Sending a Message to the Rest of Us

Posted on by Tina

There are times when any parent is forced to ask themselves “What would you do for your children?”. You gave them life, would you also give them yours? Would you beg for them? Steal for them? What would you sacrifice? Those are the times when you shudder and hope you never have to find out the answer.

For 40-year-old Kelly Williams-Bolar, she’s found that answer the hard way, as her sacrifice may be her livelihood. I’m sure by now you’ve heard her story: Williams-Bolar is a black woman living in Northeast Ohio, on public assistance, working to finish a teaching degree. She works as a teacher’s aide for a special education classroom in Akron, Ohio. She lives in a low-income housing neighborhood where she’s been repeatedly robbed; a place where gunshots are a more familiar sound than lawnmowers and neighborly chatter. She’s raising two adolescent daughters there.

Williams-Bolar wants to get her daughters out of that life. She wants it bad enough to take her daughters out of the school district they were in, in inner city Akron, and put them in a better, safer district—one that is predominantly white with better test scores and a better chance of getting into college. To do this, she registered her daughters in the Copley, Ohio school district. Her daughters were recorded as living with her father, a Copley resident.

For whatever reason, the Copley school district doubted Williams-Bolar’s residency claim, possibly due to a tip (worth $100) from someone in the district. They investigated, hiring an off-duty policeman to tail Williams-Bolar and her daughters. They supposedly sent Williams-Bolar and her father bills, claiming that since the Copley public schools were not an open-enrollment district they were owed tuition.

The latest development in this case is that Williams-Bolar has been tried and found guilty of felony fraud. This isn’t the first time the Copley-Fairlawn district has brought fraud charges against parents, but it’s been the highest profile case, and the first I know of that’s led to a conviction. Even though the judge commuted all but 10 days of the sentence, this ruins Williams-Bolar’s chance of becoming a teacher in Ohio. It also may cost her her current job. All because she sent her daughters to a better school. The whole situation reekss of “sending a message” to poor parents: be happy with what you’ve got, or pay the price.

I’ve seen a lot of comments on the internet regarding the court case and the situation, many of them are negative. Many people have reckoned themselves both judge and jury, maintaining that Williams-Bolar broke the law, committed fraud and must therefore pay the price. The price being that she will never be able to teach in Ohio (and possibly anywhere else), that her life has been opened up to public scrutiny, and that she now has a criminal record that will follow her for the rest of her life.

Some people think that if Williams-Bolar wanted to improve her daughters’ education, she should have just moved to Copley. She should have just moved into a district with an average house price of $198,588. Others think she should have just paid the out-of-district tuition, which is around $800 a month per child on her public school teachers assistant salary.

For some perspective, here’s some background on the girls’ schools in both districts, courtesy of greatschools.org.

Read the ratings and take a look at the demographics provided. They paint a very clear picture of racial and economic disparity between the two school districts. If this case isn’t about race, as many insist it isn’t, it’s certainly about class differences. Read, then tell me: would you have tried everything you could to get your child into the better school? Not the school with less minority students, but the school with better test scores. Would you have moved your kids in with a parent to do so? If your only way of getting your kids into a better district was to lie (which I’m not convinced Williams-Bolar actually did), would you? While I’m not sure either way that Williams-Bolar is guilty, her treatment and sentencing doesn’t feel much like justice.

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