The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

From the archive: first published October 3, 2011.

In case you needed further proof of the American education system's failings — especially in poor and minority communities — consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft.

The most famous case belongs to Ohio's Kelley Williams-Bolar. An African-American mother of two from Akron, she used her father's address in the neighbouring Copley-Fairlawn school district to enrol her two daughters in better public schools. In January 2011 a jury convicted her of two felonies for tampering with records. She was sentenced to 10 days in jail, served nine, and received two years of probation and 80 hours of community service. Worse than the jail time, the felony record threatened the teacher's licence she was working toward, as an Akron schools assistant teacher.

She caught a break last month: Ohio Governor John Kasich used his clemency power to reduce her convictions from felonies to first-degree misdemeanors, after the state parole board had refused to recommend a pardon. "The penalty was excessive for the offense," Kasich said. "No one should interpret this as a pass — it's a second chance."

Her case is the most visible, but not the only one. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have faced similar charges — in Connecticut, Bridgeport mother Tanya McDowell was arrested in April 2011 for enrolling her son in Norwalk schools.

The uncomfortable question behind these prosecutions: in a country where school funding follows zip codes, is a mother who fakes an address a criminal — or a rational response to an unjust system?

Editor's note: this article was rewritten during our editorial review. The original 2011 version reproduced a press editorial verbatim with broken image markup and broke off mid-sentence; the text above is an original summary of the reported facts.