Malverne district excludes students over issue of residency

The Malverne Board of Education has decided to remove three students from its schools after learning that they reside outside of the district.

The board, according to Assistant Superintendent of Operations Spiro Colaitis, received word from school staff since the end of last year that three students at Malverne High School did not live within the confines of the Malverne district, which comprises the Village of Malverne, parts of Lynbrook and Lakeview, northern Rockville Centre and southern West Hempstead.

One of the cases was reported at end of last year, though the board, Colaitis said, could not exclude a child from the district after March, while two others were reported last October.

In verifying these claims of [wrongful] residency, Colaitis said, the board hired a private investigator — a retired Nassau County Police detective who has been asked to remain anonymous — two months ago to survey the students in question by following them home, observing their place of residence and reporting his findings back to administrators until they determined that the three students were not residents in the district.

Colaitis said the board sent letters to their respective households to inform parents that the students will be excluded from the district, meaning they will no longer be allowed to attend its schools, and offer them the option to submit appeals for their decision and provide evidence that could disprove the board’s findings.

He said the district normally faces up to 40 residency cases a year, mostly resulting from parents who live outside the district dropping their children off at a school bus stop heading for Malverne schools.

“When they get caught and they realize that the jig is up, they just pull their child out of the district,” he said. “But sometimes they give us a good fight.”

After the board reviewed three residency appeals and corresponding documentation filed by the students’ parents in an executive session on Nov. 12, Trustee Jack Tulley read aloud the board’s three resolutions to deny these appeals at the following public meeting, stating that the provided evidence only confirmed their residence outside the district.

One parent at the meeting — who said she lives at 521 Champlain Avenue in West Hempstead and whose daughter is now a senior at Malverne High School— said her daughter is being “kicked out of school” despite how she pays school taxes after transferring to the district from Hempstead schools 8 years ago.

“It’s not fair that I’m going to have to find my child a school to go to in her last seven months of her senior year,” she said. “You’re trying to kick her out over garbage? I mean, what more do you want? Do you want to come visit my home & see where I live?”

“If the district feels that someone is not a valid resident of the district within all of the regulations of that residency,” Superintendent of Malverne Schools Dr. James Hunderfund later told the Herald, “then the action has to be taken by the board to deny residency.”

Florence Frazer, the district’s attorney who was present at the meeting, told the parent that she may file an appeal with the State Education Commissioner John King, but must enroll her child in a school district where she lives in the process.