Spy Kids

Santa Fe Public Schools recently hired a private investigator to verify the home addresses of about 20 students, the district confirms to SFR.

SFPS Director of School Security Gabe Romero says that investigators have already conducted surveillance on the listed home addresses of 10 families whose children attend the overcrowded Amy Biehl Community School. More surveillance missions could be coming, he says.

"We are done looking at the first group we wanted to look at," Romero says.

Romero says the district's decision to hire a private investigator came following pressure from the school board to relieve overcrowding at the elementary school beyond the city's southern edge. In January, the board voted to cap enrollment at the school and send any new enrollees living in the Amy Biehl zone to Piñon Elementary instead.

Although Romero provided a copy of the district's purchase order with H and H Private Investigations for $13,750, he says he's unsure whether investigators found evidence at any of the households to indicate parents were misrepresenting their address in order for students to attend Amy Biehl, whose boundary zone includes areas along I-25 and Highway 14.

Rancho Viejo resident Tom Johnson tells SFR he believes the investigators made an appearance last week when a man in a white pickup truck pulled up into his driveway. Two of his grandchildren attend Amy Biehl, he says, and they both stay at this home about 60 percent of the school week.

Johnson was alerted to the man's presence when the vehicle set off an alarm in his driveway.

The man then drove a bit down Johnson's large driveway, about 50 feet away from his house, and stayed there 10 minutes.

A neighbor at another one of Johnson's homes in Santa Fe (he says he owns three) says that a man knocked on the neighbor's door and asked if Johnson lived there. The man told Johnson's neighbor that he was an investigator for the school district.

Johnson says the experience rattled him, and was especially frustrating because he is African-American. Black or African-American people only constitute 1.6 percent of Santa Fe's population, according to the US Census.

Johnson says he is unsure of which address his grandchildrens' father (Johnson's son) included in their student profile sheets when they enrolled at Amy Biehl.

"I know the Facebook group says we are spying on kids, but we are not following kids home," Romero says. "We don't want to be confrontational, but we need to verify the addresses of their parents.

Superintendent Veronica Garcia tells SFR the decision to hire investigators came after the school gave parents a chance to "self-disclose," but less than half of the parents at Amy Biehl complied with the school's request that they provide two proofs of address, which can include utility bills, lease agreements, mortgage agreements, bank statements and insurance forms.

If a parent did not comply with the request, and the district had other reasons to doubt a parent's claim to live in the Amy Biehl zone—such as receiving a tip, or by calling the phone number on a student's profile sheet and not reaching anybody—they may have been targeted for surveillance.

Romero says approximately 20 students came under suspicion of the district in this manner. Garcia claims that larger school districts have found surveillance to be the "least intrusive" method of verifying addresses.

"I don't think there's been widespread surveillance of people. But in instances where we have received tips, [that] there are folks that do not live there, this is what that is about," Garcia tells SFR.

The superintendent also represents the decision to hire a private investigator as a more judicious one than home visitations, which is what the school board originally asked for.

"The board did take a position on, very firmly, that they did want … home visitation is originally what they asked for," she says. "I explained the problems with that. They were fine with just the verification of address. And so that's what we're trying to do [in] the least intrusive way."

Enrollment for Southside schools like Amy Biehl, Piñon and Nina Otero stands at just a little over 4,000, and will approach 5,000 by the 2026-2027 school year, according to the district. Enrollment numbers are forecast to stay steady or decline everywhere else.

Garcia says that while the district didn't want to hire a private investigator, it wasn't fair to families moving to the Amy Biehl zone to be denied a seat because somebody else used a false address. She says the children of three or four families who recently moved to the Amy Biehl area were turned away from the school.

Parents who self-disclose that they misrepresented their address, she says, will be given "amnesty" and their children will be allowed to stay at Amy Biehl until the end of this school year.

SFR previously reported that a 2016 study by a Harvard graduate student found that strict requirements for documents to prove a SFPS student's home address were biased against families whose housing situation was fluid and who did not have easy access to internet and telephonic communications.

In that same story, school board member Steve Carrillo told SFR some families who misrepresent their addresses were guilty of leveraging political contacts to enroll students in schools outside their zone.

This story was updated on March 22 to reflect that Romero provided a copy of the contract and named the investigators after initial publication.