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."
Shouldn't be information the school district has a right to access. It's none of their business where a person's car is parked over night. I really hope society pushes back on surveillance.
The craziest part of this is that a school district thinks that the overnight location of the vehicle used to transport a student has anything to do with the location of the residence. Especially when that data is from a time period when the school isn't in session.
I can think of a half dozen valid scenarios why the vehicle used for school drop off is parked away from the student's residence at night.
e.g. Vehicle belongs to a non-custodial parent from out of district who handles drop off. Vehicle is used by a household member to do overnight shift work. Family just moved, of course their vehicle wasn't being parked in the district in July. ALPR character recognition error. Parent and student live elsewhere in the summer, and still qualify as residents within the district.
It sometimes boggles the mind the amount of inflexibility that people doing these jobs have/are willing to use, especially in something so consequential.
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.
This isn't the Motorola that makes phones. Lenovo owns Motorola Mobility. But America kept the highly profitable business of building a surveillance state. Yay.
Welcome to Tennessee (it shouldn't matter, but it does: clean-cut taxpaying middle-aged white guy, with former background in govt data centers [1] ). If I had any detectible minority status, I would display a plate properly.
More onlookers (from behind) snap photos of this taglessness than any other politics/offensive bumper sticker I've had [2] — my only thought is that my vehicle misleads them to think that perhaps I'm undercover I.C.E. (purposefully obscurring)..?
[1] I've woken up blackout in a comped hotel when friends in identical situation got arrested/PI; I still carry a long-expired govt work badge in my moneyclip
[2] 2nd-most popular, all-time, was "Patron Saint of Denials Luigi Mangione" image
Tennesee also doesn't require antique vehicles to display the license plate (only to have it "available upon demand"). It's only 25 years old to be considered "antique," but you must request this from DMV (i.e. isn't automatic).
I have a printout of #1105 in my glovebox, specifically because my license plate is similarly-ridiculous (and "unscannable" but a legally-issued specialty plate). On the reverse is a copy of my state's law on "proper display of registration identifier," but not to discuss with a cop (for him to find in event of being an asshole, searching my vehicle).
My vehicle blends in and is otherwise-legal — non-compliance encourages me to obey most traffic laws — but I do carry the plate in my passenger seat to display in event of pull-over (my plate is some iteration of "no plate," and I do respect individual officers' safeties [1]).
[1] They have every right to know, when performing a lawful investigation. My plan would be to hold it up while initially stopped (to show intent of identification, my plate is complicated in many ways and must be searched for in a very odd way).
My state does not allow certain confusing characters, but I'm part of an organization which issues plates in specific violation of aforementioned character restrictions (as an added bonus the plate/organization is emblazzened with `EMERGENCY` across the bottom). ALPR camerae mis-read the plate, having applied state interpretation rules — no human has ever read it correctly, either [0].
But of course since you cannot even see it anymore it is definitely unscannable. I can drive by speed camera without issue (i.e. no citations received).
[0] I have only been pulled over once in the past decade (back when plate displayed normally), after traveling behind a cop for miles going 100mph+ through Dade County mountains. Cop: "I have no clue what agency you're with — you're plate didn't scan — but you need to slow the fuck down. You're lucky I have somewhere else to be!"
These lens "blockers" are working less-and-less well (as tech gets better if they ever worked well at all), and seem to increase targeting from law enforcement.
In Tennessee, after the first two citations for "improper display of registration" it becomes an actual crime (an actual misdemeanor); if I ever get to this point (four months now multiple cops behind me haven't given a single F), I have an increasingly-insane series of "protests" that have semi-interesting legalities [0].
[0] e.g. transfer registration to brother ($10 gift fee every few months, which results in no tag requirement); small 3ft trailer (possibly with guillotine erected atop, blocking view), as TN does not issue license plates to trailers less than 15ft length
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This isn't about "disappearing" (impossible in any modern civilization) — it's about sending a message and adding one small additional layer of protection from simple broad ALPR searches.
Returning a vehicle to a bank that someone has stopped paying for isn't exactly harm. If banks were unable to get vehicles back, people with bad credit would have a much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place.
I've often thought to spook legislators by crowd-sourcing this and scaling it. Any member if of the public can upload dashcam footage, and can search any number plate captured by the network: including legislators, town councilors and school board members. Access is gated by uploading dashcam and having it corroborated by other footage to avoid faked footage, e.g. cross-checking license plates in the same area.
My concerns are the decision makers may rake the wrong lesson from this, my own moral injury, and/or legal exposure when this information is inevitably used to harm someone. Also, Law enforcement would happily co-opt this service. Perhaps making the searches themselves public would alleviate same of the challenges.
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.
The inequality of school districts is probably one of the biggest systemic barriers in our society.
That being said, school choice isn’t that helpful. The most segregated school district in the US is NYC, which has had citywide school choice for a long time.
> In 2018 in New York, 90% of black students attended predominantly nonwhite schools, while Latino student enrollment in predominantly nonwhite schools has remained roughly stable (84%). Almost two out of three black students and over half of Latino students attend intensely segregated schools, where less than 10% of student enrollment is white.
Just because they are there statistically doesn’t mean there isn’t an underlying reason.
Maybe the “best” districts do what was done to me when I was growing up and purposefully test me harder, then get upset when I passed. Trying to justify that I didn’t belong but I ended up scoring a 99.9% on their stupid aptitude tests.
There’s a whole host of reasons why someone with choice still chooses shitty…
Yeah well aware after ~17 years in public/higher ed in multiple states and what crossed my mind first when I read the parent's name in the article though trying not to generalize as I know nothing of the district mentioned.
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.)
Right. And when you see someone so dedicated do it there is almost certainly a hidden variable which causes this to occur. I imagine the nature of funding of these schools and the distribution of public monies has a lot to do with it.
> ways of combating fraud
Imagine being the richest country in the world and _caring_, honestly, about school location "fraud."
The country as a whole may be "rich" in terms of GDP but school districts are funded locally and many towns are struggling or underwater in terms of finances.
I lived in a working class town with a school district that built up a great reputation, especially for special needs students, due to the hard work of some amazing teachers and local parents. After I left I found out that the district had to scale back many programs dramatically because the number of students, especially special needs students, was growing significantly faster than the overall tax base and got close to bankrupting the town. Most of that was an increase in the ratio of families (esp special needs families) moving to town for the schools, but apparently there were fraud cases as well.
I have sympathy for the incoming families that sought out the best school they could find for their children, but I also sympathize with the existing families who lost the great programs they helped build because they became too successful.
A better solution would have been to fund education more equitably at the state level, but that was not a lever that the school district had.
> A better solution would have been to fund education more equitably at the state level
Which could only work if the state was "richer" than the local district. So by playing abstract and unnecessary games with money and districting we intentionally prevent schools from accessing the funding which could obviate concerns over this "fraud" issue entirely.
> but that was not a lever that the school district had at the time.
The idea of a parent "fraudulently" getting their child an education from a "district" is still just hilarious to me. What is the point of this system? To make parents play games or to educate children?
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.
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."
That distinction is what I was getting at with "if that statement came from the third party (rather than the school district misinterpreting the raw data themselves)".
If the company just provided the raw data, they may be in better legal shape. But I'd say either they or the school administrator libeled the family. Maybe both. (Of course, I'm not a lawyer.) Even if the company did provide only the raw data, I wonder if libel is somehow implied in its contracted/intended use. And I'm really hoping for the legal bloodbath outcome, because this is unconscionable.
The family may not have time or money to pursue this, but there are lawyers who work on contingency or even pro bono, including the ACLU.
Having never heard of Dolton before, I certainly can't speak to their specifics. School systems can be pretty huge orgs requiring significant management expertise; no one blinks an eye when a CEO gets pay for similar responsibilities.
My kids went to a big football high school in Texas and it wouldn't surprise me if the admins there felt a lot of pressure around football. It generated a lot of money for the district and proceeds funded a lot of the arts programs (especially marching band which was huge).
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.
Yes. I'm saying there's a legit interest in combatting a real challenge. This is a false positive and a stupid bureaucratic hole of the school's own creation.
But the parents aren't, and grandma's tax contribution may have already gone towards funding the parents. The system's structured with local revenue; letting people change their locality too easily messes with that structure a lot.
(I pay, for example, about $3k in school taxes annually, but I have two kids in a $21k/year district. If they have kids, I may be still paying for their education, let alone the grandkids.)
