Most college applicants tout their high school transcripts.
She has to explain that, even though she walked across a stage last year, she’s not quite sure whether she’s part of the graduating class of 2019 or 2020.
The complicated truth — and what the 18-year-old hopes colleges will understand — is that her transcript is not a reflection of her failures. It is a reflection of a city that sometimes fails students who get seriously ill or injured unexpectedly.
“I thought I would have a normal high school career,” Ana tells me over the phone on a recent afternoon. “I was thinking I would get into a good college, somewhere in New York hopefully. I was hoping to study something like global studies and international relations. I never expected that I would be in a situation like this.”
This is a mess that no parent wants to see their child trudging through, and that pending legislation could help prevent other D.C. students from facing.
On Tuesday, the D.C. Council’s education committee voted unanimously to pass the “Students’ Rights to Home and Hospital Act.” The legislation still has to go through several more votes and receive approval from the mayor to go into effect. But the recent action is an acknowledgment that the city’s process for supporting students who miss more than 10 school days because of a physical or psychological condition needs to be more transparent and consistent across schools and offer families a way to appeal if a child is denied support through the city’s home or hospital instruction program (HHIP).
With so many pressing problems pulling at our attention in the District, it would be easy to look past this one. If you don’t have children in the schools, or if you do and those children are healthy, the ramifications of this legislation may seem distant.
But if we think of children in the city’s schools as trains on tracks, this legislation aims to address those cracks that stand to potentially derail those carrying some of the heaviest loads.
Since introducing the act in July, the education committee heard from an attorney who described how a high school student with mental health and neurological needs waited nearly two months for the school to respond to a psychiatrist’s request for home instruction and, later, after being hospitalized and filing a second request, waited 76 days before being denied those services.
The committee also heard from Charles “Buck” Logan, an attorney with the Children’s Law Center, a nonprofit that provides legal service to low-income families. He told them that more than 150 D.C. students every year find themselves facing serious health conditions that lead them to request home or hospital instruction, but too often, those requests are denied or delayed without justification. Part of the problem, he said, is that school personnel who lack medical training are second-guessing what the students’ doctors are saying. As a result, he said, 1 out of every 3 of those requests are denied, and some students wait weeks, and sometimes months, to get approved.
The current legislation would address those issues. It would also require schools across the city to have home and hospital instruction programs — currently, charter schools are not required to — and make it easier for parents to learn how to apply for that support.
“We are aware of cases in which schools repeatedly raised truancy concerns about a sick child who had been absent from school for more than 10 days, yet never informed the parents about the option of requesting HHI,” reads Logan’s written testimony.
As Ana tells it, when she started to get sick her junior year and missed days and then weeks of classes, she had no idea what was wrong with her body. She would later learn, after many doctor visits and tests, that she had celiac disease, which can cause serious digestive problems, fatigue and depression. But at the beginning, all she knew was that many days she couldn’t go far from the bathroom, let alone take a bus to Wilson High School and sit through classes.
Her mother, Amy Tinto, says when she first spoke to school officials, she didn’t know she could request hospital or home instruction, and no one told her.
“We figured, ‘They know what they’re doing, they do it all the time,’ ” Amy Tinto says. She says she trusted school officials to do what was best for her daughter. “And that was wrong.”
A D.C. Public Schools spokesperson said that because of a privacy law, school officials cannot comment on an individual student’s records.
She provided a statement saying the school district “is committed to providing every student the opportunities and supports they need to thrive. . . . DCPS is committed to partnering with students and families to meet their needs, and supports robust home and hospital instruction policies for our young people experiencing medical emergencies, chronic illnesses, mental health crisis, or terminal diseases.”
The attendance policy listed on the school’s website explains the F’s on Ana’s transcript for her junior year. The policy reads: “Secondary students accumulating more than thirty (30) unexcused absences in a course within a full school year shall receive a failing final grade in that course with a resulting loss of course credit.”
A strict attendance policy makes sense given the district’s past. In 2017, intense scrutiny followed the discovery that students at Ballou High School were allowed to graduate despite missing months of school.
But Ana says she wanted to be in class. She says she didn’t want to fall behind or have to stop participating in extracurricular activities.
“It was really hard for me to sit at home and watch everyone else have a normal life while I was stuck inside,” she says. “I was missing my life, and I was missing my friends, and for a while, it felt like I was never going to get that back.”
About the beginning of her senior year, at the recommendation of a doctor at Children’s National Hospital, her mom sought help from the Children’s Law Center. Attorney Evan Cass, who started working with the family at that time, says that if Ana had been initially enrolled in the HHIP, it is likely that each F on her transcript would have instead been an M, reflecting she could not complete the course for medical reasons. She also would have received help keeping up with her courses.
Instead, by the time he met her, she was feeling well enough to attend school again, but it was uncertain whether she would be able to graduate on time.
Cass says he and the family met with school officials to put in place a plan that would allow her to finish alongside her peers. That plan called for her to take a heavy course load and enroll in online classes, and she did. She did everything that was expected of her. She passed those classes. She got her cap and gown. And she stood with her classmates on graduation day.
“I walked across the stage, shook hands with my principal — everything that would make me believe I was graduating,” Ana says.
Then, over the summer, just before she was set to leave for Croatia, where her father lives and where she planned to work and apply for colleges, she learned that she was half a credit short of that diploma.
Cass and the family describe a frustrating process in trying to get answers from the school system on how that mistake was made and how she could complete that elective course. She remains in Croatia and says she is hoping the school system will find another option than the two she’s been given: attend summer school or unenroll and graduate from an online school.
While she is trying to sort out that half credit and figure out how she’s going to pay for college now that the scholarships she needs seem unlikely, she continues to fill out applications.
She is trying to move forward, even as she is being held back.
“At this point, I just hope that I can graduate,” she says. “I hope that I can go to college. I hope that I can just put this all behind me. And I hope that no kids in DCPS will ever have to deal with something like this.”
Cass wrote one of her college recommendation letters.
It begins with an explanation.
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