> her daughter’s new student enrollment form was denied due to “license plate recognition software showing only Chicago addresses overnight” in July and August. In an email sent to Sánchez in August, the school district told her, “Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside.”
The person in the story claims to have lent the car to some family members at that time. That appears to confirm that the car was really parked somewhere else at night. But how does this LPR company have that information?
https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/leveraging-license-pla...
Key bit:
"With LPR intelligence tools such as Thomson Reuters license plate recognition, corporate crime professionals have the ability to share and request the sharing of commercial LPR data with other corporations."
Eg. Flock and Vigilant Solutions.
https://losgatan.com/class-action-suit-against-flock-license...
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260227692233/en/Flo...
I can think of a half dozen valid scenarios why the vehicle used for school drop off is parked away from the student's residence at night.
e.g. Vehicle belongs to a non-custodial parent from out of district who handles drop off. Vehicle is used by a household member to do overnight shift work. Family just moved, of course their vehicle wasn't being parked in the district in July. ALPR character recognition error. Parent and student live elsewhere in the summer, and still qualify as residents within the district.
It sometimes boggles the mind the amount of inflexibility that people doing these jobs have/are willing to use, especially in something so consequential.
Some of the largest customers of DRN are banks, especially sub-prime lenders :)
https://drndata.com/news/motorola-solutions-acquires-vaas-in...
And all of them... feed right into the greater LEARN (Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network) system that the feds and company have access to at all times.
My car is paid for but I just don't display a license plate period (in my US state it's only a $10 fine to not).
My concerns are the decision makers may rake the wrong lesson from this, my own moral injury, and/or legal exposure when this information is inevitably used to harm someone. Also, Law enforcement would happily co-opt this service. Perhaps making the searches themselves public would alleviate same of the challenges.
Every time the parent who doesn't live in the exact neighborhood drops the child off the car is flagged.
Then what happens when they look into this? Does the child automatically go to the school zoned for the parent with a "better" school or a "cheaper" school? Who makes the decision?
What about paid caregivers or family members?
This is a huge waste of time/money for everyone except for the company who sold the school on the "need" for it. There are way better ways of combating fraud which don't introduce mass surveillance.
In reality it was basically just "one parent lives in the district with a legal mailing address that works" - and very rarely enforced or even looked into. Especially if a kid was already enrolled and then later had a life event.
It more competitive/exclusive districts though this gets taken very seriously, with certain parents tattle-telling on others, etc.
Right. And when you see someone so dedicated do it there is almost certainly a hidden variable which causes this to occur. I imagine the nature of funding of these schools and the distribution of public monies has a lot to do with it.
> ways of combating fraud
Imagine being the richest country in the world and _caring_, honestly, about school location "fraud."
I lived in a working class town with a school district that built up a great reputation, especially for special needs students, due to the hard work of some amazing teachers and local parents. After I left I found out that the district had to scale back many programs dramatically because the number of students, especially special needs students, was growing significantly faster than the overall tax base and got close to bankrupting the town. Most of that was an increase in the ratio of families (esp special needs families) moving to town for the schools, but apparently there were fraud cases as well.
I have sympathy for the incoming families that sought out the best school they could find for their children, but I also sympathize with the existing families who lost the great programs they helped build because they became too successful.
A better solution would have been to fund education more equitably at the state level, but that was not a lever that the school district had.
I’ll pause for everyone’s minds to finish blowing.
and then the school administrators said, paraphrasing, "despite owning a home in the district, fuck you"
The family has proof of residence (which is its own absurdity we won't discuss), and this third party can arbitrarily override that based on a black box argument.
Doesn't the family have a very straightforward libel claim against the third party? That the car was parked elsewhere may be true. "Although you are the owner on record of a house in our district boundaries, your license plate recognition shows that is not the place where you reside" is a statement the family can disprove in court (to a civil standard) and demonstrate has financially damaged them ("her daughter is currently attending a private school 45 minutes away from her home"). If that statement came from the third party (rather than the school district misinterpreting the raw data themselves), the family will win. The straightforward financial damages (let alone anything pain / suffering / punitive damages) likely exceed the company's payment from the school district ("a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract"). It wouldn't take many of these claims before the company becomes insolvent, and good riddance.
I'd also expect them to win a lawsuit against the school district for falsely denying the basic right of education. Perhaps the individual school administrator also for libel. With any luck, a total legal bloodbath that warns any other school districts away from this conduct.