> Real solution is to loosen regulations on private schools and provide equivalent tax return to parents who choose private over public.
Yeah, privatization always results in better results and zero scammy abuses of the system.
Feels like now we're getting into "falsehoods programmers believe about family." My cousin effectively lived with us when he was a kid and went to school in the district for our house, not his mom's. My niece was raised jointly by my sister and my parents, but my sister's housing situation was so unstable she lived with my parents more often, and went to school in that district as well. What exactly do they even do if a parent has no stable housing at all? Make the kid change schools every month?
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.
Then the government should advertise an explicit minimum amount of tax paid annually in order to register for the school, or switch property tax to land value tax only.
The residency requirement is that minimum. It's not a minimum in monetary limits. It's a minimum that you have to actually live there. The fact you are living there means you are paying a higher tax amount than for an undeveloped lot. There's a difference on having a house on a lot vs just some field. You have some skin in the game as they say compared to just owning land while living somewhere else completely.
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.
The person in the article provided proof in the form of a mortgage statement, which should establish that they pay tax to the district. Where they spend their time outside of school hours seems irrelevant.
> 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?
> Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid license plate tracking? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
No, I'm talking about changing how schools are funded by making funds more evenly distributed across districts. Giving the kids in the "bad" areas the same opportunities as those in the "good" areas. Right now, if you can't afford that four-five-six-seven-hundred thousand dollar home, you aren't afforded the same level of public education as someone else who can. And doing so democratically, which is why I mentioned it'll never happen because no politician would be able to run on that. Their opponents would be outfunded by the top 10% to keep the status quo.
And this is coming from someone who own's a home in a "good" district. Where we got a total rebuilt elementary school 4 years ago, a new middle school actively being build, and a new high school that opened 3 years ago. Why should my kids have access to everything newer and better just because we can afford to live out in the suburbs, than someone else who isn't working in the cushy tech industry and instead is busting their ass only to live in poverty?
Newer does not mean better, or even imply it. Money spent on facilities has almost no correlation to educational outcomes.
What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy.
It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success.
The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day.
The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close.
The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn.
Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes.
The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction.
Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.
Uh what's undemocratic about the state legislature, which created the current system of small local districts, Changing how schools are funded and governed?
Small parroquial government entities that are funded inequitably are bad, actually. And the current system of schools districts is a legacy of segregation and white flight. Local government boundaries are entirely arbitrary, should the city let water or fire services suffer in one council district because it doesn't produce enough taxes to support it?
A child's academic opportunity shouldn't be determined by their zip code and parents income. Everyone should have access to free high quality public schools.
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.
So? My employer has my SSN, address, work history, etc. but I don't want them to know about where I go on the weekends. It's a fallacy to say that just because an entity knows a lot about you that it's OK if they know everything about you.
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.
Then "school district fraud" shouldn't be a problem. If a parent is willing to committing a crime to get their kid into a good school, they're heavily engaged and involved.
School sizes do change over long time horizons as demographics grow. This is true.
But school buildings have limited capacity and teacher:student ratios should be maintained. These cannot be changed instantly. Planning happens according to people actually living there, so if a lot of people are circumventing the rules and cheating their way in it breaks the system.
Not even very long horizons. For example, a hot housing market can cause a rush of young families into a district as older retirees cash out and move to Florida or whatever. Schools adapt to this.
I agree following rules is important. What kind of example are you setting for your kids, right? But having some perspective is also important.
"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."
FYI, parent engagement is also heavily proportional to parent income/property prices.
Very hard to be engaged at school with double/triple working class jobs.
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.
All of the children get an education, but you have to divide up the attendance across the available schools.
A single child going to the incorrect school isn’t going to break the system, but when it starts happening at scale it starts diluting the per-student funding in a district, increasing class sizes (reducing the teacher to student ratio) and eventually puts the school over limits and forces nearby children who should be going there into schools that are farther away.
One or two students don't make a difference. But if a number of people lie, then that dilutes the experience of the legit students. So it's not just as simple as you make it sound.
Here's an extreme example. One boy I know went to a school from kindergarten. He was tall and expected to start on the basketball team. Suddenly,in his junior year, several great players showed up from out of nowhere. There were lots of rumors about whether they were legitimately allowed to enroll, but in the end several lifelong students were bumped from the team. The coach was happy. The principal loved the idea. The kids presumably enjoyed the new school. But there were several others who lost an opportunity.
There are downsides to open door policies like you're endorsing. Most of the time, they're not so visible. But when resources are finite, people get hurt.
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?
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.
What's concerning is not just the surveillance aspect but the idea that this kind of data is treated as authoritative enough to override traditional documentation like mortgage statements and utility bills
We had a similar problem some years back in the UK.
Surveillance powers that were justified as necessary because of terrorism were used to check on whether people lived in the correct area for a school - as well as a lot of other minor offences. The intent was obvious from the start because of the bodies that were given these powers (local authorities that run state schools are not involved in fighting terrorism). There was a backlash and the surveillance powers were trimmed down.
I got a bill recently from NYC for speeding through a red light, which was weird enough as it wasn't a car that I own. But the license plate listed is one I had years ago, when I lived in a different state. Clearly license plate databases even within government are inaccurate. I can't imagine how bad the private databases are. The fact that the government also leans on the private databases seems to compound the problem.
Likewise. I once got pulled over by the police because they insisted that my license plate had been turned in and I was driving without valid plates.
They called other officers, ran the plate, ran the VIN, ran the plate, ran the VIN. I dunno I think we sat there for almost an hour before they told me why they pulled me over and what was up.
The school district uses Thomson Reuters Clear to verify residency. Thomson Reuters Clear uses LPR data.
"School District 126’s contract with the license plate reader company shows it’s paying a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract that began in December of 2024 -- the same month that Sánchez and her daughter moved into their new Alsip home."
Per a Google search my county:
For the 2025–2026 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) charges nonresident tuition of
$21,668 for elementary school and $20,214 for secondary school. Nonresident students must apply through the International Admissions and Enrollment office, and not all schools are open to tuition-paying students.
My wife worked in the office of an elementary school for 20 years and verified residency, custody, restraining orders and more. She shared many stories about people gaming the system. People will cross state and county lines to access a better school or one closer to work.
> The plate reader company touts “Accurate residency verification does more than protect the financial health of public schools—it safeguards the trust and equity at the heart of public education.”
There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.
How and why are license plates being tracked to children? That this is not the most twisted part of the story is insane. Just the fact that driving children to school has become so prevalent that ALPR is an effective tool should raise some questions. Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness?
a school district is a customer of the same ALPR data broker network that sells to law enforcement, repo companies, and federal agencies. the data doesn't care who's buying.
I'm not necessarily against the school having this data, though it is creepy. But what the heck, her driver's license and proof of home ownership should be good enough. This is really a failing on the school district to apply any logic at all.
What if she owned a business in another area and registered the vehicle there?
What if the parent lived in one place, but the child was living somewhere else?
I ran into a similar problem with my child over a decade ago, his mother had bought a new house that needed work but updated her driver's license too soon. She still had my address on her checks, where she hadn't lived for years, and they randomly used that to launch an investigation. Afterwards they forced my kid to switch school. Which is made even crazier by it being the same district, like the taxes are going to the same spot, and they hadn't even moved in yet.
School districts being their own government is a big problem in general. It seems like the whole point of them is to enforce segregation.
Laws and regulations require enforcement. If not, honest people have abide by them, but dishonest people do not.
If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies.
It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful.
Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction.
In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.
Yeeeeeah, no school district needs or should have access to LPR databases. Period. Full stop.
Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law.
I would encourage you to channel this energy into organizing and advocating in your community for the removal of devices of mass corporate surveillance. Failing that, subscribe to 404media, they have been crushing it documenting this across the country (which feeds into downstream governance and accountability efforts).
TLDR Hold your local government accountable, they work for you.
Done and done. As the weather warms up, I've got plans to wardrive my town and report every single Flock camera I find (already reported five).
I hate these things and want them gone. They do not serve any practical purpose other than intimidation of minority groups and warrantless mass surveillance.
What kind of demented people are running that school district? Who comes up with the idea to use LPR data and gets other administrators to sign off on it? It just seems riddled with edge cases that no one in that district would be qualified to deal with or foresee.
When you don't have a functioning government, while technology continues to advance, lobbyists and government come up with spurious reasons why previous absolute rights don't apply to almost identical circumstances when colored with new technologies.
