Evicted Students Miss Class and Fall Behind. Tulsa Schools Want to Change That

This article was published with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy and power.

Tulsa, Oklahoma

With her long, wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, the young mom sat alone outside courtroom 6 at the Tulsa County Family Center for Juvenile Justic, checking her phone and anxiously waiting for a court official to call her name for an eviction hearing.

“I’ve never been through this,” Courtney said in early May. Her two kids, ages 5 and 6, were staying with her mother out of town while she tried to catch up on rent or find another place to live. It was the best for the children, she said, but “they want to be with me.”

Between losing one job and starting another, she feared she’d still come up short of the  $1,004 she owed.

She didn’t have much time.

In Oklahoma, the eviction process moves faster than the ability of most renters to respond. State law gives tenants five days to pay their debt or move out. A tenant has to appear in court just three days after a summons arrives. 

Tulsa has one of the worst eviction rates in the country — the 11th highest as of a decade ago. Since then, the rate has grown from 8% to roughly 13%. Last school year, landlords filed evictions affecting more than 600 children in the state’s largest district, the Tulsa Public Schools. 

Her kids’ schools, Courtney said, didn’t ask why she withdrew them with a month left in the school year.

That’s hardly surprising, experts say.

“[Parents are] looking for, ‘How do I find a place where my kids are going to sleep?’ ” said Eric Hallett, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma. “They’re not thinking ‘What can a lawyer do for me?’ or even ‘What can Tulsa Public Schools do for me?’ ”

But in a state with one of the fastest eviction timelines in the nation, that’s something the district is trying to change. Since 2020, leaders have worked with ImpactTulsa, a nonprofit, to prevent disruption in kids’ education and quickly direct parents under threat of eviction to resources like legal aid and rental assistance. When a student’s address appears in an eviction filing, the parent receives an email from the district offering help.

“There is a culture of defeat, if the eviction seems like a done deal, why would I reach out for help?” 

Ana Barros, ImpactTulsa

The alert is a promising example of schools being “first responders” in a housing emergency, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization focused on students experiencing homelessness. Tulsa’s system has caught the attention of organizations doing similar work from Dallas to Dayton, Ohio. But the resources available to families fall far short of the demand, and the threat of eviction itself can be so traumatic that parents are often too overwhelmed to respond.

“There is a culture of defeat,” said Ana Barros, the director of collaboration and partnerships for ImpactTulsa. If the eviction seems like a “done deal, why would I reach out for help?” 

Roughly 3 million kids nationally are caught up in evictions each year, with households headed by single Black mothers especially vulnerable. Housing instability lands the heaviest on families with young children. New data from a Stanford University survey shows that nearly 30% of parents with children under 6 were worried about being evicted in the next month and 8% had already received an eviction notice. A federal program provides homeless students with educational and transportation services. But families who are evicted don’t immediately qualify for the same support, and the damage to students’ learning is clear.

“The gaps in children’s education are huge,” said Emily Turner, an attorney who is part of ImpactTulsa’s eviction prevention team. Missing days and weeks of school because of an eviction raises concerns about kids’ safety, she said, and the more they miss, the harder it is to come back. “They feel behind or they feel scared or they feel like this isn’t my space anymore.”

In the Oklahoma City schools, 65% of students whose families received an eviction notice were chronically absent, almost as many as those who were actually evicted, according to Shelterwell, part of Mental Health Association Oklahoma. On state assessments, students with an eviction notice or judgment had 25% lower proficiency rates in math compared to their peers. In reading, the academic impact was more than twice as much — 56% lower. 

“We have slipped to the bottom in education rankings,” said state Rep. Amanda Clinton, a Democrat who sponsored a bill this year to give tenants facing eviction access to free mediation before a judge heard their case. The bill passed the House, but died in the Senate. She agrees with Republicans that the state should focus on turning around its dismal performance in reading. “But we cannot be serious about improving student outcomes unless we get serious about keeping kids in the classroom to start with.”

At Kerr Elementary, on the east side of Tulsa, Principal Jennifer Thomas sees the academic impact of evictions every morning. Students with unstable housing are frequently absent, and when they do come to school, they often arrive at least an hour late and hungry. 

“We have students who have been at four different schools within a month,” she said. As with Courtney’s kids, Thomas said it’s not unusual for grandparents to provide backup, but that adds to the learning disruption. “Grandma doesn’t know where the school is, or Grandma’s not used to having to get the kids up at 7:30.” 

Lawmakers took up the issue last year and worked to pass a bipartisan bill that would have given tenants a few more days to show up in court — a rare development in such a deep red state. But Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, vetoed it. With a background in real estate, including rental homes in Florida, he argued that the extension would be too “burdensome” for landlords. This year, a similar bill died in committee. 

“This is a very, very landlord-friendly state,” said Delia Kimbrel, the director of research and policy at ImpactTulsa. “The scales are really stacked up against the family.”

