Suburban school district uses license plate readers to verify student residency

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"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.

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.

It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.

There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.

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.

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.

Besides AOC.

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.

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.