In San Francisco’s public school lottery, location is everything. Depending on the neighborhood, enrollment in certain schools can be a guarantee or a pipe dream.
That is why the San Francisco Unified School District board in 2010 instituted a policy to ensure the school choice system would be effective in its chief goal of reducing racial segregation. The policy included a mandate to “investigate the accuracy of home addresses” to deter families from gaming the system.
Students whose families were found to be committing address fraud had their enrollment revoked, and their parents or guardians were forced to pay investigation fees, which ranged from $300 to $4,000, according to interviews with current and former SFUSD staff and a review of district documents.
For more than a decade, investigators were successful at rooting out address fraud, uncovering as many as 143 cases annually. Then it stopped.
SFUSD has not confirmed a single case in the last three school years, The Standard has learned. Current and former employees say the district has abandoned investigating them altogether.
“It’s like freaking open season,” said Kit Lam, who spearheaded address fraud investigations at the district’s Educational Placement Center for 11 years.
Lam, who had worked for years in law enforcement in Hong Kong, deployed an array of creative tactics to catch SFUSD families in the act. He would drive to the reported home addresses in the middle of the night to surveil cars parked in the driveway and scour utility bills and driver’s licenses to check for alterations. He would often go so far as to knock on neighbors’ doors to get more information.
‘We just say, “We’ll look into it.” But there’s no tool to do so anymore.’
anonymous SFUSD employee
In the spring of 2022, Lam was fired for what he claims was a beef with Lauren Koehler, director of the Educational Placement Center, which is now called the Enrollment Center. The district declined to connect Koehler with The Standard for an interview or comment on the alleged beef.
“The position of address fraud investigator was eliminated during budget reductions,” SFUSD spokesperson Laura Dudnick said. “Staff cannot comment on personnel matters.”
After Lam left, others at the center — many of whom had assisted Lam with his investigations — were told that the district would no longer be conducting investigations because it didn’t have the resources, according to a current employee who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their job.
Even as district staff say the address fraud tip line is no longer being monitored, they continue to field eight to 10 complaints per year about fraud. These include a complaint from a homeowner who was mailed a notice from the district about a student who was not known to them, and a complaint from a school principal who suspected a student lived outside of San Francisco.
In both instances, center staff had no choice but to shrug their shoulders.
“We just say, ‘We’ll look into it,’” the employee said. “But there’s no tool to do so anymore.”
When asked for records pertaining to the number of sustained cases of address fraud, the district said it did not have data beyond 2021-22, the last year Lam was employed.
The ‘golden ticket’
During his tenure with the district, Lam focused on highly coveted schools on the west side, such as Lowell High School, and kicked off investigations based on complaints from residents and hunches of his own.
Lam’s burden of proof was “criminal” — that is, he had to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The fraud cases typically fell into two categories: residents from neighboring counties who falsely claimed to live in the city, and San Francisco residents falsely claiming to live somewhere they didn’t.
Many cases in the latter category involved the Census Tract Integration Preference (CTIP) index, which gives school-choice preference to students living in the 20% of the city with historically poor test scores.
One parent, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said he knows well-off city residents who used fraudulent addresses, such as P.O. boxes or rented apartments sitting empty, in CTIP areas like the Bayview to boost their odds in the 2025 school lottery. SFUSD data obtained by The Standard shows that in 2018, for example, there were at least five confirmed cases of fraud in which families gained entry to a top school by using a fraudulent address in a CTIP zone.
Under the elementary school enrollment system, a home address in a CTIP zone supersedes a school’s geographic attendance area. Parents said getting a CTIP preference — legit or not — is referred to as “the golden ticket.”
“And so many rich people have it,” said one.
It is possible for well-off families to obtain the status without resorting to a phony address. While much of the Mission, for example, is a CTIP zone, gentrification has allowed high-income families to benefit from the lottery system. Even the Painted Ladies, which have sold for as much as $3.6 million in recent years, are in a CTIP area.
The designation is so sought-after that some real estate listings advertise it as a perk.
The Standard found listings for three houses in the Mission, each of which have sold for more than $1.3 million, touting CTIP status.
“Perfectly sized for a family, surrounded by playgrounds, and in a CTIP zone for preferred SFUSD school placement,” said a 2023 listing for 3083 22nd St. in the Mission. “This modern home has it all!”
The house, which was previously owned by SFUSD school board vice president Jaime Huling and her husband, sold for $1.4 million, nearly double what the family paid in 2010, according to public records.
Huling has a child who attends Dolores Huerta Elementary, one of the city’s most desired schools. The family now lives in Noe Valley at a house bought in 2019 for $2.5 million, just two blocks from the school. Records show the family owned both properties for four years.
In a phone interview, Huling confirmed that the family used the Mission address when her child was going through the enrollment process in 2022. She said they were living there at the time because of construction at the new house.
When asked about the ethics of citing CTIP status to sell the property, Huling dodged the question, claiming she “followed all of the rules.”
‘If it’s been two to three years since the district has checked for address fraud, that is going to get around. People are going to know. It perpetuates that behavior.’
Darlene Lim, a former SFUSD executive director
The same system that allowed Huling to get her top choice of school has inspired Facebook support groups that are full of stories of parents struggling with their poor results in the lottery. The lottery system is a major reason many families opt for private school or move out of the city.
SFUSD has spent millions in a years-long pursuit of an updated enrollment system, according to current and former staff.
Autumn Garibay, who heads the PTA at Flynn Elementary, believes there is something deeply wrong with parents who buy a house in a certain neighborhood, only to send their kids to school in another one.
Garibay said she was encouraged by neighbors, many of whom own multimillion-dollar homes, to use her CTIP to get her kid into a “better” school in Noe Valley — despite the fact that they lived within sight of Flynn Elementary. She also recalls hearing a parent say that if she desired a certain public school, she “would just rent a studio in the Mission.”
“I don’t think the families that should be benefiting from [school choice] are,” Garibay said.
Darlene Lim, who was executive director of the Educational Placement Center from 2006 to 2016, said a system to investigate address fraud is necessary in San Francisco, where school choice is so heavily utilized.
“If it’s been two to three years since the district has checked for address fraud, that is going to get around,” said Lim. “People are going to know. It perpetuates that behavior.”
Lim appreciates the progressive ethos behind the school choice system, but suggested that parents will ignore their expressed politics when it comes to their children’s education.
“They don’t think that much about the consequences,” she said.
Meanwhile, the district claims it has bigger fish to fry.
“We do not have the resources to pay for a full-time position to investigate reports of address fraud,” Dudnick said.
Nevertheless, Dudnick asserted that the district “has a process for verifying proof of address.” When asked for details on that process, she sent a link to a site listing the documents required for enrollment, such as a birth certificate, which can be easily manipulated.
Suffice to say, Lam isn’t buying it.
“No one is watching,” he said. “They don’t care.”