I don't even care about this case. Probably 99.9% of the time this particular system comes up with the correct answer - but since it's tracking cars and not people, it screwed up when somebody (extremely unusually) loaned out their car for months to a person who lives where people often fraudulently claim residence in that school district in order to (unfairly) take advantage of their schools. For the 1/1000 that it gets wrong, let them complain and have it cleared up manually; is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate?
The problem is illegal searches, Congress has shown that it doesn't care, the Supremes since Scalia left don't care, and the Dem base don't care if it targets the Repub base and the Repub base don't care if it targets the Dem base; both of them have been trained to think that it is alt-left alt-right populism to have privacy rights (or any rights at all.)
Expecting the same people who think that the 1st Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have the internet or that the 2nd Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have machine guns to be any sort of meaningful speed bump on this almost complete project of complete public-private tracking of every individual at all times is silly. The Founding Fathers didn't have residency requirements for suburban public school attendance or property tax funding of it. They didn't even have public schools.
>is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate?
showing a drivers license, utility bill, vehicle registration, and mortgage documents? and then, perhaps, the school could do an independent lookup/verification on the property and see the owner?
exactly like in this case where all of the above was done and verified by the school and came out with the correct answer.
School zoning and funding schools from local taxes is one of those things that always perplexed me when I lived in NYC. Ghettos full of "self-fulfilling prophecy" kids continue to exist to this date and people don't see to care much. It's one of those things that warrant a "I am too European for this shit" comment, because even though catchment areas exist here too, and you can't exactly send your kid to any school you wish (although in many EU countries you still can), schools are NOT founded through local taxes.
This and private prisons exploiting inmates for cheap workforce are plain, old-school segregation, except diluted and less "in your face". US seriously needs to start fixing some of its shit because it's getting grosser by the day and you can't pretend to be such a developed nation anymore: the King is Naked and rest of the world just doesn't buy the Hollywood illusion anymore.
The US spends billions and billions of dollars trying to police problems instead of spending the same money on addressing the root cause... collectively there's enough money to make this country an absolute paradise, but we're all acting like crabs in a bucket.
It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.
I don't know how fixable that one is via just spending: There's a significant component of just selecting for student quality, interest in studying and parentally funded support when a student is struggling. It's a non-trivial part of the US' love of sprawl: Fewer kids of different levels of means will live near you. So when parents say they buy a house for "good schools" they aren't just saying funding per student. And yes, we have this too even in areas without a significant racial component. Making sure only very expensive houses are around you, and keeping housing prices up, has an effect on schooling, even if just by selecting for kids of parents that can afford the big houses.
Ultimately the American parent is paying for the kids education either way: Either by buying a more expensive house near said "good schools", or by paying a private school, which is allowed to be selective in their admissions and match students. Making all schools actually be about the same is not just a matter of funding them equally, but you'd have to end the student segregation (even when it's in legal ways(, which is quite the challenge.
For instance, around me, there's some really bad school districts that end up grabbing very large mansions. But what happens there is that none of the kids of people living in those mansions actually go to public school. So while it might not be economically difficult to up the funding of the schools near poorer neighborhoods, I don't even necessarily think that they will get the same outcomes for the same funding: The selection component is going to change performance.
Tying property taxes to school funding is designed to cause this outcome, it's not a mistake. The majority of US history involves actively harming the poor through policy.
Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in the country.
Their leading solution?
Increase tax on cigarettes.
Not 'increase tax on cigarettes to increase early detection initiatives' or increase tax on cigarettes to increase screening subsidies', just 'increase tax on cigarettes so that the state has more money and poor people have less money'.
Demand for cigarettes isn’t static. If you make them expensive enough, demand falls. Lower demand means less smoking which means less cancer.
The only real risk with pigouvian taxes is that if you raise them too high, you can foster the development of a black market, which comes with its own set of negative social consequences.
Sure, lower demand does indeed reduce smoking, and a reduction in smoking might decrease cancer (iirc that's really hard to prove as an isolated variable given that those who give up smoking tend to make other lifestyle improvements that could also account for the difference).
My point is that the solution is such a blunt tool. Given that smoking rates aren't relatively high in Iowa, smoking alone cannot be the major contributor to their relatively increased cancer rates. Were they to smoke more than any other state and also have high rates, I could maybe see it, but that's just not the case.
Even if smoking rates were high and and increasing the tax were a solution, I'd still suggest that it's rather lazy to only do that given that tobacco does not cause a majority of cancer.
You could do the same thing in a different direction and be equally relatively ineffective by, for instance, decreasing tax on sunscreen, or subsidizing healthy foods or gym memberships.
Given that stress contributes to cancer rates, you could decrease the cost of mental health, run a de-stigmatizing campaign, force all corporations to finance therapy with independently verified therapists etc.
There are so many many things that can be done that would likely be better than attempting to decrease an already low smoking rate.
I understand that you were trying to make a different point so forgive me for derailing this conversation but this is important and I want to be emphatic.
Smoking incontrovertibly and substantially increases your risk of developing cancer. 85-90% of lung cancer cases and a substantial number of other forms cancers of can be attributed to smoking. There are a lot of ways to study this (you can look at people that never started smoking, not just people who quit). Yes, these studies are correlational (we don’t do RTCs on things that can kill you) but they are very high powered and are designed to account for confounding variables. The entire reason we’ve seen a decline in cancer mortality in the US since the 90s is largely attributable to falling smoking rates beginning in the 70s. And while much fewer people smoke, roughly 1 in 7 still do. Encouraging them to find another way to feed their nicotine addiction, and discouraging young people from ever picking up the habit, would save a lot of lives still.
Smokers know the score by now. It's time for society to stop coddling them. Tax their asses to the Moon, call it reparations for all the smog and stentch they subjected the rest of us to for generations.
Iowa's tobacco use is relatively low. If tobacco were the primary problem (as indicated by the focus of the solution), you'd expect Iowa to use more tobacco than most or all states.
Given that their utilization is so low, it cannot possibly be the leading contributor.
Reducing an already low use of the product is a dumb place to start and a worse place to stop if your goal is to decrease the cancer rate.
If your goal were to reduce the cancer rate, you'd focus on something about your population that is contributing to the higher cancer rate.
I think that one's pretty clear cut, people giving themselves cancer are a financial drain on everyone else. Both the supply and demand side should be punished.
Smoking is at historic lows [1] (~10-15%). Screening doesn't stop smoking, poor people will still be poor, smokers will still smoke, although GLP-1s may fix this [2] [3] (certainly, if this proves out, use cigarette taxes to help pay for GLP-1s for everyone to impair the dysfunctional reward center loop). There doesn't seem to be political will to simply ban cigarettes, so here we are. Making cigarettes expensive for poor people who smoke destroys demand, no? Otherwise, we accept the cancer rates for their choice and freedom to smoke knowing the consequences (~5k deaths/year in Iowa from this risk).
> There doesn't seem to be political will to simply ban cigarettes, so here we are.
A simple ban will work as well as prohibition of alcohol did. There will be a black market. Sure, producing tobacco is a bit more involved then producing liquor, but for smuggling there are enough options.
The attempt is to raise prices and do marketing against smoking as well as preventing ads for smoking. So that over time the interest goes down and when looking at numbers of smokers that seems to work in some regions.
Of course tobacco lobby has a lot of money and tries to prevent all measures.
You could just as easily claim, and still be just as opinionated, that a system is what is intended to be (intentional design theory), or that a system should be what it ought to be (normative systems theory), or that a system should evolve to fit the purposes of it's environment (structural functionism), or that there is no fixed purpose and that purpose is instead decided by social consensus (social constructivism).
A motivated reader might notice that the above systems thinking models each align with various schools of thought/philosophical schools. Idealism, telologism, constructivism, etc. This highlights the assertion that there might not be any one correct system of thought given one's stance on Truth, in that certain said systems might believe that they are the One Truth but could not logically demonstrate to the others that they are as such.
The US spends ~$1T/year on its military but states it cannot afford universal healthcare, childcare, education, efforts towards affordable housing, etc. Observe what the system does, not what it says it does. Agree this is just my opinion, as a scholar of systems field reporting observations. Am I wrong? I am always open to being challenged and wrong, in my quest for the Truth. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" as the song goes.
within a profit-driven economy, problems are simply profit centers to exploit for short-term revenue. solving those problems removes short-term revenue streams in favor of long-term stability, which of course would lead to long-term revenue streams... but who has time to wait?
