A tarnished hero

A tarnished hero

An Akron woman who went to jail for 10 days after being found guilty of falsifying documents so that her daughters could go to a successful suburban school district rather than a failing Akron school, has become a cause c l ®bre among advocates for school reform and school choice.

Kelley Williams-Bolar, 40, has a lot of things going for her in the sympathy department. She has been working as a teacher’s aide in Akron while attending the University of Akron and is reported to be 12 credit hours away from a bachelor’s degree in education. If her conviction is upheld, that education could be for naught because Ohio law prohibits a convicted felon from receiving a teaching certificate.

Her supporters say that all she was trying to do was what’s best for her daughters when she enrolled them in the Copley-Fairlawn schools for the 2006-07 school year, using her father’s address in the school district as that of the children.

Right idea; wrong way

No one begrudges a mother trying to provide the best possible education for her children. But Copley is not an open-enrollment district. And investigators for the district were convinced that Williams-Bolars daughters continued to live with her, not her father. They also say that they offered Williams-Bolar alternatives that would have included establishing legitimate residency or paying tuition, but she refused.

The Summit County prosecutor’s office said it had never before been forced to take a similar case to trial. A jury found Williams-Bolar guilty of two counts of tampering with records during the process of enrolling her children and deadlocked on charges of theft, with 11 jurors voting guilty.

After a four-day trial, a jury was convinced that Williams-Bolars cheated. She actually got off easy with a 10 day jail sentence. The maximum could have been five years in prison.

Ohio’s education system has its flaws, and there are hundreds of proposals for improving it. But gaming the system and sending your kids to another taxpayer’s schools on that taxpayer’s dime isn’t one of them.