The scariest part of this story isn’t that they’re doing LPR at drop-off, it’s that they’re claiming to have knowledge of where the car is parked overnight.
> her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.”
The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?
"With LPR intelligence tools such as Thomson Reuters license plate recognition, corporate crime professionals have the ability to share and request the sharing of commercial LPR data with other corporations."
Fun fact: Motorola Solutions sells LPRs not only to law enforcement (via Vigilant Solutions), they also sell them via the "Digital Recognition Network" arm to third party companies - tow operators, private operations, and so on.
Some of the largest customers of DRN are banks, especially sub-prime lenders :)
And all of them... feed right into the greater LEARN (Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network) system that the feds and company have access to at all times.
more concerning than overnight, in my opinion, is monitoring it in summer months when school is presumably out and keeping a record of it for who knows how long.
Big flag error I can see right away is joint custody where a parent lives out of the zone.
Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged.
Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision?
What about paid caregivers or family members?
This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it.
There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.
Where I grew up it was "technically" whichever parent had primary custody, which back then was usually very clear - especially during the school year. So much like taxes are "6 months and a day" for residency, it was similar for school.
In reality it was basically just "one parent lives in the district with a legal mailing address that works" - and very rarely enforced or even looked into. Especially if a kid was already enrolled and then later had a life event.
It more competitive/exclusive districts though this gets taken very seriously, with certain parents tattle-telling on others, etc.
This is all around a bad idea. Not only because of the scenario you mentioned but because modern “families” look different today. Zones split right down neighborhoods… even living one block away puts you in another school.
Right. I am in that bucket described by parent comment but also live literally at the edge of the district boundary our second child will eventually attend that I intentionally took up residence in a few years ago when we split. All kinds of motivation as to why a SD would do this but I don't need that decision influenced by a company that has no presence in the state let alone the district I live.
This is "falsehoods programmers believe about addresses" on steroids. Six years ago, I couldn't drive due to injuries and gave my car to my dad, who took it to California. I was pretty diligent about making sure the ownership records transferred and he registered it, but I'm imagining the state of Texas using this as a pretense to deny my ability to vote, and California deciding I owe them income taxes.
State taxes can be a bit of a mess, E&Y (accountants) were enlisted to started looking at expense reports at a long-ago former employer to be sure people were staying within the guidelines. There are "jock" taxes mainly intended for pro athletes and entertainers but they theoretically apply to everyone for even a one night stay in some states. (Shortish stays for "normal" people were ignored but not sure how kosher that actually was.)
The American system of school funding strongly encourages pulling up the ladder behind you. Real estate values are influenced by school ratings, too. Hence Karen as-a-service.
While the school is paying Thompson Reuters CLEAR for information about where their students supposedly live, CLEAR isn't limiting their data collection to just student families.
They are collecting information about everyone en masse and making up different problems they are "solving". Everyone in the US should realize that this is a story about themselves, not just some family in Chicago.
A surveillance tech company asserting that they know better, based on 'big data'. Shocking.
The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.
> The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.
Doesn't the family have a very straightforward libel claim against the third party? That the car was parked elsewhere may be true. "Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside" is a statement the family can disprove in court (to a civil standard) and demonstrate has financially damaged them ("her daughter is currently attending a private school 45 minutes away from her home"). If that statement came from the third party (rather than the school district misinterpreting the raw data themselves), the family will win. The straightforward financial damages (let alone anything pain / suffering / punitive damages) likely exceed the company's payment from the school district ("a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract"). It wouldn't take many of these claims before the company becomes insolvent, and good riddance.
I'd also expect them to win a lawsuit against the school district for falsely denying the basic right of education. Perhaps the individual school administrator also for libel. With any luck, a total legal bloodbath that warns any other school districts away from this conduct.
That depends if the third party makes the claim of non-residence and how they make it, and if they disclaim warranty and reliance. I can show you a site with some graphs and data of who is parked where and when and how often; I doubt they're directly saying, "This person definitely doesn't live at this residence, so deny her child entry."
The irony is that the system might technically be "correct" about where the car was seen overnight, but that still doesn't prove anything about where the family actually lives
In this case, I would think residence is irrelevant, considering this person is paying property tax that pays for this school and land records can easily prove this.
The thing they're trying to combat is people claiming residency in a better school district. We had a case here where the parents were driving their kid to grandma's so the kid could go to school there instead of in a bad local school.
The way you've written this is a bit misleading. I can own undeveloped property in a school district and pay the property taxes for it, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to someone owning a home in that district. The residency requirement would mean you're paying enough property tax since you've clearly developed the property if you are living there.
It still blows my mind when people tell me a car is "freedom". Yeah, the freedom to be tracked at all times by _multiple_ public and private organizations. So when you build a public institution that can only be accessed by car, congrats! Surveillance is the price of entry now.
School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there. It’s a big source of fraud that hurts those paying taxes in the districts. I’m all for strong enforcement of those rules, but this goes too far.
In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.
Is using the surveillance state the solution to this problem though? I personally don't think so. There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc. Will there be some number of people that cheat the system? Absolutely. Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely.
Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.
> Will there be some number of people that learn about the license plate trackers and buy a $500 beater and park it on the right street to "beat them"? Also absolutely.
I believe they’re using LPR at drop off and pick up too, so parking a $500 junker somewhere isn’t a workaround. They would have to drive to the parked car every morning, transfer into it, drive it to school, return to the parking location, swap cars again, and then repeat the entire routine for pick up. It all technically could be done, but as a parent who knows what it’s like to hustle multiple kids to school in the morning I doubt this routine would be a common workaround.
> There are other solutions, utility bills in the families name, ownership/rental documents, etc.