"But I don't WANT to make this country an absolute paradise. I WANT to enforce a racist and classist social hierarchy and keep the labor class distracted and divided so that they can't organize and mount a legitimate campaign against capital interests."
A relative of mine works for a school district in the Chicago area. What should they do? Not take note of people's residence? The whole reason they do is because they used to not. Then people took advantage of it. And the people that take advantage of it typically cause problems for the district. Everything is racist and classist. But wanting a diverse school district to thrive? No that's the real problem. I guarantee Alsip is more diverse than wherever you are writing from. The irony. [0] https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/district.aspx?districtid=...
No. From the article: According to the school district, 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.” | Her response, according to the article? "No I'm not." Real trustworthy. People in the Chicago area lie all the time. There is more to the story and I do not have the information. My relative sees this all the time.
> However, to this day, despite providing all required paperwork including her driver’s license, utility bills, vehicle registration, and mortgage statement, the Alsip Hazelgreen Oak Lawn School District 126 has repeatedly denied her daughter’s enrollment.
She provided all the documentation the district requires of her. Her car being at a different local over the summer is not proof that she does not live in the home in the district.
This is like two pathologies of america combined: the automated policing is too heavy handed, and a car is for some reason taking priority despite a bunch of supporting information indicating otherwise
did you notice in the part you quoted where _the school_ says "you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries"?
so, her taxes fund the school. therefor her child has the right to attend the school. simple as.
(also from the article: "[...] providing all required paperwork including her driver’s license, utility bills, vehicle registration, and mortgage statement")
It's the suburbs of Chicago. Funding for schools is largely from local property taxes, which creates large gradients in the quality of those schools between towns.
Towns with better school districts command higher property values, creating a positive feedback loop in resources but also pricing younger families out of those same areas.
Another typical situation is a divorce, where one parent moves out of the expensive town but still wants the kids to attend the same schools for continuity.
While I'll make no judgment specifically on whether or not she is telling the truth, because the article itself isn't enough validation to say she is telling the truth here; I'll comment more on the comments in this thread.
At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally.
A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair.
So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here).
But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end.
At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.
It's the easiest way to not have to deal with Article 27.
Briefly, if Article 3 applies to a site outside the EU Article 27 requires that site to designate a representative in the Union that people can contact over GDPR issues.
There is an exception in Article 27 if the site use by people covered by GDPR is just occasional, doesn't involve particularly sensitive data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of any natural person.
A big factor in determining whether or not Article 3 covers your site is intent. If there is evidence you envisaged serving people in the Union that makes it more likely Article 3 will apply. If you did not that makes it more likely that it does not.
Blocking EU visitors should be evidence that you are not trying to serve EU users, making it less likely Article 3 applies, and less likely you will need an Article 27 representative.
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?
It's covered in the article. The school district has a contract with Thompson Reuters Clear. And here's more general information on that service:
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...
Shouldn't be information the school district has a right to access. It's none of their business where a person's car is parked over night. I really hope society pushes back on surveillance.
It seems like overreach, to say the least.
That’s fucking crazy.
The craziest part of this is that a school district thinks that the overnight location of the vehicle used to transport a student has anything to do with the location of the residence. Especially when that data is from a time period when the school isn't in session.
I can think of a half dozen valid scenarios why the vehicle used for school drop off is parked away from the student's residence at night.
e.g. Vehicle belongs to a non-custodial parent from out of district who handles drop off. Vehicle is used by a household member to do overnight shift work. Family just moved, of course their vehicle wasn't being parked in the district in July. ALPR character recognition error. Parent and student live elsewhere in the summer, and still qualify as residents within the district.
It sometimes boggles the mind the amount of inflexibility that people doing these jobs have/are willing to use, especially in something so consequential.
There are companies that scan every parked car visible in any public accessible spot.
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 :)
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.
This isn't the Motorola that makes phones. Lenovo owns Motorola Mobility. But America kept the highly profitable business of building a surveillance state. Yay.
e.g. at BigBox Mart towtrucks will traverse the parking lanes, with ALPR cameras quickly detecting repos to snatch.
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).
$10?? I thought it was a major crime to drive without a license plate.
Welcome to Tennessee (it shouldn't matter, but it does: clean-cut taxpaying middle-aged white guy, with former background in govt data centers [1] ). If I had any detectible minority status, I would display a plate properly.
More onlookers (from behind) snap photos of this taglessness than any other politics/offensive bumper sticker I've had [2] — my only thought is that my vehicle misleads them to think that perhaps I'm undercover I.C.E. (purposefully obscurring)..?
[1] I've woken up blackout in a comped hotel when friends in identical situation got arrested/PI; I still carry a long-expired govt work badge in my moneyclip
[2] 2nd-most popular, all-time, was "Patron Saint of Denials Luigi Mangione" image
In New Jersey your parked car could be towed for not having a plate.
In Tennessee we don't even issue front plates. Most vehicle registrations are <$30.00 (imagine!).
Twenty years ago my then-fiance and I were entering NYC via tollbooth, and the attendant harrassed us about "where is your front license plate?!"
>My car is paid for but I just don't display a license plate period
Which of course draws a bunch attention to you regardless.
It really doesn't, there are lawful reasons to not have a plate yet.
Tennesee also doesn't require antique vehicles to display the license plate (only to have it "available upon demand"). It's only 25 years old to be considered "antique," but you must request this from DMV (i.e. isn't automatic).
It's not about hiding — it's about sending a message.
IIRC, Steve Jobs was known to do this in his black plateless Mercedes (decades ago).
Wired even wrote this up (2010). Getting a new lease every 6 months, which apparently legally let him go plateless somehow. https://www.wired.com/2010/08/the-mystery-of-steve-jobs-plat...
I found it pretty grossly offensive a practice.
I lived nearish to him during this era, and after this article was published, it seemed like every black Mercedes in town started going tagless.
There's an XKCD on licence plates (https://xkcd.com/1105/) which is probably relevant to your case, too.
I have a printout of #1105 in my glovebox, specifically because my license plate is similarly-ridiculous (and "unscannable" but a legally-issued specialty plate). On the reverse is a copy of my state's law on "proper display of registration identifier," but not to discuss with a cop (for him to find in event of being an asshole, searching my vehicle).
My vehicle blends in and is otherwise-legal — non-compliance encourages me to obey most traffic laws — but I do carry the plate in my passenger seat to display in event of pull-over (my plate is some iteration of "no plate," and I do respect individual officers' safeties [1]).
[1] They have every right to know, when performing a lawful investigation. My plan would be to hold it up while initially stopped (to show intent of identification, my plate is complicated in many ways and must be searched for in a very odd way).
I think its funny you think youve come up with some unscannable license plate.
My state does not allow certain confusing characters, but I'm part of an organization which issues plates in specific violation of aforementioned character restrictions (as an added bonus the plate/organization is emblazzened with `EMERGENCY` across the bottom). ALPR camerae mis-read the plate, having applied state interpretation rules — no human has ever read it correctly, either [0].
But of course since you cannot even see it anymore it is definitely unscannable. I can drive by speed camera without issue (i.e. no citations received).
[0] I have only been pulled over once in the past decade (back when plate displayed normally), after traveling behind a cop for miles going 100mph+ through Dade County mountains. Cop: "I have no clue what agency you're with — you're plate didn't scan — but you need to slow the fuck down. You're lucky I have somewhere else to be!"
can you put some kind of filter the screws the cameras up?
These lens "blockers" are working less-and-less well (as tech gets better if they ever worked well at all), and seem to increase targeting from law enforcement.
In Tennessee, after the first two citations for "improper display of registration" it becomes an actual crime (an actual misdemeanor); if I ever get to this point (four months now multiple cops behind me haven't given a single F), I have an increasingly-insane series of "protests" that have semi-interesting legalities [0].
[0] e.g. transfer registration to brother ($10 gift fee every few months, which results in no tag requirement); small 3ft trailer (possibly with guillotine erected atop, blocking view), as TN does not issue license plates to trailers less than 15ft length
----
This isn't about "disappearing" (impossible in any modern civilization) — it's about sending a message and adding one small additional layer of protection from simple broad ALPR searches.
The real question is why do they only sell information to services designed to cause harm.
Returning a vehicle to a bank that someone has stopped paying for isn't exactly harm. If banks were unable to get vehicles back, people with bad credit would have a much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place.
>much harder time getting a vehicle in the first place.
This is a good thing; add "houses" to the list, too. Credit is too freely issued — we live on debt (as a society/world).
