VIDALIA — The crackdown on out-of-district students in Concordia Parish is under way, and some students are being sent to other school districts.

While some students were moved to the correct school district by their parents’ initiative and others have been told to move by the district, others still have not proven their residency, Superintendent Loretta Blankenstein said.

Tougher residency requirements placed in effect this year are part of an ongoing desegregation order from the U.S. Justice Department.

The school district does not have a deadline by which they have to meet the justice department’s order, but principals are already working on it, Blankenstein said.

Parents were first notified that they would have to prove their residency by letters that were sent home with the students. Follow-up letters have since been sent.

The school district initially got a list of students with questionable residency from the Justice Department itself.

At the end of the last academic year, the district gave the department all of the students’ information, and the department geocoded it along school district maps.

Information that may have helped flag a student’s residence as questionable might have been a phone number and an address that did not match, Blankenstein said.

Other students were flagged because the district received complaints about them being out-of-district, she said.

The district also found out-of-district students by following school buses along their routes.

In one instance, Blankenstein said district officials saw students getting off of a bus and into a waiting vehicle at an address listed as theirs.

“Some of the things that we found would be a mobile home with no electricity connected,” she said.

In a case like that, the person who owned or rented the mobile home may have waited a few weeks for school to begin, and then had the power disconnected when they thought residency had been established.

“If they had already disconnected the lights, we might have contacted them,” Blankenstein said.

In other instances, school officials went for a home visit only to find that the address listed was a camp instead of a primary residence.

But not all of the students on the list are out of district. For example, students in Ridgecrest have a Ferriday address, some Monterey students have a Jonesville address and even some students who have a Vidalia address are actually in the Ferriday school zone.

“Those students may have been ID’d as someone we need to verify but are actually in zone,” Blankenstein said.

Vidalia Junior High School Principal Whest Shirley said the reason many of the out-of-district students were able to register was because they could provide enough documentation to enroll.

“When a parent comes in with the proper paperwork, we are obligated to let them enroll,” he said. “It’s hard for principals to police that if they have the proper paperwork.”

The entire problem hinges on residency and how it is defined.

“It’s not really a property ownership deal, not where you pay taxes,” he said. “It’s where you put your head down at night. I own property in Arkansas and Mississippi, but that doesn’t mean I can send my kids to school there.”

Shirley said approximately five students have been sent home for being out of district in the last week, and that the school probably still has 20 out-of-zone students.

Meanwhile, at Vidalia Lower Elementary School, Assistant Principal Charles Anderson said between 10 and 15 students have been sent to other schools, and a total of 30 have been contacted about having questionable residency.

“There are two reactions that we see,” Anderson said. “Either a parent gets upset and is pretty mad about the situation, but most of the parents I have talked to just said, ‘You caught me.’ They were just sad they had to change schools.”

Parents usually understand when it is explained that the order was not a district vendetta, but a federal order, Vidalia High School Principal Rick Brown said.

“We had a some discussions and had to explain that that wasn’t necessarily the school board, but a justice department decision that they had to abide by,” Brown said.

But the schools are seeing some benefits, Anderson said.

“Some classes have lost two or three students, and there is a big difference between teaching 21 students and 18 students in an elementary classroom,” he said.

Shirley said that the reaction he has seen in the community is generally positive, much of it for the same reason that Anderson gave.

“Every study points that if you can lower the teacher-student ratio, you are going to have a better learner output,” he said.

Numbers of how many students have been sent to other school districts are not yet available, but Blankenstein said every school had some students who were out of district.