These kids want to go to school. The main obstacle? Paperwork

It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.

After more than a year of online learning, students were all required to come back to school. Tameka was skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe from COVID-19. One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school.

Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn’t sure he could mask.

After a few hours, one school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled.

Around lunchtime, the other called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn’t have a class schedule.

Tameka’s children — all four of them — have been home ever since.

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Tameka’s partner died of a heart attack in May 2020. His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car.

Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he died. It was never found.

Slowly, Tameka has tried to replace the missing documents. She says it took more than a year to get Medicaid cards to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations the school requires.

When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.

She also needs to show the school her own identification and a new lease, plus the notarized affidavit. “It’s a lot.”

Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.

Contact logs show school social workers have sent four emails and called 19 times since the pandemic started. Most calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected. Tameka rarely called back.

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The youngest, who should be in second grade, has had to settle for “playing school.” She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone.

Even at 8, she understands it’s not the real thing.

“I want to go to school,” she says, “and see what it’s like.”