I've seen people throw their $20k in negative equity into a new purchase/lease — and just been baffled.
--but I agree: lenders oughta'be able to retrieve their lien'ed properties.
There are A LOT of throwaways talking about repossessing cars in this comment. that's a little weird. Guess I struck a nerve at some company.
Repossessing collateral on a secured loan is not a service designed to cause harm.
Who else would buy it? What use exists for this data that isn't harmful to society?
Repossessing cars isn't societally harmful, quite the opposite in fact.
Discouraging people from using cars at all?
Finding missing people? Finding criminals?
People not returning vehicles to the banks, or commiting fraud by taking up resources in districts they don't live in are technically criminals.
There are, in fact, many crimes
“Find me the missing person, and I’ll find the crime.”
— Lavrentiy Beria (Probably)
Catching the pedophiles. Think of the children.
More like catching the children. Think of the pedophiles.
As long as theyrw not in the Epstein Class.
The scary part isn't a single camera, it's the aggregation
I've often thought to spook legislators by crowd-sourcing this and scaling it. Any member if of the public can upload dashcam footage, and can search any number plate captured by the network: including legislators, town councilors and school board members. Access is gated by uploading dashcam and having it corroborated by other footage to avoid faked footage, e.g. cross-checking license plates in the same area.
My concerns are the decision makers may rake the wrong lesson from this, my own moral injury, and/or legal exposure when this information is inevitably used to harm someone. Also, Law enforcement would happily co-opt this service. Perhaps making the searches themselves public would alleviate same of the challenges.
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.
In areas where school choice isn’t available, it’s to keep the affluent districts, affluent. It’s racism and bigotry disguised as protecting children.
The inequality of school districts is probably one of the biggest systemic barriers in our society.
That being said, school choice isn’t that helpful. The most segregated school district in the US is NYC, which has had citywide school choice for a long time.
> In 2018 in New York, 90% of black students attended predominantly nonwhite schools, while Latino student enrollment in predominantly nonwhite schools has remained roughly stable (84%). Almost two out of three black students and over half of Latino students attend intensely segregated schools, where less than 10% of student enrollment is white.
Just because they are there statistically doesn’t mean there isn’t an underlying reason.
Maybe the “best” districts do what was done to me when I was growing up and purposefully test me harder, then get upset when I passed. Trying to justify that I didn’t belong but I ended up scoring a 99.9% on their stupid aptitude tests.
There’s a whole host of reasons why someone with choice still chooses shitty…
Yeah well aware after ~17 years in public/higher ed in multiple states and what crossed my mind first when I read the parent's name in the article though trying not to generalize as I know nothing of the district mentioned.
Major paradigm shift: What if, hear me out, the school administrators talked to the students and their parents?
I’ll pause for everyone’s minds to finish blowing.
which happened in this case!
and then the school administrators said, paraphrasing, "despite owning a home in the district, fuck you"
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.)
A kid could legitimately split time between two homes or be dropped off by whichever parent is on duty that morning
> This is a huge waste of time/money
Right. And when you see someone so dedicated do it there is almost certainly a hidden variable which causes this to occur. I imagine the nature of funding of these schools and the distribution of public monies has a lot to do with it.
> ways of combating fraud
Imagine being the richest country in the world and _caring_, honestly, about school location "fraud."
The country as a whole may be "rich" in terms of GDP but school districts are funded locally and many towns are struggling or underwater in terms of finances.
I lived in a working class town with a school district that built up a great reputation, especially for special needs students, due to the hard work of some amazing teachers and local parents. After I left I found out that the district had to scale back many programs dramatically because the number of students, especially special needs students, was growing significantly faster than the overall tax base and got close to bankrupting the town. Most of that was an increase in the ratio of families (esp special needs families) moving to town for the schools, but apparently there were fraud cases as well.
I have sympathy for the incoming families that sought out the best school they could find for their children, but I also sympathize with the existing families who lost the great programs they helped build because they became too successful.
A better solution would have been to fund education more equitably at the state level, but that was not a lever that the school district had.
> started growing much faster than the tax base
So you have two unaddressed problems.
> A better solution would have been to fund education more equitably at the state level
Which could only work if the state was "richer" than the local district. So by playing abstract and unnecessary games with money and districting we intentionally prevent schools from accessing the funding which could obviate concerns over this "fraud" issue entirely.
> but that was not a lever that the school district had at the time.
The idea of a parent "fraudulently" getting their child an education from a "district" is still just hilarious to me. What is the point of this system? To make parents play games or to educate children?
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.
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."
That distinction is what I was getting at with "if that statement came from the third party (rather than the school district misinterpreting the raw data themselves)".
If the company just provided the raw data, they may be in better legal shape. But I'd say either they or the school administrator libeled the family. Maybe both. (Of course, I'm not a lawyer.) Even if the company did provide only the raw data, I wonder if libel is somehow implied in its contracted/intended use. And I'm really hoping for the legal bloodbath outcome, because this is unconscionable.
The family may not have time or money to pursue this, but there are lawyers who work on contingency or even pro bono, including the ACLU.
If they disclaim warranty and reliance that’s relevant to the person they are selling data to, but not to the harmed party.
Yep, completely absurd but I'd also add that both the tech company and the school gov deserves equal shame here given there's proof of residence.
I can't imagine why highly paid school admin wouldn't correct an obvious mistake.
> highly paid school admin
I would not have expected a school administrator to be highly paid. What kind of salary are we talking about here?
Is 500k highly paid? https://www.illinoispolicy.org/see-what-your-illinois-school...
It's the teachers that are shafted, not the admin/manager class.
That's mind blowing to me. I'd imagine they out earn a significant percentage of HN posters!
They're CEOs of fairly large organizations, often managing thousands of employees and budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars.
That’s spending that is all on autopilot; how much time does any CEO spend on payroll? Approximately zero.
They aren't being paid the big bucks to sign off on a payroll run.
They're being paid to manage the parts of the organizations that do that sort of thing, among others.
....yes, half a million dollars per year is highly paid.
In Texas, the superintendent of the big school districts all make around $400k.
Yeah, but a good portion of that is making sure they keep the football team going.
In the Dolton school district (Chicago suburb), their superintendent makes $530k / year. Is that for the football team?
Having never heard of Dolton before, I certainly can't speak to their specifics. School systems can be pretty huge orgs requiring significant management expertise; no one blinks an eye when a CEO gets pay for similar responsibilities.
I've heard enough about Texas's high school football culture and the pressures on administrators over it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Stadium_(Allen,_Texas) for example.
My kids went to a big football high school in Texas and it wouldn't surprise me if the admins there felt a lot of pressure around football. It generated a lot of money for the district and proceeds funded a lot of the arts programs (especially marching band which was huge).
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.
she owns and pays for a home in the school district. the school knows and admits this.
if she didnt, i would (sort of) agree. but she does.
Yes. I'm saying there's a legit interest in combatting a real challenge. This is a false positive and a stupid bureaucratic hole of the school's own creation.
So what? Grandma's paying taxes there.
Real solution is to loosen regulations on private schools and provide equivalent tax return to parents who choose private over public.
> So what? Grandma's paying taxes there.
But the parents aren't, and grandma's tax contribution may have already gone towards funding the parents. The system's structured with local revenue; letting people change their locality too easily messes with that structure a lot.
(I pay, for example, about $3k in school taxes annually, but I have two kids in a $21k/year district. If they have kids, I may be still paying for their education, let alone the grandkids.)
> Real solution is to loosen regulations on private schools and provide equivalent tax return to parents who choose private over public.
Yeah, privatization always results in better results and zero scammy abuses of the system.
(One hopes the /s can go unsaid.)
Feels like now we're getting into "falsehoods programmers believe about family." My cousin effectively lived with us when he was a kid and went to school in the district for our house, not his mom's. My niece was raised jointly by my sister and my parents, but my sister's housing situation was so unstable she lived with my parents more often, and went to school in that district as well. What exactly do they even do if a parent has no stable housing at all? Make the kid change schools every month?
> Feels like now we're getting into "falsehoods programmers believe about family."
Sure, but that's why a level of human intervention with a touch of empathy is required for cases like this one and the unhoused example.
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.
Then the government should advertise an explicit minimum amount of tax paid annually in order to register for the school, or switch property tax to land value tax only.
The residency requirement is that minimum. It's not a minimum in monetary limits. It's a minimum that you have to actually live there. The fact you are living there means you are paying a higher tax amount than for an undeveloped lot. There's a difference on having a house on a lot vs just some field. You have some skin in the game as they say compared to just owning land while living somewhere else completely.
