The Fairfield, Connecticut, Board of Education (BOE) is facing two lawsuits challenging students’ residency determinations and alleging that district leaders authorized aggressive investigative tactics, including surveilling trash pick-up at houses, monitoring private residences, and following teenagers around after they leave home in the morning.
Even if true, however, Residency Investigators, who determine whether a student lives in the school district they attend, have been given broad powers, and the alleged actions may fall within the letter of the law.
There is no statewide database that tracks the number of students removed from Connecticut districts each year because of residency requirements. However, whenever a case is contested, it is reviewed by officials at the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE).
According to CSDE Director of Communications, Matthew Cerrone, CSDE officials reviewed 11 cases in 2024 and 16 cases in 2025. So far, the department has reviewed eight cases since the start of 2026.
It’s not clear in which district each of these cases took place; however, Inside Investigator can confirm that in the past two years, Fairfield officials have attempted to remove at least two high school students from the district, and both have escalated to lawsuits.
Both lawsuits were filed in 2026, after the two students—both seniors at the time—were removed from their respective schools weeks before graduation.
One of these students is a 17-year-old girl who is referred to as “D.D.” in court documents. D.D.’s parents own homes in both Fairfield and Easton, but she attends Fairfield Ludlowe High School.
D.D.’s residency hearing has been going on since 2023, shortly after her parents bought the Easton house. She moved to Easton while the Fairfield house was being renovated, but moved back to Fairfield after a few months, and has lived there since. Despite that, she was removed from Ludlowe High School for two weeks in April, less than two months before graduation.
The other student is an 18-year-old with special educational needs for various disabilities, including Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and “emotional dysregulation,” which is a symptom of both ADHD and PTSD, according to his mother, Katharine Venice.
Venice calls him “R.V.” in statements shared with Inside Investigator, although his legal name is on public records. R.V.’s residency dispute began in October 2025 but escalated in April when his mother lost the month-to-month lease for his room. R.V. claims that after the lease was terminated—which he says was motivated by the school district’s aggressive attempts to remove him—he became homeless, and the district violated his rights once again by refusing to let him return to school.
“Extensive Surveillance”
Each Connecticut town or city Board of Education creates its own guidelines on when and how to investigate a student’s residency. They have leeway to pursue these investigations in any way they see fit, so long as they abide by existing Connecticut laws.
In Fairfield, those tactics range from requesting certain documents to observing students as they leave their homes. Those actions are also not mutually exclusive; even if a family can provide utility bills, deeds, and copies of a government ID, their child may still be subjected to observation outside of school.
That is the case with the Derosier family. They claim they gave school district officials copies of their utility bills, emails with contractors, D.D.’s driver’s permits, and had multiple witnesses who could attest to D.D.’s daily routine, and the fact that D.D.’s older sister lived with her.
But when the district first started reviewing D.D.’s residency in 2023, the residency investigator didn’t feel like this was enough to prove that D.D. lived in Fairfield and met the state’s residency requirements.
“The party claiming that the residence in the school district is permanent must prove that fact by a preponderance of the evidence,” a court document states. “Since the Student and the Student’s sister failed to testify concerning the character of the Student’s residence with the sibling, and no other evidence was presented to establish permanency, the parents have failed to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the residence in Fairfield is permanent.”
The document goes on to say, “Given the testimony of Mr. Lopes (the investigator) citing the extensive surveillance he conducted prior to the hearing at the Fairfield Board level… it is clear that the Student was living in the Easton house and being driven to school in Fairfield.”
The “extensive surveillance” included following D.D. as she left her parents’ house in Easton over the course of a month.
“The investigator retained by the Administration, Mr. Lopes, conducted an investigation beginning on November 7, 2023 and ending on December 15, 2023, which found that the Student left the Easton house on thirteen occasions to attend school in Fairfield… During the same time period Mr. Lopes drove by the Fairfield house frequently and did not observe any activity which indicated that there was anyone living in the house,” court documents state.
In an interview with Inside Investigator, Rose Derosier said, among other things, that Lopes monitored trash pick-up at her Fairfield house during this period of time.
