ATLANTA (WXIA) -- If you rewind past the sentencing, the verdict and all the testimony the APS scandal comes down to all those children who were sitting in classrooms filling out wrong answers.
To understand who they are, first you must define "The Cheated Generation" within Atlanta Public Schools.
The state found evidence of cheating in 2009. A first grader then is now in seventh grade, a third grader is now a high school freshman, and a sixth grader when the scandal broke is currently high school senior.
That's if they stayed on track. Not all did. Some fell very, very far behind.
"I'll just be trying and I just won't get it," explained Allison George.
She was held back in 8th grade… twice.
"I'm fixing to be seventeen in the 9th grade," she said.
She says just couldn't grasp the fundamentals.
"Half the stuff now I have a hard time understanding, like the subtracting and dividing. I have a hard time catching on," George said.
Her family believes it was when she was a student at Humphries Elementary where things went wrong. There, her fourth grade teacher was involved in grade changing.
George said it hard to take it in that her test scores had been changed, and when she found out she says "I started crying because I thought it was me."
George thought it was her fault she struggled. She thought it was her fault she never mastered the fundamentals to move on.
Then the scandal came to light, and she read about people she knew in the news.
"Those were my teachers. It ruined their lives and some of ours," George said.
Despite falling behind she's determined to build a career in the military but is also interested in becoming an attorney, thanks to the APS trial.