I can't imagine why highly paid school admin wouldn't correct an obvious mistake.
I would not have expected a school administrator to be highly paid. What kind of salary are we talking about here?
In most cases it’s not too hard to figure out who is committing fraud here. Families tend to rat each other out. It’s more a question of if the district is enforcing the rules.
Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue. That'll not happen in my lifetime though, too many people bought houses in "the right neighborhood" to get their kids into the "good" school that there would be so much push back that no politician would dare touch it. Especially since those people are typically also the ones with the money.
I believe they’re using LPR at drop off and pick up too, so parking a $500 junker somewhere isn’t a workaround. They would have to drive to the parked car every morning, transfer into it, drive it to school, return to the parking location, swap cars again, and then repeat the entire routine for pick up. It all technically could be done, but as a parent who knows what it’s like to hustle multiple kids to school in the morning I doubt this routine would be a common workaround.
Per above though I’m not advocating for license plate readers for enforcement.
Tracking license plates to look for unusually activity is an easy win for both fraud prevention and security from more serious threats.
Will these cause injustice and false positives even more than license plate tracking? What is your point?
> Personally, I think schools shouldn't be funded solely by the taxes of residents that reside within their bounds, but as a collective pool of all tax revenue.
Are you talking about undemocratically forcing a restructuring all school financing everywhere in order to avoid one school doing a $1K/mo license plate tracking contract to make sure kids live in the district that they're attending school in? What is the principle that you're trying to uphold?
The reason parents try to get into different schools isn’t to chase funding, it’s to get into the one with the best outcomes. A lot of that comes from parental involvement and having a critical mass of engaged students and parents, not the dollar amount spent on each student.
Straight to jail with you.
This isn't 'fraud' in any meaningful moral sense, it is a rational reaction to immoral, unjust school funding models that perpetuate systemic inequalities based on the zip-code you can afford. I'm sure schools have a duty to police this in their mind, sure, but I side with parents trying to evade the boundaries they've been put because they weren't born rich enough.
You may think it’s OK to steal because the end justifies the means… but it’s still stealing.
I can see it being a problem if e.g. a bunch of family members are putting their kids in a school district based on a single home owned by a grandparent. But if that grandparent was also the kid’s legal guardian, fair enough!
How does this work? Do parents use a friend’s address to register for the school? Is there no way for the state-run school to check against tax records?
The onus is on the organizations spying on the public and the Govt. for letting them do it.
It's one thing to snap a frame of a license plate on a freeway that the entire city uses. It's another to get a positive face detection of one kid out of a whole city, who is probably wearing a hood and staring at the ground, while walking down quiet neighborhood streets on a random side of the road under tree cover for 80% of the time. Gait is even harder.
Plus everyone carries a tracking device in their pocket regardless of mode of transport anyway (increasingly becoming the best or only way to get tickets)
They called other officers, ran the plate, ran the VIN, ran the plate, ran the VIN. I dunno I think we sat there for almost an hour before they told me why they pulled me over and what was up.
They are collecting information about everyone en masse and making up different problems they are "solving". Everyone in the US should realize that this is a story about themselves, not just some family in Chicago.
Surveillance powers that were justified as necessary because of terrorism were used to check on whether people lived in the correct area for a school - as well as a lot of other minor offences. The intent was obvious from the start because of the bodies that were given these powers (local authorities that run state schools are not involved in fighting terrorism). There was a backlash and the surveillance powers were trimmed down.
I don't even care about this case. Probably 99.9% of the time this particular system comes up with the correct answer - but since it's tracking cars and not people, it screwed up when somebody (extremely unusually) loaned out their car for months to a person who lives where people often fraudulently claim residence in that school district in order to (unfairly) take advantage of their schools. For the 1/1000 that it gets wrong, let them complain and have it cleared up manually; is there some other system that would obviously have a lower false positive rate?
The problem is illegal searches, Congress has shown that it doesn't care, the Supremes since Scalia left don't care, and the Dem base don't care if it targets the Repub base and the Repub base don't care if it targets the Dem base; both of them have been trained to think that it is alt-left alt-right populism to have privacy rights (or any rights at all.)
Expecting the same people who think that the 1st Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have the internet or that the 2nd Amendment should be abridged because the "Founding Fathers" didn't have machine guns to be any sort of meaningful speed bump on this almost complete project of complete public-private tracking of every individual at all times is silly. The Founding Fathers didn't have residency requirements for suburban public school attendance or property tax funding of it. They didn't even have public schools.
showing a drivers license, utility bill, vehicle registration, and mortgage documents? and then, perhaps, the school could do an independent lookup/verification on the property and see the owner?
exactly like in this case where all of the above was done and verified by the school and came out with the correct answer.