The Fairfield BOE, Superintendent Michael Testani, and their attorneys did not respond to numerous emails and voicemails requesting interviews over a two-month period, seeking additional information about residency investigation practices.
Court documents show that the same investigator used similar tactics when trying to determine R.V.’s residency.
“Mr. Lopes investigated the residency status of Student beginning on October 29, 2025,” court documents submitted by the district in the Venice lawsuit. “His investigation included personally observing the Fairfield Residence on school day mornings prior to the start of school and prior to Student’s assigned school bus arriving at the residence each morning, and documenting whether Student boarded the bus when it stopped. On days he did not personally observe the bus, he checked with the bus company to see if Student had taken the bus. Of eight (8) such days monitored by Lopes beginning November 6, 2025 and ending November 17, 2025, Student rode the bus in the morning two (2) days. On one of the six (6) days that Student did not ride the bus, he arrived late to school.”
According to Venice, Walter Fitzgerald Campus (WFC) Principal Karen Baldwin observed how he got to school on the days he wasn’t on the bus.
Rose and Venice said they were not notified of the tactics that were used to investigate their children ahead of time.
The investigation impacted both D.D. and R.V.’s mental health.
D.D. started to have panic attacks and nightmares that she was being followed.
“I always just have this feeling of there is someone (there). I feel like I always (have to) be careful,” D.D. said. “I would always come home from (cheerleading) practice really late, so I’d always get scared walking from the car into my house. I just always felt like there was somebody there, even if there wasn’t.”
Once, she called her parents at 10 p.m. and said she felt like someone was in the house with her, Rose said. Rose was in Texas at the time, so she couldn’t check in on D.D. Instead, they called the police. There was no one in the house with D.D.
“She’s traumatized about it, because she’s been panicking since age 14 that she’s being followed,” Denis said. “She sent me a text message in the middle of the night, ‘Dad I can’t sleep. I feel like I’m being stalked.’ She was scared to walk home at night.”
As for R.V., he was struggling emotionally at the start of his senior year, and his mom said that the district’s efforts to remove him from school made things worse.
In October, he was kicked out of his father’s home. According to Venice, R.V. and his father were arguing a lot around that time, and at one point, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) needed to get involved.
On October 16, Robert Mancusi, the executive director of Special Education & Special Programs, emailed R.V.’s parents and stated, “It has come to our attention this morning that neither parent resides in Fairfield any longer. As a result of this information [R.V.] can no longer remain a student in the Fairfield Public Schools. He will be officially withdrawn from the Fairfield Public Schools effective today,” according to pictures of the email shared with Inside Investigator.
According to Venice, R.V. was told that the police would be called on him if he showed up to school.
R.V. missed two weeks of class until the CSDE intervened to force the district to allow him to attend school until a residency investigation and hearing took place. Days after he was allowed to return, he was suspended for a fight that took place on a weekend, off school grounds. Venice believes that the suspension was a means to force him out of the district.
“Fairfield knew my son needed stability in his senior year, and then they disrupted almost every part of it,” Venice said in an email to Inside Investigator on May 26.
Burden of Proof
Students are not necessarily tied to the schools in the districts where their parents live. In both D.D. and R.V.’s cases, parents say both that this should carry more weight and that students should not be penalized so close to graduation when life circumstances change.
According to the state’s school residency requirements, “Children living with people other than their parents may attend school in the district where they currently live, so long as (1) it is the intention of the caregivers, whether relatives or nonrelatives, and of the child or his parents or guardian that the residence will be permanent; (2) such residence is provided without pay; and (3) such residence is not for the sole purpose of giving the child free school privileges in the district.”
Boards of Education are allowed to require either the parents or the caregiver of students to provide documents that prove that these conditions have been met.
Each district determines what residency accommodations can or cannot be granted. The standards aren’t always straightforward or consistent, and whenever district officials question whether or not a student lives there, it is up to either that student’s family or the student themselves, if they are adults, to prove that they meet these nebulous standards.
In filings for the Derosier case, the district’s lawyers explicitly wrote phrases like, “Permanency is an elusive concept,” and “There is very little case law on the meaning of the term “without pay”.”
