ATLANTA — Bad test scores and poverty.
For Thomasville Heights Elementary, the two went hand-in-hand.
That was, until parents decided to lawyer up. Now, the work of an unlikely help has helped turn around a failing school.
For three years, Erin Tucker has been fighting for better living conditions at her home in the Forest Cove Apartments.
"My upstairs bathroom leaks to the downstairs one. They say they fixed it, but they only patched it up," Tucker told 11Alive's Natisha Lance, as she described how she's concerned how one of her children may fall through the floor.
One of her children is a student at Thomasville Heights Elementary School, ranked as one of the worst-performing schools in the state. It's also the poorest. Ninety-five percent of the students there are Tucker's neighbors, and they too are suffering from some of the same housing conditions.
But a major shift started about a year ago, when a dynamic duo came to the school: Tenant lawyer Anyanna Jones Lightly and community advocate Crystal Reynolds.
"Parents always come to us in trauma," Reynolds explained.
Part of her job is connecting parents with what they need. For Tucker, it was a lawyer to help her get essential repairs in her home.
"If anything, I call them and they're on it, whatever the problem is."
Last year, the lawyers stopped 20 evictions and took on more than 80 cases.
"It takes someone coming in from the outside, a strong advocate who says, 'I'm going to shine a light on this and I'm going to inform you what the law is'," Lightly said.
It turns out, fighting for tenants' rights has made all the difference academically, too.
Jovan Miles takes over the school as principal in July. He told 11Alive school turnover dropped from 40 percent to 25 percent. Test scores also went up by 50 percent.
"We've seen a previously reluctant community embrace the work that the school is doing," Miles said. "Parents here pretty much, all day, every day, kind of living that 'it takes a village' approach, helping to do the turn-around work here that we're doing."
The work in Thomasville Heights' community was so successful, that other struggling schools have started the same program. But, for parents like Tucker, this is just the beginning for her and her kids.
"There are more people out here going through the same thing, maybe even worse, but this needs to be in every school," she concluded. "Every school."
