Two D.C. police officers are being sued for more than $224,000 by the Attorney General on charges they lied about where they live in order to send their children to public schools in Northwest D.C.
Attorney General Karl Racine is seeking $224,291 in unpaid non-resident tuition plus penalties from Metropolitan Police Department members Lt. Alan Hill and Sgt. Candace Hill. In 2013, D.C. Public Schools ordered the Hills to pull their three children from the schools they were charged with attending illegally, the lawsuit says.
One of the couple's children attended D.C. public schools for almost 10 years, from 2003 to 2013, according to the suit. He attended Eaton Elementary School in Cleveland Park, and Deal Middle School and Wilson High School near Friendship Heights. The family's other two children, twins, attended D.C. public schools from 2005 to 2013, also attending John Eaton Elementary and Alice Deal Middle School, the suit says.
The Hills allegedly told DCPS they lived at a D.C. address where Mr.Hill had owned a property since 1996. The Hills actually lived in Mitchellville, Maryland; Alexandria, Virginia and at their current residence in Accokeek, Maryland, the suit says.
The suit says in September 2007 Alan Hill sued the tenant of his D.C. apartment for non-payment.
The suit says the Hills put their kids in D.C. public schools for convenience, as the parents occasionally used a marked police cruiser from the Second District police station in Cleveland Park to drop off their children at the schools, which were less than two miles away.
District law says non-residents are required to pay for each student attending a D.C. public school.
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DCPS discovered the Hills did not live in D.C. in September 2013 and asked the parents to remove their children from the schools, the suit says. The Hills requested an appeal initially, and then pulled their children from the schools, according to the suit.
So far, the Office of the Attorney General has collected 13 monetary judgments and five out-of-court settlements related to non-resident-tuition fraud, totaling $773,000. The Attorney General’s office began suing parents in 2012.
“You shouldn't take advantage of the taxpayers of the District of Columbia and expect to get away with it, and suits like these are one of the tools we use to safeguard public integrity,” Racine said.