During R.V.’s junior year in high school and at the start of his senior year, he lived with his father in Greenwich, but attended WFC, with no complaint raised by district leaders. School officials even went so far as to send a school bus to a train station to pick him up and take him to WFC. It wasn’t until his mother changed her forwarding address that district officials began to investigate R.V.’s residency and take action to remove him. Emails shared with Inside Investigator show that Venice repeatedly asked the Fairfield Deputy Superintendent, Zakaria Parrish, why the district decided to suddenly remove R.V. from WFC when they knew he had lived in Greenwich for a year and a half.
In D.D.’s situation, there is no dispute over whether or not she lives in Fairfield. Both the district and her parents, and every hearing officer assigned to this case, believe that she has lived there since at least January of 2024.
Part of the reason D.D. was able to stay in the Fairfield school district for so long before facing removal was that the first hearing officer assigned to her case determined it would be unfair to remove her from the Fairfield Ludlowe High School since she lived in the district.
“I find it unreasonable to forbid the student, who now sleeps in Fairfield and departs from there to school, from attending the Fairfield Schools,” the first hearing officer assigned to the case, Thomas J. McNeil Jr., wrote.
But living in a town, on its own, does not fulfil the residency requirements.
That is why the second hearing officer said, “It is clear from the testimony…that the [Student’s] move to Fairfield to live with the sibling was an attempt to establish residency in Fairfield…It cannot be a coincidence that right after the December 18, 2023 decision at the Fairfield BOE level denying the Student accommodations by virtue of non-residency, that the parents told the Student that [she] would move to Fairfield with the sibling and the Student moved to the Fairfield address.”
District attorneys went on to argue that the payments Rose and Denis make to D.D.’s older sister to cover household expenses are equivalent to paying the sister to watch over D.D. This would violate the second condition of the state statute that allows students to attend schools outside their district, which is that a guardian cannot be paid to take care of a student.
D.D.’s residency dispute continued through the end of the 2023-2024 school year and the entirety of the 2024-2025 school year. As this was happening, the Fairfield BOE was providing transportation accommodations for R.V. so he could live primarily in Greenwich while attending the WFC.
The Derosiers think the reason the district was accommodating R.V. for so long, but not their daughter, was because of racial prejudice—D.D. is black and R.V. is white.
Fairfield District officials did not respond to questions about either of these cases.
In both lawsuits, the BOE plainly stated they were not convinced by the evidence that the families presented to prove their residency.
A court document submitted by the BOE’s lawyers summarizes an exchange of emails between Venice and Parrish. These documents confirm that the residency officer spoke to Venice’s landlord, but claim Venice had not submitted the required documentation to prove her son’s residency.
“Because Student’s Mother failed to meet her burden of proving that Student is an actual resident of Fairfield, Student is therefore, by law, not entitled to school accommodations provided by the Board.”
Furthermore, district officials were also not convinced that R.V. had become homeless and that the district was required to let him attend school, per the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which guarantees homeless youth access to public education.
“Plaintiff had the opportunity to prove that he is homeless within the meaning of the law but bypassed that opportunity. Indeed, the CSDE urged Plaintiff to provide the school district with a copy of his alleged lease… and Plaintiff failed to do so,” court documents state. “The record is devoid of any evidence of an eviction notice or action asserted against Plaintiff for his claimed residence at (the address he claimed he lived at). Plaintiff simply did not live at that address. Nothing in Plaintiff’s Affidavit supporting his motion indicates a change in circumstance. As such, Plaintiff is unlikely to be able to prove he is homeless within the meaning of the law, such that he is entitled to school accommodations in Fairfield.”
Despite the district’s insistence that R.V. has a home, Venice said that after their month-to-month lease ended, he was couch surfing with friends in Fairfield, while she bounced between sleeping at her boyfriend’s and her parents’ homes in Westchester, New York.
“Irreparable Harm”
A core component of the lawsuits brought against the school by the Derosiers and R.V. is the argument that D.D. and R.V. suffered from “irreparable harm” by being removed from the district so close to their graduation.
