An example of a school poacher is a person who lives in New York City, but attends school in Pelham, New York, just over a municipal boundary line. The way it works here you must attend school within the municipality in which you reside. You can't go to school in the next district over, even if you can hit it with a tennis ball! This concept is hard to understand for many people, especially outside New York State because in places like Virginia and Florida, the school district lines cut across very wide areas, including with multiple cities, towns and villages. In the screwed up State of New York, we have 700 school districts, wildly varying levels of wealth and very inconsistent per pupil funding across the districts. Basically, it's a mess.