What if you lived in a tent in the field?
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.
Do you walk around with rotating face coverings and disguise your gait?
The onus is on the organizations spying on the public and the Govt. for letting them do it.
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.
Many districts employ full time investigators for this. The district is a tax collector and this is a form of tax fraud.
Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
The person in the article provided proof in the form of a mortgage statement, which should establish that they pay tax to the district. Where they spend their time outside of school hours seems irrelevant.
Document fraud is both incredibly easy and pervasive. There’s a mentality of “I jumped through the hoop, now you can’t get me.”
They aren’t taking blood tests or staking out your homes (I don’t think…)
>Document fraud is both incredibly easy and pervasive.
the school does not contest the legitimacy of the documents.
the school even says "[...] you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries"
Sounds like the license plate readers basically are stalking out homes though.
They provided a mortgage statement. The district employee can trivially verify that by firing up the GIS system.
So you go to the county’s website and look up the address and see who owns it. Or even homes.com
> 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?
> Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid license plate tracking? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
No, I'm talking about changing how schools are funded by making funds more evenly distributed across districts. Giving the kids in the "bad" areas the same opportunities as those in the "good" areas. Right now, if you can't afford that four-five-six-seven-hundred thousand dollar home, you aren't afforded the same level of public education as someone else who can. And doing so democratically, which is why I mentioned it'll never happen because no politician would be able to run on that. Their opponents would be outfunded by the top 10% to keep the status quo.
And this is coming from someone who own's a home in a "good" district. Where we got a total rebuilt elementary school 4 years ago, a new middle school actively being build, and a new high school that opened 3 years ago. Why should my kids have access to everything newer and better just because we can afford to live out in the suburbs, than someone else who isn't working in the cushy tech industry and instead is busting their ass only to live in poverty?
Newer does not mean better, or even imply it. Money spent on facilities has almost no correlation to educational outcomes.
What matters are the peers you go to school with, supported by decent curriculum and moderately competent teachers. None of which is expensive. Oh, and administrators who actually care about teaching being done vs. being terrified of the lawsuit fairy.
It’s the peers that matter by far the most - and that means parents. Parents that are self-selecting into good districts tend to skew heavily towards “involved” and some definition of functional. This can mean being able to and buying a home or rent an apartment in a good district, or finding some clever and/or creative workaround to get the same outcome. The latter is even better in most cases since those families are motivated at an even higher level to make sure it’s a success.
The best school I went to as a kid was a private highly selective school in “the ghetto” where my dad lived growing up. Nearly every kid there was on some form of subsidized or full ride tuition, with very “working class” parents. The facilities were barebones at best. The vast majority of kids had parents who held them to extreme expectations even if they didn’t have financial means or even time to be highly involved day to day.
The uber rich brand new high school I went to the next year in the suburbs wasn’t even close.
The difference was in the kids who attended the school and the expectations put on them for both classroom behavior, engagement, and work ethic. Shitty disruptive kids were kicked out within a matter of days so as to let kids who wanted to be there actually learn.
Anything beyond that is close to a rounding error for outcomes.
The inner city school district I pay taxes into spends more per student than many of the suburbs. You could triple it again and get zero change in outcomes - in fact so far since living here school budgets are inversely correlated with outcome, although I don’t see a causation there in either direction.
Schools that are allowed to be ran like schools and hold students to high expectations and standards do well. Schools that are ran like social programs trying to correct for all of societies ills do not. It’s pretty simple in the end.
Uh what's undemocratic about the state legislature, which created the current system of small local districts, Changing how schools are funded and governed?
Small parroquial government entities that are funded inequitably are bad, actually. And the current system of schools districts is a legacy of segregation and white flight. Local government boundaries are entirely arbitrary, should the city let water or fire services suffer in one council district because it doesn't produce enough taxes to support it?
A child's academic opportunity shouldn't be determined by their zip code and parents income. Everyone should have access to free high quality public schools.
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.
> They already have all kinds of data on you
So? My employer has my SSN, address, work history, etc. but I don't want them to know about where I go on the weekends. It's a fallacy to say that just because an entity knows a lot about you that it's OK if they know everything about you.
The correct way to address this is to not have school funding be based on how expensive the nearby houses are.
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.
Then "school district fraud" shouldn't be a problem. If a parent is willing to committing a crime to get their kid into a good school, they're heavily engaged and involved.
Schools have limited capacity. If they fill up with students from far away, nearby students who have a real right to be there get pushed out.
This isn’t a topic where you can think in terms of a single child only.
School bodies expand and contract over time as the demographic makeup of a district and school changes. "Limited capacity" isn't strictly true.
School sizes do change over long time horizons as demographics grow. This is true.
But school buildings have limited capacity and teacher:student ratios should be maintained. These cannot be changed instantly. Planning happens according to people actually living there, so if a lot of people are circumventing the rules and cheating their way in it breaks the system.
> School sizes do change over long time horizons
Not even very long horizons. For example, a hot housing market can cause a rush of young families into a district as older retirees cash out and move to Florida or whatever. Schools adapt to this.
I agree following rules is important. What kind of example are you setting for your kids, right? But having some perspective is also important.
"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."
FYI, parent engagement is also heavily proportional to parent income/property prices.
Very hard to be engaged at school with double/triple working class jobs.
How do you propose schools be funded?
Not OP, but IMO pretty much any funding mechanism other than local property taxes funding the local school is better.
How about only taxing households with school-age residents?
Yeah, that's the opposite direction I was thinking. Everyone benefits from having an educated next generation.
Bingo.
What?! An honest solution that Doesn't impede on our privacy rights.
Straight to jail with you.
> It’s a big source of fraud
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.
It’s fraud.
You may think it’s OK to steal because the end justifies the means… but it’s still stealing.
The difference in outcomes isn't from funding/resources. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/26/why-do-the...
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!
If you own a house or rent in the district you are paying (or your landlord is) the taxes that fund schools.
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.
Is it even wasted if a child gets an education?
All of the children get an education, but you have to divide up the attendance across the available schools.
A single child going to the incorrect school isn’t going to break the system, but when it starts happening at scale it starts diluting the per-student funding in a district, increasing class sizes (reducing the teacher to student ratio) and eventually puts the school over limits and forces nearby children who should be going there into schools that are farther away.
One or two students don't make a difference. But if a number of people lie, then that dilutes the experience of the legit students. So it's not just as simple as you make it sound.
Here's an extreme example. One boy I know went to a school from kindergarten. He was tall and expected to start on the basketball team. Suddenly,in his junior year, several great players showed up from out of nowhere. There were lots of rumors about whether they were legitimately allowed to enroll, but in the end several lifelong students were bumped from the team. The coach was happy. The principal loved the idea. The kids presumably enjoyed the new school. But there were several others who lost an opportunity.
There are downsides to open door policies like you're endorsing. Most of the time, they're not so visible. But when resources are finite, people get hurt.
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?
If anything, LPR data might be a useful lead generator. But using it as decisive evidence seems like a stretch
We're either going to have to go to a voucher system or we're going to see students with spyware or tracking hardware attached to them.
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.
I think this is an entirely cromulent reason to forbid the car to attend the school. But perhaps not a child, who presumably doesn't live in the car.
What's concerning is not just the surveillance aspect but the idea that this kind of data is treated as authoritative enough to override traditional documentation like mortgage statements and utility bills
We had a similar problem some years back in the UK.
Surveillance powers that were justified as necessary because of terrorism were used to check on whether people lived in the correct area for a school - as well as a lot of other minor offences. The intent was obvious from the start because of the bodies that were given these powers (local authorities that run state schools are not involved in fighting terrorism). There was a backlash and the surveillance powers were trimmed down.
I got a bill recently from NYC for speeding through a red light, which was weird enough as it wasn't a car that I own. But the license plate listed is one I had years ago, when I lived in a different state. Clearly license plate databases even within government are inaccurate. I can't imagine how bad the private databases are. The fact that the government also leans on the private databases seems to compound the problem.
Likewise. I once got pulled over by the police because they insisted that my license plate had been turned in and I was driving without valid plates.
They called other officers, ran the plate, ran the VIN, ran the plate, ran the VIN. I dunno I think we sat there for almost an hour before they told me why they pulled me over and what was up.
We are living in 1984.
The school district uses Thomson Reuters Clear to verify residency. Thomson Reuters Clear uses LPR data.
