Since nobody wants to mention even a peep about books they have read or plan to read, I thought I’d comment on a post by Liz Goodwin at The Lookout, a Yahoo News blog. The headline read, “Homeless woman prosecuted for enrolling son in Conn. School.” I just had to express an opinion.
The Norwalk school district in Connecticut is prosecuting a homeless woman for theft, specifically for enrolling her five year old son in one of the district’s schools under a false pretense. The falsehood is that they live at the in-district address of a friend, who incidentally lives in public housing. The homeless woman and her boy also sometimes stay at a shelter in the district, though she never registers when they do so.
The friend was evicted from her public housing for her part in the address scam. If convicted on the charges filed against her, the homeless mom could be incarcerated for 20 years and be fined $15,000. Her son would have been eligible to attend the Norwalk school if only she would have registered at the shelter.
I assume that the only way the friend could be evicted is if she overtly confirmed to the school district that her friend was living at her address. I assume the homeless mom avoided registering at the shelter to stay off of somebody’s radar screen. I assume the reason for that is to enable her to get services or avoid losing services from one agency or another.
Hmm, could that be another act of deceit on her part? It appears she might be a serial offender. As the author of By the Light: A Novel of Serial Homicide, I know a little something about stringing crimes together. I guess it could be that she simply does not trust the establishment. Just based upon my own opinions, I could probably buy that.
I further assume that the decision makers at the Norwalk school district have their heads up their collective asses. My imagination can conjure up no other explanation for pursuing charges with such heady penalties. And, of course, there is still the fact that, but for lack of registration at the shelter, school eligibility would be a moot question. And, really, how is this homeless woman going to accumulate 15 grand to pay her fine when she can’t even scrape together enough for a roof over her and her son’s heads?
Who will care for the five year old son if his mom goes to prison, and at what cost to taxpayers? How much will it cost them to house and feed the mom for up to 20 years? Don’t you think the friend will pop back up as some form of expense on the backside of her eviction?
The article draws parallels to a similar case that occurred in Ohio and stirred debate regarding the fairness of lower income families having to send their children to schools of lesser quality due to the schools being so prevalently funded by local tax revenues. Most school districts across the land have faced tough cutback decisions in light of the downturned economy. It is incidentally interesting to note that school districts here in Johnson County, Kansas, toyed with possibilities of raising additional revenues to replace funding cutbacks made by the state. These talks were swatted down by the state’s executive and judicial branches with the explanation that it would disrupt the fairness they applied across the state with their cutbacks.
I’m thinking that in the Connecticut case, the address-loaning friend and the serial-deceiving mom should be punished in manners that will provide a more up-close-and-personal and lesson-teaching experience. Some sort of public service might be appropriate… scraping gum off the sidewalks, cleaning up public areas along roadways, or some other form of labor-involved activity. Unless there are circumstances of which we don’t know, the eviction should probably be set aside. The big jail time and impossible-to-pay fine, now that they have given us a pissoff and a good chuckle, should become a faded memory as quickly as possible.
My thoughts about this changed as I analyzed the facts and told the story. What say you? Oh, never mind. Silly me, I forgot about your shyness.
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