Shortly after going to prison for trying to get her children a better education, Kelley Williams-Bolar’s teenage daughter Jada confronted her mother about an accusation that would stay with her forever.
“You’re not there for me,” said Jada, now 26. Like the rest of her family, Jada is still struggling with her mother’s 2011 conviction for sending Jada and her sister Kayla to a suburban school outside Akron, Ohio had sent, using their grandfather’s address.
By the time Jada stood firmly in front of her, Williams-Bolger had spent nine days in jail, overwhelmed by how a crime could upend their lives and jeopardize future housing and employment. She started to defend herself and then fell silent. She knew Jada was right.
Help fund stories like this. Donate now!
“But you know, it was my thoughts that weren’t there. It hadn’t been there for years,” admits Williams-Bolar, a longtime teacher and child care provider. “…Honestly, it destroyed me. There was a lot to deal with. I was not the same mother to my daughters.”
Years after their persecution and forced removal from districts, families across the country like Williams-Bolar’s are still paying the price, economically and emotionally, after being persecuted for acting in the best interests of their children.
In Pennsylvania, one family ended up owing more than $10,000 in tuition and racking up legal fees in the six figures because they improperly enrolled their child in a better, neighboring district. In Connecticut, Tanya McDowell, whose family was homeless, used her babysitter’s address to enroll her five-year-old child in a school in Norwalk. She was convicted of theft and unrelated drug charges and served three years in prison.
Aside from the legal consequences, many families still struggle with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress, causing their family relationships and work to suffer. Their children sometimes felt that they had lost their parents and interest in school.
Now, seventy years after the Supreme Court banned the sorting of children by race and promised quality education for all in this landmark event Brown v. Council With this decision, experts are banging the drum that continuing to exclude children from quality schools based on their home address perpetuates segregation. Advocates have also called for an end to the practice of prosecuting parents who, knowingly or unknowingly, ignore zone boundaries when registering their children.
‘It Destroyed Me’: A Lasting Trauma, Years After Districts’ Action
Williams-Bolar’s daughters were destined for Akron’s public schools, 15 minutes away but seemingly a world apart from Copley-Fairlawn, the predominantly white suburb where her father lived and often cared for her daughters. When she visited Copley’s schools, she saw acres of land, science fairs, an expansive greenhouse and a full computer room. Akron’s schools at the time had rapidly decaying infrastructure. Styrofoam cups filled with dirt were the plants in her daughters’ science classes.
Day and night, she said. She simply could not have anticipated the costs of enrolling her children in Copley.
Her trial began months later. Intensive investigation into the case resulted in their family receiving unwanted international attention. A contractor from the school district came to their front door, looked in their refrigerator, closets and bathrooms and counted every toothbrush. Teachers and students at her daughters’ school made snide comments about their mother’s prison sentence. They caught the sideways, judgmental glances of the neighbors.
White men started driving slowly past their house at all times of the day, not saying anything, just staring. This would happen about a dozen separate times.
Williams-Bolar would sometimes lie in her room crying for days, not knowing how much time passed. Her depression lingered long after then-Governor John Kasich granted clemency and reduced her convictions to felonies.
Three years of probation also meant the family could not travel to visit relatives in the south. She was also not allowed to visit her father in prison for months. Although his involvement in her school enrollment case was dropped, the state convicted him shortly thereafter on charges of government benefit fraud. Williams-Bolar claims the case against her father would not have proceeded without the unprecedented attention given to her family.
“Once you’re in the lion’s den, they won’t let you go,” she said.
He served eleven months in prison and died in hospital a month before his release.
“He loved barbecuing in the front yard. He loved having all his grandkids come over and always listen to music,” says Kayla, now 30. “I mean, the best grandpa a girl could ever ask for. Damn like a father to me, and I would do anything to get him back. But here we are.”
Research in St. Louis and Philadelphia recently confirmed that counties continue to regularly encounter families suspected of living outside their borders. Today, their methods tend to be less public, with districts hiring private investigators or threatening prosecution to get families to unenroll their children. The thousands known to have been expelled from school for address sharing are disproportionately black and brown.
In at least 24 states, parents can face criminal charges, fines and prison sentences for sharing addresses. Only one state, Connecticut, has decriminalized this common practice.
To reduce the size of the problem and promote integration, districts could adopt county lines that are more inclusive of diversity and better reflect work-life patterns, rather than neighborhood lines that reflect racist residential segregation. But they often lack ‘the political will’ to do so; Quality schools remain scarce, says civil rights attorney Erika Wilson.
Q&A: Civil rights attorney Erika Wilson on how to revive desegregation efforts
And while Williams-Bolar knows a friend was similarly confronted by the county and believed her family lived outside the border, they never prosecuted her or asked her to remove her two children. The friend was related to a prominent NAACP leader. Williams-Bolar later met a former Copley student who claimed he also lived in Akron and that the school knew it at the time but let him stay because he was an athlete.
“I think it’s common at these selective schools. The problem is that it’s enforced very, very selectively,” says Tim DeRoche, author, researcher and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization.
Report: State by State, How Segregation Legally Continues Seven Decades After Brown
‘I remember my wife losing her hair’
Around the same time Williams-Bolar was going through her trial, just one state over, six-year-old Fiorella Garcia begged the governor of Pennsylvania to drop charges against her parents. Crying, she said she didn’t want to go into a foster home.
In 2012, her parents Hector and Olesia Garcia faced seven years in prison, felony convictions and the loss of custody of their daughter. The suburban Lower Moreland Township School District claimed Fiorella lived outside its zone, in Philadelphia. Fiorella and Olesia lived temporarily with her grandparents in Lower Moreland, but did not notify the district that they had moved.
In documents reviewed by The 74, the Garcias repeatedly offered to pay the district’s costs for Fiorella to complete the school year at Lower Moreland so as not to interrupt her schooling. Their requests were rejected.
Their mug shots were headlines in the local news the night they were arrested, alongside headlines hinting at tax fraud. Olesia, who owned a private insurance company, risked losing her license and business. Their address was covered and shortly afterwards their car was vandalized.
“This never left my mind… I remember my wife losing her hair,” Hector Garcia said, trying to hold back tears. Because he lost so much sleep, he tried medications and started experiencing chest pain, which he attributes to the stress.
Their tides only changed after they left their public defender, who wanted them to settle for a guilty plea. The Garcias racked up nearly $100,000 in debt to instead hire a high-profile Florida law team, the money they say would have gone toward their daughters’ college education or family vacations.
Ultimately, all charges against Olesia were dropped and Hector pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. The family paid $10,752 in “tuition” to the district and a $100 fine.
In the decade that followed, Garcia spent most of his time learning education law, organizing school choice and Republican political campaigns, feeling betrayed by the Democrats he believed were responsible. Fiorella, now 17, is about to graduate from high school.
Telling her story and becoming an advocate for parents has been Williams-Bolar’s “medicine.” She feels she is part of changing education policy to expand access to quality schools and “leave a legacy for my father, because he didn’t deserve any of that. He didn’t deserve to die in prison.”
Today, she works as a paraprofessional at one of Akron Public Schools’ high schools: the superintendent refused to fire her after the ordeal.
“Honestly,” said Kayla, who is also considering going back to school to become a teacher, “I’m still trying to heal.”
