According to AP investigation, family of missing student registers at school

ATLANTA – Four months after The Associated Press reported on an Atlanta family struggling to enroll in school, all children – a complete about-face – returned to class last month. The project was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist on Monday.

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

“I was the most happy 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 has withheld her full name because she risks being sent to prison or losing custody because her children are out of school.)

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

Thousands of students have been missing from American classrooms during the pandemic and online learning. For Tameka’s four children, the break from school lasted four years. Crippling poverty, burdensome paperwork, and depression prevented her from resuming her education—or starting it for the first time.

Atlanta Public Schools received $332 million in federal recovery funds to help students recover from the pandemic’s learning losses and return to school. But school staff had largely stopped contacting Tameka’s family until an AP reporter began inquiring about them last year, district communications logs show.

Tameka often didn’t have a working phone, but the district relied on phone messages and made just one home visit over 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 conducted further investigation, the school contacted the state’s child protection agency at least once, according to district spokesman Seth Coleman. In March, Children’s Services threatened to take their children away if they didn’t attend school by mid-April, Tameka said.

That same month, thanks to a refundable child tax credit, Tameka received a large check from the federal government, allowing her to replace a broken phone and run errands 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 fall 2021. The school district removed the children from the rolls when they missed 10 days in a row, citing a state regulation.

Months later, Tameka tried to send two of her children to school, not realizing they had run out of room at her elementary and middle school.

It seemed impossible to re-enroll them. In addition to submitting an application, Atlanta requires at least eight documents to enroll a child in school, including a notarized affidavit.

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 was lost at the hospital.

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

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

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 Uber or Lyft,” said Tameka, who doesn’t 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. Apparently, Atlanta Public Schools reported the agency after the AP story broke and a reporter continued to inquire about Tameka’s family. Agency caseworkers had visited about six months earlier and urged Tameka to take the children to school. This time they gave her a deadline – April 15th. If she failed to register the children, case workers would place her children in foster care, they told her.

The deadline helped focus on Tameka, who had already assumed the school year, which ends May 24, was lost. “I wanted them to start over — with everyone else,” she said. “But they had other ideas,” she said, referring to the social workers at the youth welfare office.

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

Afterward, the district said it planned to investigate the family’s residence. The practice has become increasingly 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 gentrifying neighborhoods.

“We will conduct a more comprehensive review of all the facts we have to determine whether the family resides within the Atlanta Public Schools boundaries and, if so, in which school district,” Coleman wrote in an email in April. “Our people have done EVERYTHING they could to help these parents and this family and they continue to do so.”

While covering the story, the AP visited Tameka and her family at their Atlanta home a half-dozen times, often showing up unannounced because Tameka didn’t have a working phone. Neighbors and household staff often knew where she was if she didn’t answer the door. Her whereabouts were never in doubt.

Tameka was surprised to hear the district ask if she lived in Atlanta and if her children were eligible to attend their schools. “I’m not trying to run or hide,” she said. “They act like I’m trying to hide or that I’m a criminal.”

Still, Tameka admits that her depression and feeling overwhelmed affected her judgment and ability to solve problems. “I never asked for help,” she said. “I tried to do things on my own.”

When enrolling, the four children had to take tests to find out which class they should attend. And the district has offered the children spots in summer school, Tameka said.

But her place at school is still temporary. The district let her in without any documentation. Tameka had 30 days to take each child to the doctor and fill out a state-mandated health certificate assessing their nutrition, vision, hearing and dental health.

She hasn’t made all the appointments yet.

___

Associated Press video reporter Sharon Johnson contributed to this report.

___

Associated Press education coverage receives funding from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP Standards for Working with Charities, a list of supporters, and supported areas at AP.org.