Charleston County schools look to verify magnet schools addresses

Charleston County schools are supposed to verify the address of every student this year, but district leaders plan to ask the school board to change that requirement.

The school board passed a policy in January of last year aimed at preventing parents from lying about their addresses to attend specific schools. District leaders failed to make plans to implement the policy until late last summer, so they decided to phase in the policy with five magnet schools. This coming school year, the policy was supposed to apply to all schools.

But schools Superintendent Nancy McGinley plans to take a proposal to the board at its July 21 meeting that would require address verification only at the county’s 11 magnet schools annually. Non-magnet schools would check students’ addresses when they were admitted, and those schools could ask for the same documents of any enrolled student at any time, according to the administration’s proposal. Non-magnet schools would not have to check every students’ address.

The verification process was an enormous task that required many resources beyond what schools have, McGinley said. To verify every students’ address at every school would be “too burdensome,” she said.

Read more in tomorrow's editions of The Post and Courier.