"School District 126’s contract with the license plate reader company shows it’s paying a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract that began in December of 2024 -- the same month that Sánchez and her daughter moved into their new Alsip home."
Per a Google search my county: For the 2025–2026 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) charges nonresident tuition of $21,668 for elementary school and $20,214 for secondary school. Nonresident students must apply through the International Admissions and Enrollment office, and not all schools are open to tuition-paying students.
My wife worked in the office of an elementary school for 20 years and verified residency, custody, restraining orders and more. She shared many stories about people gaming the system. People will cross state and county lines to access a better school or one closer to work.
https://archive.ph/CWjF4
> The plate reader company touts “Accurate residency verification does more than protect the financial health of public schools—it safeguards the trust and equity at the heart of public education.”
There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.
Also complete with the "it's not just X—it's Y" sentence pattern.
Among the many takeaways from this case is that if you don't own a car at all, you will likely be summarily denied, therefore you "must" own a car.
How and why are license plates being tracked to children? That this is not the most twisted part of the story is insane. Just the fact that driving children to school has become so prevalent that ALPR is an effective tool should raise some questions. Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness?
> Is walkability so far gone in the public consciousness?
Using transport to get to school isn't a new concept. School buses have been a thing forever.
If you can't understand why a parent would drive their kids to school in Chicago, you probably haven't experienced winter weather there.
I'm in Canada, and I definitely experience winter. My child walks to school. Boots work far better in snow than four tires and a steel box.
Assuming she pays taxes on the house, who cares if she lives there?
a school district is a customer of the same ALPR data broker network that sells to law enforcement, repo companies, and federal agencies. the data doesn't care who's buying.
I'm not necessarily against the school having this data, though it is creepy. But what the heck, her driver's license and proof of home ownership should be good enough. This is really a failing on the school district to apply any logic at all.
What if she owned a business in another area and registered the vehicle there?
What if the parent lived in one place, but the child was living somewhere else?
I ran into a similar problem with my child over a decade ago, his mother had bought a new house that needed work but updated her driver's license too soon. She still had my address on her checks, where she hadn't lived for years, and they randomly used that to launch an investigation. Afterwards they forced my kid to switch school. Which is made even crazier by it being the same district, like the taxes are going to the same spot, and they hadn't even moved in yet.
School districts being their own government is a big problem in general. It seems like the whole point of them is to enforce segregation.
Is there anyone, any person of power, in the USA, who is not committed to evil?
Besides AOC.
Laws and regulations require enforcement. If not, honest people have abide by them, but dishonest people do not.
If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies.
It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful.
Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction.
In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.
OK, it's lawsuit time.
Yeeeeeah, no school district needs or should have access to LPR databases. Period. Full stop.
Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law.
Fuck mass surveillance.
I would encourage you to channel this energy into organizing and advocating in your community for the removal of devices of mass corporate surveillance. Failing that, subscribe to 404media, they have been crushing it documenting this across the country (which feeds into downstream governance and accountability efforts).
TLDR Hold your local government accountable, they work for you.
https://deflock.org/
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=Flock
https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
Done and done. As the weather warms up, I've got plans to wardrive my town and report every single Flock camera I find (already reported five).
I hate these things and want them gone. They do not serve any practical purpose other than intimidation of minority groups and warrantless mass surveillance.
https://github.com/justcallmekoko/ESP32Marauder/wiki/Flock-W...
https://www.ryanohoro.com/post/spotting-flock-safety-s-falco...
Sounds like an easy-win lawsuit against both the district and the company.
What kind of demented people are running that school district? Who comes up with the idea to use LPR data and gets other administrators to sign off on it? It just seems riddled with edge cases that no one in that district would be qualified to deal with or foresee.
probably the same sort of demented people supporting Flock cameras in their own neighborhoods.
If the parent has a legal title to a house in the school zone their children should be allowed to go to the school.
When you don't have a functioning government, while technology continues to advance, lobbyists and government come up with spurious reasons why previous absolute rights don't apply to almost identical circumstances when colored with new technologies.
I don't even care about this case. Probably 99.9% of the time this particular system comes up with the correct answer - but since it's tracking cars and not people, it screwed up when somebody (extremely unusually) loaned out their car for months to a person who lives where people often fraudulently claim residence in that school district in order to (unfairly) take advantage of their schools. For the 1/1000 that it gets wrong, let them complain and have it cleared up manually; is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate?
The problem is illegal searches, Congress has shown that it doesn't care, the Supremes since Scalia left don't care, and the Dem base don't care if it targets the Repub base and the Repub base don't care if it targets the Dem base; both of them have been trained to think that it is alt-left alt-right populism to have privacy rights (or any rights at all.)
Expecting the same people who think that the 1st Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have the internet or that the 2nd Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have machine guns to be any sort of meaningful speed bump on this almost complete project of complete public-private tracking of every individual at all times is silly. The Founding Fathers didn't have residency requirements for suburban public school attendance or property tax funding of it. They didn't even have public schools.
>is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate?
showing a drivers license, utility bill, vehicle registration, and mortgage documents? and then, perhaps, the school could do an independent lookup/verification on the property and see the owner?
exactly like in this case where all of the above was done and verified by the school and came out with the correct answer.
School zoning and funding schools from local taxes is one of those things that always perplexed me when I lived in NYC. Ghettos full of "self-fulfilling prophecy" kids continue to exist to this date and people don't see to care much. It's one of those things that warrant a "I am too European for this shit" comment, because even though catchment areas exist here too, and you can't exactly send your kid to any school you wish (although in many EU countries you still can), schools are NOT founded through local taxes.
This and private prisons exploiting inmates for cheap workforce are plain, old-school segregation, except diluted and less "in your face". US seriously needs to start fixing some of its shit because it's getting grosser by the day and you can't pretend to be such a developed nation anymore: the King is Naked and rest of the world just doesn't buy the Hollywood illusion anymore.
I dislike how LPR startups are confusing everyone by promoting "ontology" to mislead people that it's simply "surveillance".
The US spends billions and billions of dollars trying to police problems instead of spending the same money on addressing the root cause... collectively there's enough money to make this country an absolute paradise, but we're all acting like crabs in a bucket.
It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.
I don't know how fixable that one is via just spending: There's a significant component of just selecting for student quality, interest in studying and parentally funded support when a student is struggling. It's a non-trivial part of the US' love of sprawl: Fewer kids of different levels of means will live near you. So when parents say they buy a house for "good schools" they aren't just saying funding per student. And yes, we have this too even in areas without a significant racial component. Making sure only very expensive houses are around you, and keeping housing prices up, has an effect on schooling, even if just by selecting for kids of parents that can afford the big houses.
Ultimately the American parent is paying for the kids education either way: Either by buying a more expensive house near said "good schools", or by paying a private school, which is allowed to be selective in their admissions and match students. Making all schools actually be about the same is not just a matter of funding them equally, but you'd have to end the student segregation (even when it's in legal ways(, which is quite the challenge.
For instance, around me, there's some really bad school districts that end up grabbing very large mansions. But what happens there is that none of the kids of people living in those mansions actually go to public school. So while it might not be economically difficult to up the funding of the schools near poorer neighborhoods, I don't even necessarily think that they will get the same outcomes for the same funding: The selection component is going to change performance.
Tying property taxes to school funding is designed to cause this outcome, it's not a mistake. The majority of US history involves actively harming the poor through policy.
Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in the country.
Their leading solution?
Increase tax on cigarettes.
Not 'increase tax on cigarettes to increase early detection initiatives' or increase tax on cigarettes to increase screening subsidies', just 'increase tax on cigarettes so that the state has more money and poor people have less money'.
Demand for cigarettes isn’t static. If you make them expensive enough, demand falls. Lower demand means less smoking which means less cancer.
The only real risk with pigouvian taxes is that if you raise them too high, you can foster the development of a black market, which comes with its own set of negative social consequences.
Sure, lower demand does indeed reduce smoking, and a reduction in smoking might decrease cancer (iirc that's really hard to prove as an isolated variable given that those who give up smoking tend to make other lifestyle improvements that could also account for the difference).
My point is that the solution is such a blunt tool. Given that smoking rates aren't relatively high in Iowa, smoking alone cannot be the major contributor to their relatively increased cancer rates. Were they to smoke more than any other state and also have high rates, I could maybe see it, but that's just not the case.
Even if smoking rates were high and and increasing the tax were a solution, I'd still suggest that it's rather lazy to only do that given that tobacco does not cause a majority of cancer.
