Soon after she had gone to jail for trying to get her children a better education, Kelley Williams-Bolar’s teenage daughter Jada confronted her mother with an accusation that will stick with her forever. 

“You’re not there for me,” said Jada, now 26. Like the rest of her family, Jada still struggles with her mother’s 2011 felony conviction for sending Jada and her sister Kayla to a suburban school outside Akron, Ohio, 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 felony could upend their lives, jeopardizing future housing and employment opportunities. She started to defend herself, then went silent. She knew Jada was right.

“But you know, it was my mind that wasn’t there. It wasn’t there for years,” conceded Williams-Bolar, a longtime educator and child care provider. “…Honestly, it destroyed me. It was a lot to deal with. I wasn’t the same mom for my daughters.”

Years after their prosecutions and forced removal from districts, families across the country like Williams-Bolar’s are still paying the price, economically and emotionally, after being prosecuted for acting in the best interest of their children. 

In Pennsylvania, one family ultimately owed over $10,000 for tuition and amassed legal fees into the six figures for keeping their child enrolled in a suburban school after moving out of the district three months before the end of the school year. In Connecticut, Tanya McDowell, whose family was experiencing homelessness, used her babysitter’s address to enroll her five year old in a Norwalk school. She was convicted on larceny and unrelated drug charges, serving . 

Outside of the legal ramifications, many families still struggle with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, their family relationships and work suffering as a result. Their children have felt at times like they had lost their parents and interest in school. 

Now seven decades after the Supreme Court outlawed sorting children by race and promised quality education for all in the landmark Brown v. Board decision, experts are beating the drum that continuing to exclude children from quality schools based on their home addresses perpetuates segregation. Advocates have also called for an end to the practice of prosecuting parents who, knowingly or unknowingly, disregard zone lines when enrolling their children.

Williams-Bolar’s daughters were zoned for Akron Public Schools, 15 minutes but seemingly a world apart from Copley-Fairlawn, the predominantly white suburban district where her father lived and often cared for her daughters. Visiting Copley’s schools, she saw acres of land, science fairs, a sprawling 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. 

Night and day, she said. She just couldn’t have anticipated what the cost of enrolling her kids in Copley would be. 

Months later, her trial began. Intense scrutiny on the case made their family recipients of unwanted, international attention. A school district contractor showed up to their front door, looking inside their refrigerator, closets, bathrooms, counting each toothbrush. Teachers and students at her daughters’ school made snide remarks about their mother’s jail time. They’d catch neighbors’ side eyed, judgemental gazes. 

White men started driving slowly by their home at any time of day, never speaking, only staring. This would happen about a dozen separate times. 

Williams-Bolar sometimes stayed in her room crying for days, not knowing how much time was passing. Her depression lingered well after . 

Three years on probation also meant the family couldn’t travel to see relatives in the south. She was also barred from visiting her father in prison for months. Though his involvement with her school enrollment case was dropped, soon after the state convicted him on fraud charges related to government benefits. Williams-Bolar maintains the case against her father would not have been pursued without the unprecedented spotlight on her family. 

“Once you get in the lion’s den, they’re not just gonna let you go,” she said. 

He served 11 months in prison, and died in its hospital one month before release. 

“He loved going out barbecuing in the front yard. He loved all his grand babies coming over, always listening to music,” said Kayla, now 30. “I mean, the greatest grandpa a girl could ever ask for. Damn near like a father to me, and I’d do anything to have him back. But here we are.”

Investigations in and recently confirmed districts still regularly confront families suspected of living outside of their boundaries. Today, their methods are usually less public, with districts hiring private investigators or threatening prosecution to get families to disenroll their children. The thousands known to be kicked out of their schools for address sharing are disproportionately Black and brown. 

In at least 24 states, parents can face criminal prosecution, fines and jail sentences for address sharing. Only one, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice. 

To reduce the scale of the issue and promote integration, districts could adopt county boundaries, encompassing more diversity and better reflecting work-life patterns, rather than neighborhood lines that mirror racist housing segregation. But they often “lack the political will,” to do so; quality schools remain scarce by design, said civil rights lawyer Erika Wilson. 

And though Williams-Bolar knows a friend was similarly confronted by the district who believed her family lived outside the boundary, they never prosecuted her or asked her to remove her two children. The friend was related to a prominent leader in the NAACP. Williams-Bolar later met a former Copley student who alleged he lived in Akron, too, and that the school knew at the time, but let him stay because he was an athlete. 

“I think it’s common at these, these selective schools. The problem is it’s very, very selectively enforced,” said Tim DeRoche, author, researcher and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization. 

‘I remember my wife losing her hair’

Around the same time Williams-Bolar was navigating her trial, just one state over, six year old Fiorella Garcia pleaded with the governor of Pennsylvania to drop charges against her parents. Crying, she said she didn’t want to go into foster care. 

In 2012, her parents Hamlet and Olesia Garcia faced up to seven years in prison, felony convictions, and losing custody of their daughter. The suburban Lower Moreland Township School District alleged Fiorella lived outside of its zone, in Philadelphia. Fiorella and Olesia lived temporarily with her grandparents in Lower Moreland, but failed to notify the district that they had moved out. 

In records reviewed by ����Ӱ��, the Garcias repeatedly offered to pay the district the cost for Fiorella to finish the school year in Lower Moreland so as to not interrupt her schooling. Their requests were denied. 

Their mug shots headlined local news the night they were arrested, alongside headlines that alluded to tax fraud. Olesia, who owned a private insurance company, risked losing her license and business. Their address made its way into coverage, and soon after, their car was vandalized.  

