The 1999 movie Never Been Kissed features Drew Barrymore’s character posing as a high school student to research teenage culture for the Chicago Sun-Times. This fun teenage comedy is a perfect way to escape reality for a couple of hours. It turns out there might be more truth to the premise then you might suspect.
A 28-year-old Louisiana woman and her mother were arrested on June 13, 2023, for fraud. This woman allegedly attended Hahnville High School in Boutte to learn English after emigrating from Honduras. She managed to pull it off for a full year before getting caught.
The St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office who arrested this unnamed woman and her mother issued a press release about the incident. This case is a bizarre one for all involved. “On Monday, May 29, … detectives were notified by officials with the St. Charles Parish Public Schools of a possible adult attending Hahnville High School in Boutte, LA during the 2022-2023 school year,” it began.
“School administration received a tip that a female student, who was on record as being 17 years old, was in fact an adult possibly in her mid 20’s. School Administration began an internal investigation and later notified the sheriff’s office of their findings,” the statement continued.
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The woman enrolled in ninth grade and almost finished her freshman year. She came to the United States in 2021 and had a baby face, which allowed her to appear much younger than she really was.
“She could very easily be taken for a young teenager,” said Sheriff Greg Champagne.
The woman’s mother was currently in the United States using an expired visa. This mother used fraudulent documents such as a passport and a birth certificate to enroll her adult daughter. This leads many to wonder what the motive was behind this.
“The big question from parents is: What’s the purpose of this? Why was she doing it? Is there something nefarious?” Sheriff Champagne said. He asked the natural follow-up questions and answered them himself.
“Based upon everything that we know, the answer is ‘no,’” Champagne explained. “She was in school. She minded her own business. She did her school work. She caused no trouble. She was not a disciplinary problem. … The information we got about the reason for her doing this was simple: She wanted to learn English.”
The mother and daughter pair are both charged with one count of injury to public records. If convicted, they could be fined thousands of dollars. Even worse, they could spend up to five years behind bars.
This incident has caused the St. Charles Parish Public Schools to do an internal audit of its policies and procedures. The district issued a statement about this, promising to “make enhancements based upon that review.” It will also “provide additional required training for school and district level employees focused on recognizing the signs of potentially fraudulent documents.”