The district’s response, in both lawsuits, says the students could have been moved to other school districts earlier in the year, which could have prevented any harm from happening. Instead, the BOE claims in both lawsuits that R.V. and the Derosiers delayed submitting documents and hearings, needlessly prolonging the residency disputes.
The Fairfield school district started its investigation into D.D. in the fall of 2023. Her hearing took place on December 18 of that year, and the district decided to remove her from school on February 23. The district argued the Derosiers needlessly prolonged this process by challenging the hearing and concocting a scheme to have D.D. live with her older sister so she could continue to attend Fairfield Ludlowe High School.
“The Parents, in fact, have been illegally sending the Student to Fairfield Ludlowe High School (“Fairfield Ludlowe”) since August 28, 2023. However, through a continuous pattern of actions, the Parents were able to delay Hearing Officer Rolnick’s Decision until February 19, 2026,” a document in the Derosier lawsuit states. This filing was in response to the Derosier’s petition to keep D.D. in Fairfield Ludlowe until graduation.
It goes on to say, “The main reason the Parents seek an “expedited” hearing for a stay is to keep the Student in Fairfield because she is a senior and feel it would be unfair to require her to attend the school where she lives and should legally attend. However, as the Board will demonstrate conclusively, Hearing Officer Rolnick’s Decision was not issued until February 19, 2026 as a result of multiple delay tactics by the Parents themselves. Accordingly, they should not be rewarded for these tactics and, at the same time, the Board should not be penalized for those tactics. The Board pursued every avenue possible to expedite this case but was repeatedly met with objections and delays. Accordingly, the mere fact that the Parents were successful in delaying this case for so long should not be used as a reason to grant their request for a stay.”
District attorneys made a similar argument in the lawsuit filed by R.V.: “Plaintiff is not being deprived of access to education, special education services or the ability to complete his senior year by Defendants. Plaintiff simply needs to enroll in a school district where he resides in order to access such services. Whether that school district is in Greenwich or White Plains, New York, Plaintiff should enroll in and access the education to which he is entitled. At present, he is not entitled to access educational accommodations in Fairfield. In other words, any irreparable harm is not the result of the actions of the Defendants but, rather, is self-inflicted. The Court should not invoke the extraordinary remedy of a temporary injunction when the remedy is within the power of Plaintiff to achieve.”
In that same document, district officials argue they are not responsible for the termination of R.V.’s month-to-month lease in Fairfield, because “Any posting of a notice at (R.V.’s alleged address) would have no impact on the matter of whether Plaintiff is homeless or not. It has been conclusively determined that Plaintiff did not reside there during this school year.”
Despite that, the district did post a notice at that house, and the property owner texted Venice that “the school keeps coming by the notices (sic) and threatening me paying (sic) tuition,” according to screenshots and images submitted by R.V. in his lawsuit.
Because of the residency dispute, D.D. missed a month of school her senior year and had to spend a few weeks attending Joel Barlow High School in Easton. She was eventually allowed to return to Fairfield Ludlowe High School and will graduate from there this June. However, the residency dispute is not over.
As of May 28, the lawsuit has a hearing date scheduled for July 1. If a judge rules that the district was correct in its initial assessment of D.D.’s residency—that she should not have attended school in the district—then the Derosier family will not only have to pay tuition for the years that their daughter was there during the dispute, they will also have to cover the district’s legal fees.
As for R.V., he did not graduate this year. He is living in White Plains, bouncing between Venice’s ex-boyfriend’s apartment and a friend, according to Venice. Venice is also moving between her parents’ home and a friend’s place, she said.
R.V. was enrolled in a high school in White Plains under the McKinney-Vento Act, but because the graduation requirements for New York state and Connecticut are different—specifically, R.V. did not take the Regents Exam, which is a statewide standardized test—he won’t be able to graduate until January, according to Venice.
“(Fairfield) put up obstacle after obstacle instead of finding a way to keep a child in school weeks before graduation,” Venice said. “R.V. was on track to graduate, and now he is the one paying the price.”
Venice is suing the Fairfield BOE and Fairfield Superintendent Michael Testani for allegedly discriminating against her son because of his disabilities.
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