reside in the district means that a student who does reside in the city of Chicago is deprived of the opportunity to go to one of these schools,” Inspector General Will Fletcher said in an interview.

“They’re highly competitive. And parents and families fight like hell to get their kids into some of these schools.”

The IG’s office surveilled the family’s Lincolnwood home several times and saw the student leaving the home in the morning for school.

During an interview with the office, the girl’s father said he often stayed at his cousin’s basement in Chicago and used that address for his daughter to satisfy the district’s residency requirement. After his daughter was admitted to Northside, the dad and his cousin created an apartment lease naming the father as the lessee and his daughter as an authorized occupant to make the address official, the report said.

The father then got a new Illinois ID card with the Chicago address after the school’s principal demanded additional proof of residency. The ID was obtained days before the principal’s due date, the IG found.

Investigators also interviewed the cousin’s wife, who lives at the Chicago address and said the father and daughter come and go from the home but neither consistently live there, which is required to satisfy the residency rule. The woman hadn’t seen the girl at the house for over a month, the report said.

The IG’s office recommended the district disenroll the student and seek non-resident tuition from the family. A hearing on the girl’s residency was held and a presiding hearing officer concurred with the IG’s findings, ruling the student lived with her mother, siblings and grandparents at the Lincolnwood home throughout her time at CPS.

The district removed the student from Northside in late December — right before her last semester of high school — and banned her from all CPS selective enrollment schools and programs. The collection efforts for the $56,337 are ongoing, the report said.

The girl’s family sued CPS in Cook County Circuit Court in November seeking to block the district from disenrolling her and collecting the tuition charge. A judge blocked the parents’ emergency motion to keep the girl in school while the lawsuit played out. But the case remains in court.

The family’s attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.