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BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — A former DCF employee is facing charges on Wednesday after allegedly pretending to be a Boston high school student for the 2022-2023 school year.
A police report from the Boston Police said Shelby Hewitt of Canton, 32, appears to have been enrolled in the schools for almost an entire school year, from September 7, 2022 to June 14, 2023. Hewitt is being charged with seven fraud and forgery counts, six with a penalty of up to a decade in prison. BPS Superintendent Mary Skipper said last week that the woman attended Jeremiah E. Burke High School, Brighton High School, and English High School under several fake names, in a letter to families.
The state Department of Children and Families said Hewitt worked for them as a social worker on and off since 2016, and regularly since 2021. She left or was let go this past February.
The police report said Hewitt was first discovered on June 14. School administrators said they became suspicious when someone claiming to be Hewitt's "father" came to English High School and said he wanted to pull his daughter out and enroll her at a Brighton private school. Staff found this strange, as Hewitt had only just enrolled at English a week before and had been in to talk about bullying with her "mother" the same day. Police said a closer look at the papers she allegedly used to enroll revealed some strange typos, and a further investigation revealed them to be forged.
The paper trail touched off a police hunt for more documents at a home address in Jamaica Plain, where officers said they found multiple forged documents.
Neither the "father" nor the "mother" identified in the police report appear to have been charged with a crime. School officials said Hewitt has been ordered to stay away from Boston Public Schools. West Roxbury court officials confirmed there was a warrant out for Hewitt's arrest on Wednesday morning.
Boston City Councilor Erin Murphy is calling for hearings and an investigation into the incident.
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