After AP investigation, family of missing students enrolls in school

ATLANTA– Four months after The Associated Press wrote about an Atlanta family struggling to attend school, all children returned to the classroom last month — in a complete turnaround. The project was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist on Monday.

The youngest child, an energetic 8-year-old girl, had never been to school. On her first day, she was greeted at her home by half a dozen children from the apartment building, who escorted her to the bus stop, her mother said.

“I was most excited for her,” Tameka said. ‘My other children know what school is like. I want that experience for her.”

(Tameka is her middle name. The AP withheld her full name because she risks jail time or losing custody because her children have been out of school.)

The last child, a student with Down syndrome, went to school last Tuesday, Tameka said.

Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic and online learning. For Tameka’s four children, the disruption to education lasted four years. Crippling poverty, heavy paperwork and her depression stood in the way of resuming their education – or starting it for the first time.

Atlanta Public Schools received $332 million in federal recovery money to help students recover from learning loss due to the pandemic and return to school. But school staff had largely stopped attempting to contact Tameka’s family until an AP reporter began inquiring about them last year, according to communications logs shared by the district.

Tameka often didn’t have a working phone, but the district relied on phone messages and made just one home visit in more than three years, records show. (AP journalists visited Tameka at her home to communicate with her.)

After AP published its story about Tameka and continued to make inquiries, the school contacted the state child welfare department at least once, district spokesman Seth Coleman said. In March, the daycare threatened to take her children away if they didn’t go to school by mid-April, Tameka said.

That same month, Tameka received a sizable check from the federal government, thanks to a refundable child tax credit, that allowed her to replace a broken phone and buy groceries needed to complete the complicated paperwork to register her children.

Tameka’s three older children – ages 9, 13 and 14 – did not return to in-person school when Atlanta reopened in the fall of 2021. The school district removed the children from the list when they missed ten consecutive days, citing a state ordinance.

Months later, Tameka tried to send two of her children to school, not realizing they no longer had a place in their primary and secondary schools.

Re-enrolling it felt impossible. In addition to submitting an application, Atlanta requires a minimum of eight documents to register a child for school, including a notarized statement.

Tameka had lost most of her family’s official documents when her partner died of a heart attack in May 2020, at the height of the pandemic chaos. He carried the family’s birth certificates, Medicaid cards and Social Security cards in a backpack that had been lost at the hospital.

Without his income and unable to work because she had to look after the young children, Tameka had little money. The family of five had to survive on food stamps and $900 a month in government assistance.

When phones or their chargers broke, she couldn’t afford to replace them.

So when she received a refundable tax credit of about $6,000 in March, it was a much-needed opportunity to buy a new phone. “I was mobile again. I could use the phone to call an Uber or Lyft,” says Tameka, who does not have a driver’s license and lives far from public transportation.

Around the same time, a social worker from Georgia’s Department of Family and Children Services visited Tameka. Atlanta Public Schools apparently brought the agency’s attention after the AP story broke and a reporter continued to inquire about Tameka’s family. Agency case workers had visited about six months earlier and urged Tameka to get the children to school. This time they gave her a deadline: April 15. If she failed to register them, social workers would place her children in foster care, they told her.

The deadline helped Tameka, who already considered the school year, which ends on May 24, as lost. “I wanted them to start over – with everyone else,” she said. “But they had other ideas,” she said, referring to child protection social workers.

After the December story about Tameka’s struggle to send her children to school, an Atlanta Public Schools social worker visited her home in January — the district’s first attempt at in-person contact in nearly three years, according to school records. When the case worker didn’t find her at home, they left a flyer asking her to call them, spokesman Seth Coleman said.

Afterward, the district said it planned to investigate the family’s whereabouts. This practice has become more common since 2008, when the Atlanta School Board tried to prevent parents living in other parts of the city from sending their children to schools in gentrified neighborhoods.

“We will be conducting a more extensive investigation into all the facts we have to determine if the family lives within the boundaries of the Atlanta Public School, and if so, in which school zone,” Coleman wrote in an email in April. “Our people have done EVERYTHING they could to help this parent and this family and continue to do so.”

Over the course of the report, the AP visited Tameka and her family at their Atlanta apartment a half-dozen times, often unannounced because Tameka did not have a working phone. Neighbors and building crews often knew where she was if she didn’t answer the door. There was never any doubt about her whereabouts.

Tameka was surprised to learn that the district was questioning whether she lives in Atlanta and whether her children were eligible to attend their school. “I don’t try to run or hide,” she said. “They act like I’m trying to hide or that I’m a criminal.”

Yet Tameka recognizes how her depression and feelings of overwhelm clouded her judgment and her ability to solve problems. “I never asked for help,” she says. “I tried to do things myself.”

When they registered, the four children took tests to see which class they should be in. And the district has offered the children spots at summer school, Tameka said.

But their place at school is still provisional. The district admitted them without all their documentation. Tameka had 30 days to take each child to the doctor and complete a state-mandated health certificate assessing their nutrition, vision, hearing and dental health.

She has not yet made all the arrangements.

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Associated Press video journalist Sharon Johnson contributed to this report.

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