Person from the Past enrolling into Modern Day High School

It's been done in all kinds of stories about time travel- Person X brings Person Y into the future. Person Y is somewhere between age 14-18 and enrolls in the high school the main characters attend to be part of the main cast.

My question is this, as this is for a story I myself am writing- how do you prepare the legal documents of someone born over a hundred years ago to register them for High School? You'd need things like health records, a SS card and a birth certificate. How do you get these things made for someone from the past? How can you forge them? Can you forge them? And how can you make a believable history to accompany this person's absence in school for the past decade or so? (Assume the school will do an history check on the person.) I've currently been rolling with a home schooler that's enrolling in high school.

Also, this is my first post to the tvtropes forums, i've been here for a few years now on the main site. Hello everyone! ^^

edited 24th Jul '15 10:58:58 PM by halcyonsMonolith

Delving into the "realistic" details of this scenario would just result in raising more questions than it would answer, and quickly derail your twee "a kid from the past is now attending modern high-school" plot into something a lot darker.

For one thing, the kid would probably have been listed as missing, presumed dead for the last century. If they suddenly appeared 100 years later and applied at a local high school, that would attract all sorts of attention. Forget school, that kid's gonna be all over the news, if the Men In Black don't get to them first. A lot of very powerful people are going to want to know how a teenager from a century ago managed to travel through time, if they had any accomplices, etc.

Of course, that's assuming it's not the MI Bs who are the ones re-introducing the kid into the school system in the first place. Because if so, well... they're the fucking government. If they want to fabricate all the necessary papers and a watertight work history for this kid to be able to attend a modern high school, they can easily do it.

edited 24th Jul '15 11:32:02 PM by Tungsten74

Welcome! I guess one of the characters could get acquainted with a corrupt national statistician or national registrar, or somebody outside the government census who makes forgeries, and have them do it. Or they could just look at their own documents, forge something over their names, and make a bad xerox of it, saying, "Sorry, the original was lost in a recent fire and bleargh bleargh bureaucracy..." The other thing is the transcript of records from where this person was previously educated. It might just be enough that the school exists and somebody with the same "name" and appropriate grade level was enrolled there.

I'm guessing how close to innocuous it is would make it less suspicious. If the cover story is that this character had a terminal illness that kept him out of school but was homeschooled at a program that had its teaching/business license or whatever revoked and folded up without giving out report cards...and then there was a fire that destroyed all documentation...that might be more suspicious. Whoever runs the homeschooling program might object to somebody going around posing as a student.

If it's not mentioned, though, my head goes into the fridge and never comes out. I offended someone in my writer's circle who wanted to know what people thought of this story about a corporeal guardian angel disguised as a classmate, because I kept asking things like, "Who pays tuition and how? Who does the teacher see during parent conferences? How did they get enrolled? How else would their name have ended up on roll call? Have they got a birth certificate to show that's their real name?"

edited 24th Jul '15 11:39:31 PM by Faemonic

Well it depends where you are, and I'm going to assume the story is set in the US? Which isn't super helpful since I'm sure the states all have their own spins on the issue. (And I won't be super helpful since I'm from Oz).

The simplest analogy would be getting an illegal immigrant kid into school. Perhaps see what the internet has to say about that.

The simplest solution is to buy the forgeries. Depending on how much you pay they'll get more realistic. Though I don't know how you find a forger.

Another cover story would be that they were a runaway. Who refuses to share the information to find where they're from, and who doesn't match any missing kids on file.

Though the other question you should ask yourself is how important is it to the story that creating a modern identity is difficult? If you give just a little nod to it, most readers will consider it an Acceptable Break from Reality to handwave it all.

Getting the person's 'legal records' in order is only the beginning. Once that's done you have to actually prepare them for college, which might not have been too bad say, twenty years ago, but today would involve a lot of work in teaching them how to use a computer. Oh, and getting them into thinking in the modern viewpoint (WRT gender and racial issues at the least).

edited 25th Jul '15 2:32:11 AM by MattII

I appreciate all of your ideas, especially the one concerning illegal immigrant children enrolling. Yes, this story is set in the United States aside from traveling to different years and places, for the most part of this particular book (the rest of the books seldom take place here). I'm trying to make it as realistic as possible while still keeping the fantasy behind the concept of time travel. I don't want to make it such hard science fiction that my readers are bored to death with the lack of and mysticism, but I for one don't like hand waving stuff a lot unless it's absolutely called for and I cannot explain it. Otherwise, I have to have some kind of logical (or semi-logical) explanation for my actions. ^^

EDIT: My only problem with the immigrant idea is that neither of my characters that are coming into the present are, for lack of a better term, not what schools in the US would consider illegal immigrant children on the surface. One of them is from Salem Massachusetts, 1692 (The Witch Trials) and the other is from London, England, 1853 (The Industrial Revolution in Britain). Neither of them could pass for what a lot of officials in the US consider 'illegal immigrants'. ><

EDIT x2: After some quick research, I found there's actually a population of illegal immigrants from Europe too! I should look into that.

EDIT x3: Sorry if I offended anyone with my first edit, I didn't intend to offend anyone, I never considered at the time about immigration from other countries being common enough. I'm very sorry ><

edited 25th Jul '15 7:50:20 AM by halcyonsMonolith

I don't think that the suggestion was to explain the child away as an illegal immigrant, but rather to look at what people do to arrange paperwork and histories for illegal immigrants and then consider applying those processes to your time-traveller.

As a parent of children enrolled in our local elementary school, I can attest that the "background check" the school did for my kids was extremely shallow. As long as there's an adult with a drivers license willing to claim guardianship, it shouldn't be that much of a problem.

Elementary school should be fine.

But when you enter middle/ highschool....

....

....

....

...Calculus.

Watch their sanity crumbles.

You're distaste for math aside... it depends. Newton and Liebniez both developed the ideas that make up modern calculus in the 1680s and both were working from ideas that had been around for quite a bit longer, they just formalised it.

Depending on the time they're from and their previous level of education, treating calculus like that would be an egregious use of Medieval Morons.

The problem stems mostly from the fact that, at last in my country, amount of subjects got crammed on every grade seems to get more... packed everytime the education minister changed.

Japan seems to burn its younger generation this way.

But then, maybe it's just me.

It is. Watch some kids shows from the Eighties sometime - none of those problems are new.

And I would just pull a Ted. Disappeared kid suddenly shows up and is the talk of the 24 hour news cycle for about five minutes, and then there's a 2 hour special on the political chances of some schmuck. (Then social media gossips about it for a few weeks, in dwindling quantities of excitement, after which the latest season of [insert popular media show here] re-grips the fandoms.)

edited 9th Aug '15 11:09:57 PM by DeusDenuo

One thing to consider is the possibility of Time Travel being commonplace in your setting. If it is, that eliminates most of the problems, and opens the door for several intriguing plots such as:

• Time travel is used to save the lives of the people who our history says died in various disasters (i.e. the Titanic, the Hindenburg, 9/11, etc.).
• Historians using time travel to witness historical events first hand.
• Sports fans and/or journalists going back in time to witness milestone moments in various sports' histories.

And so on.