You could do the same thing in a different direction and be equally relatively ineffective by, for instance, decreasing tax on sunscreen, or subsidizing healthy foods or gym memberships.
Given that stress contributes to cancer rates, you could decrease the cost of mental health, run a de-stigmatizing campaign, force all corporations to finance therapy with independently verified therapists etc.
There are so many many things that can be done that would likely be better than attempting to decrease an already low smoking rate.
>a reduction in smoking might decrease cancer
I understand that you were trying to make a different point so forgive me for derailing this conversation but this is important and I want to be emphatic.
Smoking incontrovertibly and substantially increases your risk of developing cancer. 85-90% of lung cancer cases and a substantial number of other forms cancers of can be attributed to smoking. There are a lot of ways to study this (you can look at people that never started smoking, not just people who quit). Yes, these studies are correlational (we don’t do RTCs on things that can kill you) but they are very high powered and are designed to account for confounding variables. The entire reason we’ve seen a decline in cancer mortality in the US since the 90s is largely attributable to falling smoking rates beginning in the 70s. And while much fewer people smoke, roughly 1 in 7 still do. Encouraging them to find another way to feed their nicotine addiction, and discouraging young people from ever picking up the habit, would save a lot of lives still.
Smokers know the score by now. It's time for society to stop coddling them. Tax their asses to the Moon, call it reparations for all the smog and stentch they subjected the rest of us to for generations.
Iowa : Industrial Agriculture :: West Virginia : Coal
Iowa doesn’t grow an appreciable amount of tobacco, though.
Increasing the price incentivises people not to buy it, econ 101
Increasing the price fosters a black market, econ 102
ooooh, ur so smart.
Iowa's tobacco use is relatively low. If tobacco were the primary problem (as indicated by the focus of the solution), you'd expect Iowa to use more tobacco than most or all states.
Given that their utilization is so low, it cannot possibly be the leading contributor.
Reducing an already low use of the product is a dumb place to start and a worse place to stop if your goal is to decrease the cancer rate.
If your goal were to reduce the cancer rate, you'd focus on something about your population that is contributing to the higher cancer rate.
Just like increasing taxes incentivises people not to work.
I think that one's pretty clear cut, people giving themselves cancer are a financial drain on everyone else. Both the supply and demand side should be punished.
Smoking is at historic lows [1] (~10-15%). Screening doesn't stop smoking, poor people will still be poor, smokers will still smoke, although GLP-1s may fix this [2] [3] (certainly, if this proves out, use cigarette taxes to help pay for GLP-1s for everyone to impair the dysfunctional reward center loop). There doesn't seem to be political will to simply ban cigarettes, so here we are. Making cigarettes expensive for poor people who smoke destroys demand, no? Otherwise, we accept the cancer rates for their choice and freedom to smoke knowing the consequences (~5k deaths/year in Iowa from this risk).
[1] https://www.radioiowa.com/2026/01/02/iowa-smokers-can-save-m... (“Increasing the cost of tobacco products is one of the most effective ways to reduce use,” Cale says, “and in turn, to lower Iowa’s lung cancer rates.”)
[2] GLP-1 drugs may fight addiction across every major substance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280797 - March 2026
[3] GLP-1 medications get at the heart of addiction: study - https://medicine.washu.edu/news/glp-1-medications-get-at-the... - March 4th, 2026
(i have personal experience with a loved one who will not quit smoking, so I am not unsympathetic to this risk and harm incurred)
> There doesn't seem to be political will to simply ban cigarettes, so here we are.
A simple ban will work as well as prohibition of alcohol did. There will be a black market. Sure, producing tobacco is a bit more involved then producing liquor, but for smuggling there are enough options.
The attempt is to raise prices and do marketing against smoking as well as preventing ads for smoking. So that over time the interest goes down and when looking at numbers of smokers that seems to work in some regions.
Of course tobacco lobby has a lot of money and tries to prevent all measures.
"The purpose of a system is what it does." The purpose is not to create an absolute paradise for its citizens and residents, unfortunately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
That's not a fact. That's just an opinion.
You could just as easily claim, and still be just as opinionated, that a system is what is intended to be (intentional design theory), or that a system should be what it ought to be (normative systems theory), or that a system should evolve to fit the purposes of it's environment (structural functionism), or that there is no fixed purpose and that purpose is instead decided by social consensus (social constructivism).
A motivated reader might notice that the above systems thinking models each align with various schools of thought/philosophical schools. Idealism, telologism, constructivism, etc. This highlights the assertion that there might not be any one correct system of thought given one's stance on Truth, in that certain said systems might believe that they are the One Truth but could not logically demonstrate to the others that they are as such.
The US spends ~$1T/year on its military but states it cannot afford universal healthcare, childcare, education, efforts towards affordable housing, etc. Observe what the system does, not what it says it does. Agree this is just my opinion, as a scholar of systems field reporting observations. Am I wrong? I am always open to being challenged and wrong, in my quest for the Truth. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" as the song goes.
https://usafacts.org/government-spending/
I think the closest thing we'd get to purpose for a government is likely defined by the constitution? we're not really even upholding those values
within a profit-driven economy, problems are simply profit centers to exploit for short-term revenue. solving those problems removes short-term revenue streams in favor of long-term stability, which of course would lead to long-term revenue streams... but who has time to wait?
"But I don't WANT to make this country an absolute paradise. I WANT to enforce a racist and classist social hierarchy and keep the labor class distracted and divided so that they can't organize and mount a legitimate campaign against capital interests."
A relative of mine works for a school district in the Chicago area. What should they do? Not take note of people's residence? The whole reason they do is because they used to not. Then people took advantage of it. And the people that take advantage of it typically cause problems for the district. Everything is racist and classist. But wanting a diverse school district to thrive? No that's the real problem. I guarantee Alsip is more diverse than wherever you are writing from. The irony. [0] https://www.illinoisreportcard.com/district.aspx?districtid=...
>What should they do? Not take note of people's residence?
in this article, the childs parents provided proof of residence.
No. From the article: According to the school district, 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.” | Her response, according to the article? "No I'm not." Real trustworthy. People in the Chicago area lie all the time. There is more to the story and I do not have the information. My relative sees this all the time.
> However, to this day, despite providing all required paperwork including her driver’s license, utility bills, vehicle registration, and mortgage statement, the Alsip Hazelgreen Oak Lawn School District 126 has repeatedly denied her daughter’s enrollment.
She provided all the documentation the district requires of her. Her car being at a different local over the summer is not proof that she does not live in the home in the district.
This is like two pathologies of america combined: the automated policing is too heavy handed, and a car is for some reason taking priority despite a bunch of supporting information indicating otherwise
did you notice in the part you quoted where _the school_ says "you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries"?
so, her taxes fund the school. therefor her child has the right to attend the school. simple as.
(also from the article: "[...] providing all required paperwork including her driver’s license, utility bills, vehicle registration, and mortgage statement")
I'm getting strong "California uber alles" [1] vibes, even though it's Chicago.
It's the suburbs of Chicago. Funding for schools is largely from local property taxes, which creates large gradients in the quality of those schools between towns.
Towns with better school districts command higher property values, creating a positive feedback loop in resources but also pricing younger families out of those same areas.
Another typical situation is a divorce, where one parent moves out of the expensive town but still wants the kids to attend the same schools for continuity.
Nobody hates ALPRs more than tax evaders. I love ALPRs because they bring lawless sociopaths out of the woodwork.
Can't wait to hear it is biased for flagging brown people
While I'll make no judgment specifically on whether or not she is telling the truth, because the article itself isn't enough validation to say she is telling the truth here; I'll comment more on the comments in this thread.
At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally.
A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair.
So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here).
But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end.
At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.
Interestingly US-based newsrooms are still geo-blocking EU users. Not even bothering to ask for cookies.
It's the easiest way to not have to deal with Article 27.
Briefly, if Article 3 applies to a site outside the EU Article 27 requires that site to designate a representative in the Union that people can contact over GDPR issues.
There is an exception in Article 27 if the site use by people covered by GDPR is just occasional, doesn't involve particularly sensitive data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of any natural person.
A big factor in determining whether or not Article 3 covers your site is intent. If there is evidence you envisaged serving people in the Union that makes it more likely Article 3 will apply. If you did not that makes it more likely that it does not.
Blocking EU visitors should be evidence that you are not trying to serve EU users, making it less likely Article 3 applies, and less likely you will need an Article 27 representative.