A handful of uniformed Winnetka police converged last month on the dean`s office at New Trier High School, arrested a pair of teenage brothers, and led them from the North Shore school in handcuffs.
They weren`t drug dealers or vandals. They were South Korean nationals, and their crime was attending classes.
School officials have charged that Sung Joon Choi, 17, and Sung Wook Choi, 18, circumvented the school district`s residency rules, traveling more than 10,000 miles to enroll in what is widely regarded as the best public high school in America.
”We are finding that more and more students are being brought here and left to their own devices,” said Diane Juneau, director of student services at New Trier. ”Their parents bring them here, attempt to establish some sort of residency, and then return to their homes outside the country and leave the children alone.”
Educators call them ”crashers,” students who travel distances great or small in search of a better education or a modicum of safety outside the school districts in which they live.
Using ruses that range from borrowing the phone bills of friends or relatives to adopting a fraudulent address, parents attempt to slip their children past the watchful eye of school registrars.
The desire to change schools is fueled by increasing gang violence in the city, a perceived disparity in the quality of education between financially strapped Chicago schools and wealthy suburban districts, and a wide range of other economic and social reasons, state education officials said. It is a combination that has made crashing a fast-growing and costly phenomenon.
”Most of them are children who are trying to escape the Chicago schools,” said Richard Basden, manager of recognition and supervision for the Illinois State Board of Education. ”Parents want to get their children into an environment where there are no gangs and where they feel they will get a quality education.
”They`ll send them an hour away from home to do that-if they can get away with it.”
But at a time when schools have been squeezed by burgeoning enrollments, shrinking budgets and per-pupil costs that have soared near $10,000 a year in some districts, administrators say they have turned to high-tech dragnets and amateur sluething to purge students who illegally attend their schools at the taxpayers` expense. Among the many school districts experiencing problems:
– At Proviso West High School in Hillside, where a student who lives in Chicago was expelled Monday, officials say that for three years they have dispatched staff members armed with portable camcorders to CTA train stations and bus stops to scan for crashers. The tapes have been reviewed and used to nab up to 50 illegal students a year, officials said.
Others were caught after addresses given on enrollment forms led school officials to police stations, vacant lots and hot dog stands.
– At Oak Park-River Forest High School in Oak Park, officials said 150 to 200 students from Chicago and nearby suburbs were either rebuffed at registration or expelled so far this school year for crashing. School officials say they routinely follow up on suspicious enrollment forms by visiting addresses provided by suspected crashers and by following tips from students and parents.
– In School District 161 in Flossmoor, officials reported 30 to 50 cases each year where pupils from Chicago Heights, Country Club Hills and other neighboring suburbs have been refused admittance or expelled after it was determined they lived outside district boundaries.
– In Community Consolidated School District 47 in Crystal Lake, officials said they tightened their residency screening policies after five families from Elgin and other nearby suburbs presented fraudulent documents last summer to gain admission to the district`s elementary and junior high schools.
– At Niles North High School in Skokie, administrators said the number of illegal students from Chicago, neighboring suburbs and foreign countries has risen dramatically in the last five years.
They have responded by sending scouts to Skokie Swift stations and PACE bus stops to indentify students coming from outside the district.
At New Trier, where Juneau has led efforts since last summer to ferret out illegal students, as many as 50 students are suspected of living outside district boundaries without paying the $10,378 annual tuition charged to non- residents. The case of the Choi brothers has only served to focus new attention on the problem, she said.
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”We`re just beginning to investigate what we have here,” Juneau said.
”I think it has been happening for some time, but we haven`t had the means to investigate.
”The word got out that it was easy to get into New Trier, and that has only made the problem worse.”
But it was not New Trier`s reputation as an easy mark that led the Chois to enroll, it was the school`s highly regarded academics and a mother`s hopes for her sons` futures.
The Chois were charged with criminal trespass and expelled Dec. 6 after an investigation found that they had been living on their own for months in a Wilmette apartment that was rented last fall by their parents, both of whom had returned to South Korea after ensuring their children had been accepted at New Trier.
”They wanted a better education for us,” Sung Joon Choi said of his mother, a music teacher, and his father, an insurance company executive in Seoul. Choi said he and his brother attended Niles North the previous school year after establishing residence in an apartment in Skokie.
”They want us to go to college. My mom wants me to be a lawyer and wants my brother to be a doctor,” said Choi, adding that his mother has returned to Wilmette and is seeking help from relatives to establish the boys` residency. State law requires district officials to ensure students reside with a legal guardian within district boundaries and expel those who fraudulently enroll. Students can cross district boundaries if they pay tuition at the school.
But turning students away is a task that has placed some administrators in the unenviable position of denying entrance to those who may have good reason for seeking a new school.
”I`ve had parents bring in students who are bandaged and have their arms in slings after they were beat up by gangs,” said Larry Walker, associate superintendent of Oak Park-River Forest District 200, a district with one of the worst crashing problems in the Chicago area.
”They are afraid to go back to their schools in the city, but we have to ask where they live. It hurts to turn them away,” Walker said. ”But it just wouldn`t be fair to the taxpayers who support the school if we were to let them in.”
Walker said many crashers leave their homes before sunrise and travel for more than an hour by train or bus to attend their new schools.
They are generally good students who often participate in school activities and are a ”model for some of our students who don`t take their education very seriously,” said Proviso West Principal Robert Milano, who inaugurated video investigations at his school three years ago.
Across the nation, principals and superintendents recently have focused on the problem of non-resident students as rising divorce rates, gang problems and homelessness force students and parents to seek new schools, said Karen Powe, director of policy at the National School Boards Association in Alexandria, Va.
”I`ll bet the parents who are falsifying their addresses are most likely those who have tried the more traditional avenues of approaching the school boards for permission to enroll their child in the outside district,” Powe said. ”Having been rebuffed, they simply take matters into their own hands.” In many cases, such as the Chois`, the plan backfires and students end up missing precious class time or an entire school year as they plead their cases to school officials. The Chois are not now enrolled in classes.
Undaunted by their arrests and a March date in Cook County District Court in Skokie on the trespassing charges, Sung Joon Choi said he and his brother hope to return to New Trier and graduate. He said that he was unsure about his future in law but that his brother was intent on parlaying a New Trier diploma into an eventual career in medicine.
”He`s gonna go for it,” Choi said.