Raina Gonzalez-Homs receives postcards a few times a year with a photo of an individual, their address and conviction information — legal notifications that a registered sex offender lives in her Akron neighborhood of West Hill.
Then a neighbor noticed a recent mailing included an address behind the I Promise School on West Market Street, despite a statute barring people on the sex offender registry from living within 1,000 feet of a school or daycare. Gonzalez-Homs later discovered that the elementary building, which serves approximately 350 students in third through fifth grades, was not listed by the state as a school on the registry.
“This [raised] red flags for everybody,” said Gonzalez-Homs, the president of the West Hill Neighborhood Organization. She reached out to local police.
I Promise School was added to the state’s list on April 17 — eight years after it opened, said Bill Holland, chief of administration with the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. His agency has since sent a flurry of 30-day notices to offenders living within 1,000 feet of the school, ordering them to relocate.
As of June 3, several of those residents were still listed at the addresses specified in those letters.
The issue goes beyond West Hill. Nearly 30 Akron Public Schools have at least one person on the sex offender registry living within a quarter mile of the properties, according to information available through the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. The vast majority of those offenders face a civil liability, not a criminal charge.
Akron residents convicted of a sex offense — ranging from indecency and possession of child pornography to prostitution-related offenses and sexual assault — are required to update their addresses and periodically check in with the Summit County Sheriff’s Office for a certain amount of time, depending on how long it has been since their conviction or the type of crime they committed. If they fail to do so, they can face criminal charges and could return to jail.
But for individuals no longer on probation, simply living too close to a school or daycare is not a crime — it is a civil violation, according to the state. Instead of facing arrest, they may receive a notice from the local sheriff and may face a civil case in the local court.
The Summit County Prosecutor’s Office has not filed any civil injunctions against offenders for living too close to a school or daycare in the past five years, spokesperson Elaine Vilem said. The prosecutor’s office said in a statement that offenders often move to a new address after receiving notice of the violation and no legal action is taken.
In a statement, Akron Public Schools confirmed it receives notifications “consistent with Ohio law and procedures” and directed further questions to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office and the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office.
In 2021, the prosecutor’s office sent three letters to residents in violation in Summit County; it sent 39 letters in 2024. It could not provide information about how many letters were sent in 2022 and 2023.
The Summit County Sheriff’s Office took over notifications in 2025.
Sex offender registry and Akron schools
Signal Akron reviewed registrants living near APS buildings, but did not include other restricted properties such as daycares, charter or parochial schools in Akron, or across Summit County. Within APS, I Promise School and Leggett Community Learning Center, located in Akron’s University Park neighborhood, have the highest concentration of individuals on the sex offender registry living nearby, according to publicly available information.
During this process, the Ohio Attorney General’s Office determined that Bridges Learning Center, an APS school, is not listed as a restricted property in the state’s database. There are two registrants living within a quarter mile of the school.
Of the dozens of individuals on the sex offender registry living near Akron Public School buildings and other restricted properties, some have received notices to vacate their current addresses; others received notification for living too close to another school or daycare and moved to a property still within a 1,000-foot zone.
- Of the individuals in Summit County who moved after receiving a notice, one moved from a property in Stow that was in violation to a building too close to I Promise School.
- Another person moved from a property too close to Jennings CLC to one within a quarter mile of Hill Community Learning Center and a third moved from a property listed as too close to Mason Community Learning Center to one too close to Leggett CLC.
- Another resident moved from a property too close to a daycare to near I Promise School. He moved again after the Sheriff’s Office sent a notice in May 2026.
Holland said the Sheriff’s Office recently received an updated list from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce of schools in Summit County and continues to update the list of restricted properties within the Offender Watch system.
Legal ‘loopholes’ do not prevent people on the registry from moving near a school
Landlords, shelters and halfway houses are not legally liable for allowing a registered individual to move into a unit too close to a restricted property, the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement. And while these residents cannot reside within 1,000 feet of schools or other restricted properties, the statement continued, they can own property within the boundary.
“These ‘loopholes’ in the law make it impossible to prevent an offender from moving into a location in violation of the 1,000-foot rule to begin with, and the only course of action when they do register at an address in violation of the rule is to file a lawsuit and have the Court order the offender not to return to the property,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
A civil injunction would bar someone from returning to their home or apartment. If it’s violated, the person could be charged with contempt of court and face fines or jail time, according to the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office.
Addresses of people convicted of sex offenses change often
When Gonzalez-Homs plugged the I Promise School address into the state’s publicly available sex offender database, a host of pins marking residents living within a quarter, half or full mile from the building filled the map.
That database, maintained by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, can be searched by a person’s name or by entering an address; it shows registered individuals within a certain distance. It also includes identifying information, including conviction information and home and work addresses.