"School District 126’s contract with the license plate reader company shows it’s paying a total of $41,904 for a 36-month-long contract that began in December of 2024 -- the same month that Sánchez and her daughter moved into their new Alsip home."
Per a Google search my county: For the 2025–2026 school year, Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) charges nonresident tuition of $21,668 for elementary school and $20,214 for secondary school. Nonresident students must apply through the International Admissions and Enrollment office, and not all schools are open to tuition-paying students.
My wife worked in the office of an elementary school for 20 years and verified residency, custody, restraining orders and more. She shared many stories about people gaming the system. People will cross state and county lines to access a better school or one closer to work.
Using transport to get to school isn't a new concept. School buses have been a thing forever.
If you can't understand why a parent would drive their kids to school in Chicago, you probably haven't experienced winter weather there.
I did finally cave recently and bought a cargo bike (not electric). I've used it during snowfalls. It's fine, just like walking in snow and/or in negative 30 degree weather is fine.
What if she owned a business in another area and registered the vehicle there?
What if the parent lived in one place, but the child was living somewhere else?
I ran into a similar problem with my child over a decade ago, his mother had bought a new house that needed work but updated her driver's license too soon. She still had my address on her checks, where she hadn't lived for years, and they randomly used that to launch an investigation. Afterwards they forced my kid to switch school. Which is made even crazier by it being the same district, like the taxes are going to the same spot, and they hadn't even moved in yet.
School districts being their own government is a big problem in general. It seems like the whole point of them is to enforce segregation.
It's sad that there was no one in this decision chain calling out this absolute waste.
They even spend the most on minorities: "Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724... (see Table 1 for details)
(I admit I don't understand the deep wisdom behind presenting absolute differences in amounts, and omitting the amounts themselves, but from the rest of that article, and from the 1st link, we can see that per-pupil spending is in the $10k+ range, so a difference of $200 is negligible. In other words, it would be unfair to call Black and Latinx students privileged because of this.)
Whatever the reason for the sorry state of US education, lack of funding isn't it.
You can see anecdotes from teachers all across the country that they're expected to do more and more parenting-related tasks just to keep classrooms from complete chaos.
Ultimately the American parent is paying for the kids education either way: Either by buying a more expensive house near said "good schools", or by paying a private school, which is allowed to be selective in their admissions and match students. Making all schools actually be about the same is not just a matter of funding them equally, but you'd have to end the student segregation (even when it's in legal ways(, which is quite the challenge.
For instance, around me, there's some really bad school districts that end up grabbing very large mansions. But what happens there is that none of the kids of people living in those mansions actually go to public school. So while it might not be economically difficult to up the funding of the schools near poorer neighborhoods, I don't even necessarily think that they will get the same outcomes for the same funding: The selection component is going to change performance.
Their leading solution?
Increase tax on cigarettes.
Not 'increase tax on cigarettes to increase early detection initiatives' or increase tax on cigarettes to increase screening subsidies', just 'increase tax on cigarettes so that the state has more money and poor people have less money'.
The only real risk with pigouvian taxes is that if you raise them too high, you can foster the development of a black market, which comes with its own set of negative social consequences.
[1] https://www.radioiowa.com/2026/01/02/iowa-smokers-can-save-m... (“Increasing the cost of tobacco products is one of the most effective ways to reduce use,” Cale says, “and in turn, to lower Iowa’s lung cancer rates.”)
[2] GLP-1 drugs may fight addiction across every major substance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280797 - March 2026
[3] GLP-1 medications get at the heart of addiction: study - https://medicine.washu.edu/news/glp-1-medications-get-at-the... - March 4th, 2026
(i have personal experience with a loved one who will not quit smoking, so I am not unsympathetic to this risk and harm incurred)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
You could just as easily claim, and still be just as opinionated, that a system is what is intended to be (intentional design theory), or that a system should be what it ought to be (normative systems theory), or that a system should evolve to fit the purposes of it's environment (structural functionism), or that there is no fixed purpose and that purpose is instead decided by social consensus (social constructivism).
