The law requires the District of Columbia Board of Education to do the following: calculate by October 15 of each year the number of students enrolled in the District’s public schools and students whose tuition in other schools is paid by DCPS funds, including students with special needs and nonresident students, in the following categories by grade level if applicable: kindergarten through grade 12, preschool and prekindergarten, adult students, and students in nongrade level programs; calculate the amount of fees and tuition assessed and collected from nonresident students in these categories; prepare by October 15 and submit to the Authority, the Comptroller General of the United States, appropriate congressional committees, and others an annual report summarizing those counts; and arrange with the Authority to provide for the conduct of an independent audit of the count. Enrollment and residency verification take place when a student enters the school system. DCPS’ Enrollment Count Process in School Year 1996-97 Remained Centered in the Local Schools

DCPS’ process for enrolling, verifying residency of, and tracking students remained centered in the local school in school year 1996-97, while central office staff monitored portions of the process. Figure 1 shows the enrollment count process for school year 1996-97. School Year 1996-97 Enrollment Process Changes Did Not Ensure Accuracy

DCPS’ new student enrollment card was intended to document that students had met the 1-day attendance requirement for inclusion in the official enrollment count. Furthermore, even though the District of Columbia Auditor has suggested that students unable to document their residency be excluded from the official enrollment count, whether they pay tuition or not, DCPS included these students in its enrollment count for school year 1996-97. Limiting access to the student database has also helped to reduce errors. In addition, schools did not collect all required proofs of residency. System for Pupil Accounting Did Not Ensure an Accurate Count

The foundation of the pupil accounting system—SIS—lacked adequate safeguards to ensure that students were accurately tracked when they transferred from one school to another. Furthermore, some schools did not follow attendance rules, affecting later counts and projections. SIS Process for Transferring Students Allowed More Than One School to Include a Student in Its Active Enrollment

The student transfer process may have allowed a single student to be enrolled in at least two schools simultaneously. These districts rely on a variety of automatic edits and procedures in their student database systems to prevent such errors and serve as ongoing checks and balances on the schools. DCPS, the Board of Trustees, and the Authority Have Not Complied With the District of Columbia School Reform Act

The District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 imposed enrollment count reporting and audit requirements upon DCPS, the District of Columbia Board of Education—all of the responsibilities of which have been delegated to the Board of Trustees—and the Authority. The U.S. Department of Education, in commenting on our draft report, noted that its Office of Inspector General had no role in preparing DCPS’ enrollment count for school year 1996-97 but provided some clarifications about correspondence between it and DCPS regarding an audit of the count. Scope and Methodology

We designed our study to gather information about DCPS’ enrollment count process for school year 1996-97 and the process used by other selected urban school districts.
Why GAO Did This Study

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the enrollment count process that the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) used in school year 1996-97, focusing on: (1) whether the process appeared sufficient to produce an accurate count; (2) enrollment count processes used by some other urban school systems; and (3) the role of the Department of Education's Inspector General in preparing DCPS' official enrollment count for school year 1996-97.

What GAO Found

GAO noted that: (1) even though DCPS changed parts of its enrollment count process in school year 1996-97 to address criticisms, the process remains flawed; (2) some of these changes increased complexity and work effort but did little to improve the count's credibility; (3) errors remained in the Student Information System (SIS), but DCPS had only limited mechanisms for correcting these errors; (4) problems also persisted in the critical area of residency verification; (5) in school year 1996-97, schools did not always verify student residency as required by DCPS' own procedures; (6) proofs of residency, when actually obtained, often fell short of DCPS' standards; (7) Central Office staff did not consistently track failures to verify residency; (8) school staff and parents rarely suffered sanctions for failure to comply with the residency verification requirements; (9) the pupil accounting system failed to adequately track students; (10) SIS allowed more than one school to count a single student when the student transferred from one school to another; (11) schools did not always follow attendance rules, and SIS lacked the capability to track implementation of the rules; (12) some attendance rules, if implemented, could have allowed counting of nonattending students; (13) other school districts report that they use several approaches to control errors and to increase the accuracy of their enrollment counts; (14) these include using centralized enrollment and pupil accounting centers and a variety of automated student information system edits and procedures designed to prevent or disallow pupil accounting errors before they occur; (15) the recently enacted District of Columbia School Reform Act of 1995 requires the enrollment count process to produce enrollment numbers for nonresidents and students with special needs; (16) DCPS (acting on behalf of the District of Columbia Board of Education) and the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority are not in compliance with requirements of this new law; (17) the Department of Education helped DCPS develop its request for proposals for the independent audit of the enrollment count for school year 1996-97, but it had no role in preparing DCPS' official enrollment count for school year 1996-97; and (18) the Authority subsequently decided, however, that auditing the count for school year 1996-97 would be counterproductive.