A quarter mile — the shortest radius available on the public database — is slightly larger than the 1,000 feet included in state law, but the measure offers the only publicly available information on registrants’ addresses.
Addresses change often in that database, as individuals often appear to move between residences or experience homelessness. For example, from late April to early June of 2026, the number of people on the sex offender registry living within a quarter-mile radius of the I Promise School shrunk from at least 11 individuals to five.
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Requirements differ based on conviction
Registration requirements differ based on the type of crime a person is convicted of, and for juvenile offenders as well. Higher-tier offenders — such as an individual convicted of rape — must register every 90 days for life. Lower-tier offenders, such as an adult convicted of voyeurism, must register annually for 15 years.
It is up to local county sheriff’s offices to keep track of registrants, including whether they have moved to a property too close to a school or daycare.
The 1,000-foot radius is measured from property line to property line by law enforcement software.
“We are made aware of these situations when sex offenders come in to register and sometimes by citizens living in the area,” Holland said in an email. “If our office [was made] aware that a sex offender is living too close to a registered school or daycare, we contact the County Prosecutor’s Office and make them aware of the situation … Each situation would have to be reviewed and referred to the [prosecutor’s office,] if applicable.”
That software’s measurements sometimes appear to differ from the state’s publicly available database. For example, a man living near Jennings CLC received a notice of violation from the Sheriff’s Office in March 2026, but the state database lists him as living more than a quarter mile of the school.
Similarly, registrants living near Crouse and Rimer community learning centers received violation letters from the Summit County Prosecutor’s Office in 2024, but the state database lists both men’s addresses beyond the quarter-mile mark.
Finding a place to live as a registered sex offender
Krysta Curl worries about kids living in her West Hill neighborhood — and the enforcement of the sex offender registry meant to keep them safe.
“When we first moved to the neighborhood, we got a card saying there was a sex offender living in an apartment building. … I remember saying, ‘That’s like right next to the school,’” Curl said. “I thought it was strange.”
Yet with the number of daycares and schools scattered throughout West Hill, Curl suspects there is no location within the neighborhood where a person convicted of a sex offense can legally reside.
She guessed many of them live in West Hill because of its abundance of large, aging but affordable homes split into apartments. She described the Akron neighborhood as a diverse mix of residents spread across socioeconomic status, class, race and age. But she assumed if a person on the sex offender registry was living too close to a school that the Sheriff’s Office would “do something about it.”
“I know people have to live somewhere,” Curl said, “ I just feel like we have such a high concentration of them in such a small area — right around the number of playgrounds and schools that we have.”
No wonder Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson with Prison Policy Initiative, said the number of daycares and schools in neighborhoods such as West Hill can create “exclusionary zones” that push residents with sex offense convictions into smaller and smaller slivers of space.
Those zones, created by drawing 1,000-foot boundaries around schools, daycares and other restricted properties, can place people convicted of sex offenses farther away from public transportation and support services.
The Mitchell Hamline School of Law’s Sex Offense Litigation and Policy Center argued legal frameworks requiring people convicted of sex offences to register with authorities are costly to maintain, ineffective and do not reduce recidivism or the commission of initial sex crimes.
The brief argued sex offender registries can impair a registrant’s ability to get stable rental housing, bar them from public housing or homeless shelters or see elderly individuals denied housing with supportive services.
“What does it mean when 90 percent of an urban area is out of reach as a place to live for someone who is on a registry?” Bertram said rhetorically. “When you exclude someone and essentially exile them from an urban area, that can be extremely harmful and can destabilize someone where there is more of a risk to public safety.”
That risk, Betram said, could mean a person being more vulnerable to drug addiction, homelessness or extreme poverty, which could increase the chance of them cycling back into the criminal justice system.
In 2009, the issue made national headlines after restrictions in Miami, Florida, forced dozens of people convicted of a sex offenses to live under a bridge — one of the city’s few known locations outside exclusion zones. Some residents were transported there by their probation officers or sheriff’s deputies.
“These registries, they artificially inflate the amount of fear that people naturally have of their neighbors, and there hasn’t been any evidence that it goes to protect public safety,” Bertram said. “What it is doing is stoking people’s fears and invading people’s privacy.”
Officials hope to tackle enforcement challenges
The Summit County Prosecutor’s Office recognizes the pitfalls left by the bureaucracy surrounding the state’s sex offender registry — and how individuals may slip through the cracks.
The split between who updates the registry and who prosecutes potential violations can lend itself to a disjoined process, said Vilem, the Summit County Prosecutor spokesperson.
It is a divide Summit County officials are trying to bridge, she added, with the county prosecutor and sheriff working to streamline registration and notifications.
“We will continue to work together to minimize bureaucratic delays,” Summit County Prosecutor Elliot Kolkovich said in a statement.
“However, many of the challenges with enforcement and prevention are due to a lack of Ohio laws that allow for further enforcement and preventative methods.”
