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Thursday, 06/05/03 Bredesen is waiting to sign bill into law The 25 Wilson and Cannon county families who lied to get their children into the Rutherford County school system may have to pay school officials for educating their children if a bill approved by the state legislature becomes law. Both houses of the General Assembly passed a bill last month giving school districts permission to recoup the cost of educating out-of-district children whose parents fraudulently enrolled them. Gov. Phil Bredesen first must sign the bill before it becomes law, and he wants to wait until he fully reviews it, he said. ''The basic notion is if someone lied to get their children in a different system, there should be some way to recover'' the costs of their education, he said, giving no specific timeframe as to if or when he would sign the bill. If it becomes law, the families could be liable for the county's portion of the students' education up to six years after the parents falsely enrolled them. The families would also be liable for any costs associated with a lawsuit, including attorneys' fees, if the school district chose to sue them for the money, the bill said. For the 2002-2003 school year, Rutherford County spends roughly $2,500 per pupil, said Ed Jordan, school board chairman. Of the 25 families, 21 of them sent their children to Lascassas Elementary School. The remaining children attended Kittrell Elementary. School officials had always heard about out-of-district children attending their schools but started looking more closely into the situation after learning about the bill several weeks ago, said Jeff McCullough, school board attorney. McCullough said he sent letters home to parents informing them of the proposed law and telling them their children could no longer attend a Rutherford County school. During the 1994-1995 school year, the board had implemented its own regulation prohibiting out-of-district children from attending Rutherford County schools, adding a provision that allowed children who were already in the district permission to remain, McCullough said. However, the likelihood of these children remaining in the school system is slim, McCullough said. Several legislators backed the bill because there have been several cases of families living in neighboring states but sending their children to Tennessee schools, said Sen. Mark Norris, a Republican from Collierville who co-sponsored the bill. ''In Shelby County alone, we had between 80 and 250 out-of-state students at any given year,'' Norris said.
Margo Rivers covers Rutherford County for The Tennessean. She can be reached at 259-8094 or mrivers@Tennessean.com. |
