APS To Review Residency Data at Elementary
North Star Parents Pushed for Audit
Albuquerque Public Schools may soon have a clearer idea of how many students attending North Star Elementary live within the school’s boundaries.
APS Superintendent Winston Brooks announced at a school board meeting Wednesday that the district will begin an audit of residency among North Star families, using property tax rolls and other documents to determine how many students live in the North Star area. The school is north of Paseo del Norte, off Ventura.
The move comes at the behest of North Star families. APS held a community meeting last week to talk about the overcrowding problem and to seek suggestions on how to solve it. A large majority of parents said they would like to see an audit of the school’s enrollment, claiming many parents who live outside the boundaries provide fraudulent residency documents to enroll their children at the Northeast Heights school.
The North Star parentteacher association has also circulated a petition, asking that an audit be done before any other measures — like redrawing the school’s attendance boundaries — are considered. The petition has about 250 signatures.
“I think we took community input, and we’re going to be following up with them on that,” Brooks said Wednesday.
North Star has been overcapacity nearly every year since it opened in 2006. It has about 745 students in a school built for 663.
At the beginning of this school year, the district urged North Star parents to consider
sending their children to nearby Double Eagle Elementary, which is also an affluent, high-scoring school and which is underenrolled.
Brooks said he has not made any decisions about what the district will do with findings from the audit, or whether fraudulently enrolled students will necessarily be sent back to their home schools. He said, for example, he would not be inclined to disenroll a fifthgrader who had been at the school since kindergarten.
Brooks said the administration would look at audit results and bring a recommendation to the school board, which will then take a vote.
North Star, along with two other Northeast Heights elementary schools, came under fire last year for requiring extra proofs of residency for parents seeking to enroll their children. A parent complained, and APS administrators told the schools to stop the practice so the proof of residency requirements would be uniform across the district.
Brooks said no decisions have been made about whether the district might update those requirements. He said such a decision, if it even arises, would be made by the board. He also said the North Star audit will be a pilot, which could be repeated at other overcrowded schools across the district.