“This has never got off my head … I remember my wife losing her hair,” Hamlet Garcia said, trying to hold back tears. Losing so much sleep, he tried medication and experienced chest pains, which he attributes to the stress. 

Their tide only changed after leaving their public defender, who wanted them to settle for a guilty plea. The Garcias incurred close to $100,000 in debt to instead hire a high profile law team from Florida, money they say would have gone toward their daughters’ college education or family vacations. 

Ultimately, all . The family paid $10,752 “tuition” to the district and a $100 fine. 

In the decade that has followed, Garcia has devoted most of his time to learning education law, organizing for school choice and Republican political campaigns, feeling betrayed by the Democrats he felt were responsible. Fiorella, now 17, is about to graduate from high school. 

Telling her story and becoming a parent advocate has been Williams-Bolar’s “medicine.” She feels she’s a part of changing education policy to expand access to quality schools and “leave a legacy for my dad because he didn’t deserve none of that. He didn’t deserve to die in jail.” 

Today she works at one of Akron Public Schools’ high schools as a paraprofessional: the superintendent refused to fire her after the ordeal.

“Honestly,” said Kayla, who’s also considering going back to school to be an educator, “I’m still trying to heal.” 

Confronted with that startling reality, the from the University of Chicago’s Education Lab has identified a cost-effective, school-based model that can support young girls: group counseling and mentorship. 

Attending weekly in-school counseling for just four months through the program decreased PTSD symptoms brought on by witnessing or experiencing violent attacks or or losing a loved one by 22%, depression by 14% and anxiety by about 10%, according to the randomized control trial, considered the gold standard of research.

The program is currently offered to groups of 10 teen girls in about 30 Chicago Public Schools and more in Dallas, Kansas City and Boston.

“[Because of] the violence we see, and there’s violence everywhere, not just in Chicago… they are experiencing a lot of loss,” said Christine Diaz Luna, a senior counselor at Hancock College Prep which serves mostly Latino students on the city’s southwest side. “I’ve seen in my experience that loss, that grief, that longing for connection.” 

The high prevalence of PTSD shocked lead researcher Monica Bhatt, whose team studied over 3,700 9th- through 11th-grade girls across 10 high schools from 2017-19. 

“These are girls who, despite the very, very high levels of trauma that they were experiencing, are coming to school. We see a B average … We don’t see a lot of externalizing behaviors,” Bhatt said. 

“It really adds evidence to this notion … of having a set of latent mental health challenges that do surface later in life, but aren’t apparent early on.” Research has shown that leaving depression and PTSD unchecked can affect girls’ future ability to succeed in their careers and family. 

Earlier this year, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shed some light into just how pervasive traumatic experiences are for young girls: 1 in 5 nationwide experienced sexual violence in 2021.

The Chicago research is the first large-scale study to look at effective mental health interventions specifically for Black and Latino girls — who are more likely than their peers to experience traumatic childhood experiences and have higher rates of depression and anxiety. 

“Usually, we sort of study program effectiveness on a large sample, and then we try to understand, does this vary for particular student groups?” Bhatt added. “This is a program that was designed particularly with Black and Latino girls in mind … We’re starting to develop a body of evidence where there wasn’t a lot prior.”

Students who are actively suicidal, have learning disabilities or are absent more than 75% of the year were excluded from the Chicago sample. More research is needed to understand how a program like WOW might impact those student groups. 

Researchers believe results would be even greater for girls attending for the designed length, two school years. According to , the local nonprofit that launched the model in 2011, girls who start within clinical range for PTSD and depression have even more success: decreasing symptoms by 62% and 71%, respectively. 

WOW in Action

After her freshman year, whenever TK Nowlin was overwhelmed by family, school and friend stress, she’d get frustrated, and get into arguments, or stop communicating. 

Now a junior at Fenger Academy High School in her second year of WOW programming, she feels more calm and sure of herself. 

“[WOW] helped me work on my healthy relationships … It’s very important to listen to understand instead of listening to respond, and I know that played a big factor in my life, because it was like I always had a rebuttal to something,” Nowlin said. 

Fellow junior Yazmin Hunter told ����Ӱ�� she now has a system when she’s reaching the point of frustration: take a break, sit down, breathe, listen to music, take a walk. 

Once a week, TK, Yazmin and peers across Chicago leave their elective or physical education classes to head to their WOW room. They start with a check-in, sharing a rose, bud, thorn from their week or comparing their mood to songs and colors. 

Her counselor facilitates either full group discussions or individual journaling. Surrounded by colorful walls, affirmations and mirrors, they sometimes pull cards from a container: Who is the most important person in your life? What does success or a support system look like to you? What are your views on parenting? 

Informed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the sessions get girls to reframe or question negative thoughts, reflect on how their day-day actions align with their personal values and listen openly to each others’ stories. 

“Our thoughts are powerful. And sometimes we think thoughts that aren’t necessarily true. As an example, you look in the mirror, ‘Oh my God, I’m ugly,’” Diaz Luna explained. “Let’s take that thought and break it down. What’s going on there? Where’s that coming from? Have you been told this before by someone else?”

Having the group offered during the school day is critical to reach students who work or have family commitments after school that would prevent them from attending otherwise. Students are never pulled out of core classes or lunch, only electives or physical education. 

Students can volunteer for the program, pending a parent’s permission. School staff can also refer students to the program if they notice someone struggling. 

Cost and space are typically the biggest barriers for potential school partners, Youth Guidance’s chief program officer Nacole Milbrook told ����Ӱ��. 

At about $115,000 per school for one counselor, who works with four to five groups of students, WOW is still about $40,000 cheaper to run than the accepted threshold for similar services.