Stealth Students Test Tolerance of the Affluent

The lengths to which some parents will go to get their kids into better schools really speaks to how awful some schools are and how desperately some parents just want a good education for their children.

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Stealth Students Test Tolerance of the Affluent

Published: August 26, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/26/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/27ctcol.html

GREENWICH

SAD to say, but suburban schools also have a problem with illegal immigrants, only theirs are pint-size and most are American citizens.

Take Greenwich. Students from bordering communities like Port Chester, N.Y., and Stamford, Conn., keep striving to land seats in Greenwich classrooms. Who can blame them? Just as Mexicans sneak into California because that’s where the better jobs are, students sneak into Greenwich because that’s where the better schools are.

Greenwich, one of America’s wealthiest towns, has not yet surrounded itself with a chain-link fence and National Guard troops. But it has its own version of a border patrol. A private eye, the kind who might be expected to snoop around motels, has been hired to check out tips of juvenile border crossings. Tattletale parents will report that they’ve spied a student crossing the Mill Street bridge from Port Chester or spotted another being dropped off by a car with New York license plates. The gumshoe, camera in hand, might shadow the third grader to his home.