Will these cause injustice and false positives even more than license plate tracking? What is your point?
> Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue.
Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid one school doing a $1K/mo license plate tracking contract to make sure kids live in the district that they're attending school in? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
Surveillance State? They already have all kinds of data on you, including your child’s vaccination records, security cameras throughout the building, supposed home addresses, and parental information. I assume you have to have your ID scanned before entering the building. LPR does not offer anything revelatory from a personal freedoms perspective.
Tracking license plates to look for unusually activity is an easy win for both fraud prevention and security from more serious threats.
Can’t speak for Chicago, but in my city the schools get similar funds on a per-student basis yet still have very large differences in academics from school to school.
The reason parents try to get into different schools isn’t to chase funding, it’s to get into the one with the best outcomes. A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student.
This isn't 'fraud' in any meaningful moral sense, it is a rational reaction to immoral, unjust school funding models that perpetuate systemic inequalities based on the zip-code you can afford. I'm sure schools have a duty to police this in their mind, sure, but I side with parents trying to evade the boundaries they've been put because they weren't born rich enough.
If you have proof of home ownership and proof of legal guardianship of the child, what’s the problem?
I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!
Ok, how big of an issue? How many students? How much wasted on fraud? I went to a top school where sometimes students tried to fake residency. It was essentially a non issue in the grand scheme of the potential waste for a school district to generate.
I wonder if perhaps the noise of families ratting each other out is getting too loud. This sounds like a solution to cut through the noise and have their own data. Like you said, this does go a bit too far. It also does not seem to properly equip the school district with factually correct info. Metal on wheels isn't a good data point for "You live here".
The kind of district where people would rat each other out at any rate that would cause non-trivial amounts of work is going to be full of exactly the kind of people who wouldn't see anything wrong with treating a circuitous 3rd party ALPR enforcement system as authoritative and would have the spare $$$ to pay for such a boondoggle.
> School districts do have an issue with those without bona fide residency attending school there
How does this work? Do parents use a friend’s address to register for the school? Is there no way for the state-run school to check against tax records?
Readit News
> her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.”
The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?
https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/leveraging-license-pla...
Key bit:
"With LPR intelligence tools such as Thomson Reuters license plate recognition, corporate crime professionals have the ability to share and request the sharing of commercial LPR data with other corporations."
Eg. Flock and Vigilant Solutions.
https://losgatan.com/class-action-suit-against-flock-license...
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260227692233/en/Flo...
My car is paid for but I just don't display a license plate period (in my US state it's only a $10 fine to not).
Some of the largest customers of DRN are banks, especially sub-prime lenders :)
https://drndata.com/about/
https://drndata.com/news/motorola-solutions-acquires-vaas-in...
And all of them... feed right into the greater LEARN (Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network) system that the feds and company have access to at all times.
Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged.
Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision?
What about paid caregivers or family members?
This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it. There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.
In reality it was basically just "one parent lives in the district with a legal mailing address that works" - and very rarely enforced or even looked into. Especially if a kid was already enrolled and then later had a life event.
It more competitive/exclusive districts though this gets taken very seriously, with certain parents tattle-telling on others, etc.
I’ll pause for everyone’s minds to finish blowing.
and then the school administrators said, paraphrasing, "despite owning a home in the district, fuck you"
They are collecting information about everyone en masse and making up different problems they are "solving". Everyone in the US should realize that this is a story about themselves, not just some family in Chicago.
The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.
Doesn't the family have a very straightforward libel claim against the third party? That the car was parked elsewhere may be true. "Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside" is a statement the family can disprove in court (to a civil standard) and demonstrate has financially damaged them ("her daughter is currently attending a private school 45 minutes away from her home"). If that statement came from the third party (rather than the school district misinterpreting the raw data themselves), the family will win. The straightforward financial damages (let alone anything pain / suffering / punitive damages) likely exceed the company's payment from the school district ("a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract"). It wouldn't take many of these claims before the company becomes insolvent, and good riddance.
I'd also expect them to win a lawsuit against the school district for falsely denying the basic right of education. Perhaps the individual school administrator also for libel. With any luck, a total legal bloodbath that warns any other school districts away from this conduct.
I can't imagine why highly paid school admin wouldn't correct an obvious mistake.
I would not have expected a school administrator to be highly paid. What kind of salary are we talking about here?
Dead Comment
In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.
Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.
I believe they’re using LPR at drop off and pick up too, so parking a $500 junker somewhere isn’t a workaround. They would have to drive to the parked car every morning, transfer into it, drive it to school, return to the parking location, swap cars again, and then repeat the entire routine for pick up. It all technically could be done, but as a parent who knows what it’s like to hustle multiple kids to school in the morning I doubt this routine would be a common workaround.
Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
Will these cause injustice and false positives even more than license plate tracking? What is your point?
> Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue.
Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid one school doing a $1K/mo license plate tracking contract to make sure kids live in the district that they're attending school in? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
Tracking license plates to look for unusually activity is an easy win for both fraud prevention and security from more serious threats.
The reason parents try to get into different schools isn’t to chase funding, it’s to get into the one with the best outcomes. A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student.
Straight to jail with you.
This isn't 'fraud' in any meaningful moral sense, it is a rational reaction to immoral, unjust school funding models that perpetuate systemic inequalities based on the zip-code you can afford. I'm sure schools have a duty to police this in their mind, sure, but I side with parents trying to evade the boundaries they've been put because they weren't born rich enough.
You may think it’s OK to steal because the end justifies the means… but it’s still stealing.
I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!
How does this work? Do parents use a friend’s address to register for the school? Is there no way for the state-run school to check against tax records?
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