Nearly 200 students must show proof of Fayette residency, or they can't attend classes Jan. 5

By PAT NEWMAN
Staff Writer

Fayette County students who have not presented documentation of their residency will be denied admission to school Jan. 5, according to Stuart Bennett, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction.

High school students will not be given second semester schedules until they comply.

The warning comes after four months of checking the residency status of the district's 19,000 students. Utility bills were checked and copies were made for the students' files. Bennett estimated that there are just under 200 non-compliant students.

“We have some citizens who are refusing to comply, stating that it is an invasion of their privacy,” Bennett told the Board of Education Monday night. But the overall response has been overwhelmingly positive, he said. “Most students replied immediately, Bennett said. “Right when this started, we had a burst of withdrawals from the schools.”

But the actual reasons for withdrawing from school were not always clear, he said.

The bottom line is the $5,800 it costs to educate a child in the Fayette County School System. Every non-resident student costs the taxpayer, Bennett said.

In other business, the board was briefed by Bobby Stephens, a consultant from Educational Performance Evaluation and Management Systems of America Inc. on creating a unified salary scale and compensation study for its classified employees. He has conducted more than 150 interviews with individuals and small groups of employees in order to understand their concerns and get a feel for the duties they perform.

Final recommendations will be made to the board in March on how the jobs are ranked and the rate of pay assigned to each position based on the “fair market dollar,” Stephens said.