By Greg Forester / Staff Writer
ROCKY HILL — The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey has erroneously targeted Rocky Hill as one of many state school districts that unlawfully request personal information from students that could indicate immigration status.
Districts are prohibited from asking for certain pieces of information due to state policy dictates that only a student’s place of residence — not immigration status — is the basis for attending public school.
Rocky Hill Borough was included on a list of offending districts compiled by the ACLU as part of a campaign to stop the practice, which was delivered to the state Department of Education commissioner, Lucille Davy, on Sept. 2.
The ACLU found that roughly one in four New Jersey school districts illegally request social security numbers or other personal information that could reveal immigration status when enrolling students, as prohibited by New Jersey statute and some federal laws.
When contacted Wednesday, ACLU officials admitted they had made a mistake when they included the tiny Somerset County hamlet on the list of offending school districts.
ACLU Executive Director Deborah Jacobs said the source of the error was a faulty listing on the state Department of Education Web site the ACLU used to gather the information, which listed the same contact information for three different towns: Demarest Borough, Millstone Borough and Rocky Hill Borough.
Researchers compiling the list telephoned a school in Demarest Borough in Bergen County, believing the school they were calling was a school in Rocky Hill, according to Ms. Jacobs.
A person — believed to be a secretary to a school principal — told the ACLU that the district did engage in the practices being targeted by the ACLU, according to borough Mayor Ed Zimmerman.
"But we don’t have a school, so therefore we don’t have a principal," said Mayor Zimmerman.
Most school-age children from Rocky Hill attend school in the Montgomery Township School District, which did not make it onto the ACLU list, unlike Montgomery’s small neighbor.
Montgomery does not request any of the banned information, district officials said.
"That information is definitely not required for enrollment by the district," Ms. Palumbo said.
The ACLU found that with districts that do request prohibited information, in many cases the problem was practice rather than policy, according to Ms. Jacobs.
She said that many of the offending districts had policies that followed the law, while employees charged with enrollment duties ended up requesting the banned information.
Others openly had policy that was contrary to the law, she said.
"Sometimes it is policy," said Ms. Jacobs. "We found 35 districts that actually had forms with illegal requirements."
In response to the ACLU initiative, the state Department of Education will be actively contacting the offending districts to remind them to update their practices to comply with state law.
Speaking for the state Department of Education, Mr. Vespucci said future violators could face some sort of penalty, although he would not elaborate on what form such a penalty would take.

