Getting In: Zone cheats and the zone police
Wednesday, 6 November 2024
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Families are fraudulently editing power bills, hiring people’s letter boxes and even pretending they live at their office to get their children into Christchurch’s biggest school.
Burnside High School principal Scott Haines said zone cheating - parents faking in-zone requirements of a school to secure a spot for their child - was a “growing issue”.
The school has about 2500 students, of whom 15% come from outside its strict zone, a percentage Haines said grew smaller each year.
“It certainly demonstrates confidence in the school, but it creates a challenge for us … to correctly identify who is in-zone and who is out-of-zone.”
The problem of zone cheating is something other favoured schools across the city experience.
School boards can legally remove a student if their family lied about living in-zone when they were enrolled or used a temporary residence to do so.
Most schools demand proof of in-zone residency when a student is enrolled, such as an electricity bill.
To bypass this, Haines said cheats employed tactics such as paying people to use their in-zone letterboxes, claiming to live at rental properties inside zones, or using an address they were yet to move into.
Other ways parents try to get around the rules included fraudulently changing addresses on utility bills, pretending an in-zone business property was a home and claiming a child lived with in-zone relatives, Haines said.
“Where we have any degree of suspicion or uncertainty, we will go out to do a home visit, understand who lives at the address, [and] we will ask for further identification … really drill down.”
Five or six zone cheats had been discovered this year, almost all at the time of enrolment, prompting Burnside High to invest more time combing through application details.
“We have very robust controls and processes already, but the increased incidence of finding families who are seeking to circumvent that process makes us want to review that more frequently,” he said.
Haines said he felt a “keen sense of justice” in ensuring the zoning rules were obeyed, but sympathised with innocent students who may suffer for the actions of their parents.
He guessed an agreement between Christchurch public schools to minimise out-of-zone enrolments could be to blame for the rise in efforts to cheat the system.
“It’s just now that much harder to access Burnside High School.”
Furthermore, a “huge number” of migrants had moved to Burnside following Covid-19, filling spaces and leading to the creation of an extra five English classes for non-native speakers, Haines said.
Burnside board chairman Chris Dann said in some cases zone discrepancies may not be intentional, with families unaware of some rules or simply mistaken.
The enrolment team was “vigilant” but it was often difficult to prove suspected zone fraud, Dann added.
While the problem of people cheating zoning rules is not exclusive to Burnside High, at Christchurch Boy’s and Girls’ high schools - whose desirability can see prices of nearby houses inflated by six figures - the schools say the issue is less of a problem.
The single-sex schools do not subscribe to the wider Christchurch secondary school agreement to reduce out-of-zone enrolments.
Attempted zone fraud was “very low” at Boys’ High thanks to a thorough enrolment process, headmaster Nic Hill said.
“It’s a matter of prevention, so we do check addresses, we do seek validity of those addresses and if we are concerned we check.”
A “robust” process existed at Girls’ High, under which concerns were raised directly with families and investigations launched where needed, principal Helen Armstrong said.
“This is not a significant issue we have come across, but we remain vigilant.”
Former Boys’ High headmaster Trevor McIntyre said he used to physically check “little Johnny was actually a resident” at his enrolment address during his decade leading the school.
“There was quite a bit of people using other people’s mailboxes for addresses, in fact one place I came across a situation where a family were renting an empty property in-zone.
“My sense is the scene has changed a bit since then. I don’t think there are perhaps the same pressures or the same desires to shift around as there used to be.”
McIntyre, who left Boys’ High in 2012, said it was possible the enrolment process was not as “rigid” back then, and he was not sure if proof of address had been required.
Cashmere High School was unable to comment on zone cheating amid a busy start to the term with student prize giving and a new principal, a spokesperson said.
A desire to live in the coveted school zone has also seen the inflation of house prices, while the board of trustees came under fire from the Ombudsman in August for failing to properly explain its strict enrolment policy to the family of a disabled child, whose siblings were accepted into the school before the family moved out of zone.
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