A motivated reader might notice that the above systems thinking models each align with various schools of thought/philosophical schools. Idealism, telologism, constructivism, etc. This highlights the assertion that there might not be any one correct system of thought given one's stance on Truth, in that certain said systems might believe that they are the One Truth but could not logically demonstrate to the others that they are as such.
There is so much wrong with that sentence it boggles the imagination.
Also though, we really need to destroy these things wholesale. If a local PD wants to run their own tech stack within their own boundaries using taxpayer money and operated by taxpayer citizens, then sure, I guess that's what the taxpayers want. This whole "private companies do the legwork of surveilling everybody and sell it piecemeal back to cops and private entities as a business" is flatly reprehensible and should be barred as a matter of law.
Fuck mass surveillance.
TLDR Hold your local government accountable, they work for you.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I hate these things and want them gone. They do not serve any practical purpose other than intimidation of minority groups and warrantless mass surveillance.
If you're going to spend taxpayer money to enforce laws and regulations, it seems like you should take advantage of efficiencies.
It seems like using third party data (like that obtained from Thomson Reuters Clear) is a very cost-effective way to obtain information that's useful.
Some people in the comments here object that the district is over-relying on the third party data provider. But from the article we cannot tell what happened. We don't know whether this is a 'computer says no' situation or whether the information from third party sources was was tipped off the school district, and then they verified everything to their satisfaction.
In general, it's easy for parents to share a story about what happened to their child in school, and very hard for a school district to respond. Unless the parent signs some sort of waiver, the district can't easily respond, without breaking privacy laws. Even if the story is 100% false, the school district probably can't answer the journalist's questions without violating FERPA.
Towns with better school districts command higher property values, creating a positive feedback loop in resources but also pricing younger families out of those same areas.
Another typical situation is a divorce, where one parent moves out of the expensive town but still wants the kids to attend the same schools for continuity.
Besides AOC.
This and private prisons exploiting inmates for cheap workforce are plain, old-school segregation, except diluted and less "in your face". US seriously needs to start fixing some of its shit because it's getting grosser by the day and you can't pretend to be such a developed nation anymore: the King is Naked and rest of the world just doesn't buy the Hollywood illusion anymore.
At what point is automated enforcement a good or a bad thing for law breaking? We have yet to grapple with that as a society, and the short answer is there's no easy answer to this problem. Both for precisely the reason this article calls out (that overnight location of car is not a 100% accurate representation of residency, and fixing it seems like a mess); but also because people ARE inherently selfish and REALLY do not like the rules applying to them equally.
A great many people in the United States, particularly white (sorry, I'm going to bring race into this because it's important) enjoy some level of flexibility on what laws they follow and when. Certainly more flexibility than the average black experience. In fact, this problem is so bad that states like California have had to institute policies that allow things like license plate lights being out to exist because the profiling is so catastrophically bad that it's completely unfair.
So now, we have an automated system that at least tries to provide some level of fair enforcement. At least for now, things like speed cameras, red light cameras, license plate readers, etc. don't appear to openly consider racial bias in the immediate decision making process on whether the law is enforced or not. (There are other biases, of course, and even indirect bias with regards to where these things are placed, but I'll digress a bit here).
But even aside from the racial divide, the class divide on enforcement is a problem. And the upper classes have generally enjoyed a level of insulation from complying with laws, which just continues to go up the higher you climb (See: Epstein files). But that's on the more extreme end.
At any rate, better enforcement of laws that are now crossing the lower to middle class divide because automation allows us to do so is certainly an interesting social problem.
Regardless of whether you approve or disapprove of automatic red light cameras, you can construct an argument that either having them or not having them is the policy that is actually racist against blacks.
More generally, whether automated law enforcement is good or bad depends highly on how good or bad the law is, which people legitimately disagree about; and also how reliable the automatic enforcement is.
Nonetheless, a fair point that deserves analysis. (My vote, to be fair, is ask the community what they want and put it up to a vote. With honest information on safety data versus revenue generation)
Briefly, if Article 3 applies to a site outside the EU Article 27 requires that site to designate a representative in the Union that people can contact over GDPR issues.
There is an exception in Article 27 if the site use by people covered by GDPR is just occasional, doesn't involve particularly sensitive data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of any natural person.
A big factor in determining whether or not Article 3 covers your site is intent. If there is evidence you envisaged serving people in the Union that makes it more likely Article 3 will apply. If you did not that makes it more likely that it does not.
Blocking EU visitors should be evidence that you are not trying to serve EU users, making it less likely Article 3 applies, and less likely you will need an Article 27 representative.