‘Human realities’

Corporate landlords are the most likely to evict, research shows. Those include Vesta Realty, which owned Barcelona Apartments, the Spanish-style complex at a busy intersection in southeast Tulsa that filed the case against Courtney.

Hannah Remick, a former administrative assistant for the company, who herself was evicted from one of its 40 complexes, estimates that Vesta filed about 25 evictions a week. Whether tenants have kids doesn’t make landlords any less likely to force them out, she said.

“They would just say ‘units.’ They wouldn’t think about who is living in that unit,” she said. The process, she said, is “very separated from the human realities of what’s going on there.”

When ImpactTulsa identified management companies evicting families with school-aged kids, some of the affected properties had maintenance issues and code violations that had gone unaddressed for months. In 2024, one mom of a kindergartner told reporters she was evicted after complaining to the media about a lack of hot water and cockroaches in her apartment. 

Poor living conditions for renters are not unique to Tulsa. A recent nationwide survey showed that 13% of renters moved in the past two years because their home needed repairs. Five percent said they were either evicted or trying to avoid eviction.

Remick described Barcelona as “one of the worst,” with workers instructed to layer coats of Kilz primer over walls with mold. Courtney told The 74 she had six work orders pending, including one for a leaky water heater, when she was evicted. Because an eviction can prevent a tenant from getting another lease and affect future employment, she asked The 74 not to use her last name. 

The company’s financial condition was likely one reason for the backlog of repairs. Vesta’s owner, Marc Kulick, is facing multiple lawsuits. In February, Fannie Mae, the mortgage lender, initiated foreclosure proceedings against the company, and in July, as a result of litigation, a different company, YSA Investments, took ownership of multiple Vesta properties, including Barcelona. Vesta was also among the Tulsa landlords that fell months behind on city water bills.

“We all got letters on our doors saying they were going to charge for water,” Courtney said, even though that cost is supposed to be part of the rent. 

According to a city official, the company caught up with water bills, and Vesta issued a statement saying that because of a pending “ownership dispute,” all questions about conditions, staffing or maintenance at Barcelona should go to the current operator. 

YSA spokesman Parker Detweiler said his company is “doing everything humanly possible within the law to get living conditions where they should be.”

Sherri Daley, executive director of the Tulsa Apartment Association, said while it’s important to address the “underlying causes of housing instability,” landlords have to worry about their bottom line.

“Property owners and managers typically focus on the lease obligations, payment history, and compliance with the rental agreement rather than whether a household includes school-aged children,” she said. One of the arguments against extending the eviction timeline was that it would hurt small, independent landlords. “Even one missed payment can create a ripple effect, leading to deferred maintenance and other financial pressures for the owner.”

Tenants falling behind on rent can sometimes avoid an eviction if they communicate with their landlords, said Amy Coldren, who launched Shelterwell in Oklahoma City in 2023.  As part of its eviction prevention work, the organization provides nonprofits and schools with a free, tenant education program called LiveSteady. It covers topics like how to understand a lease and manage a budget.

Coldren said one of the first women she met after starting Shelterwell was facing eviction because her children, who had previously been in foster care, were considered unauthorized occupants.

“I’m a former foster parent, so I know the work that she did to get her children back,” she said. “A simple solution would have been for her to have a conversation with her landlord and put her kids on the lease.”

‘A sensitive manner’

ImpactTulsa’s work began with a disturbing realization.

Property owners most likely to evict are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods as schools with the highest chronic absenteeism. That’s what the organization found when it began scraping the eviction court docket six years ago for addresses that match those of district students.

Between 2020 and 2023, Kimbrel identified eviction filings affecting roughly 4,400 Tulsa students. The disruption wasn’t brief. A year after a district family’s eviction showed up on their radar, nearly three-fourths of those students were still chronically absent. 

“That just slapped everybody in the face,” she said. 

But even the most sophisticated of district data systems can’t stop families from being displaced. The district’s homeless education staff last school year emailed all 621 families identified through the alert system, said BreAnna Shine, director of student engagement. Less than 100 ultimately received support through the district. Most didn’t respond. They might have landed somewhere else, ignored the message or resolved the issue with their landlord.

The other half of the system is a resource hub in one of the district’s most heavily impacted clusters of schools, East Central. The schools on that side of town draw from apartments like Eastgate, which filed eviction notices during that 2020-23 period affecting 47 students at Cooper Elementary and 26 students at East Central High School, Kimbrel’s analysis showed.

The hub at East Central Middle is two offices near the front entrance where Angeles Gonzalez, a family “navigator” with Tulsa Responds, and Turner, an attorney for the YWCA, meet privately with parents to triage their immediate needs — items like rental assistance, a free hotspot or food stamps. But district staff initially wrestled with whether they even wanted to know which families had been evicted. 

“It’s a sensitive matter,” said Stephanie Andrews, executive director of student and family support services. It’s uncomfortable to contact a parent who might not want anyone to know they’ve hit such a low point. “It’s not been without some bumps.” 

The district can guide a family to a nonprofit offering short-term rental assistance or temporary housing, but that often means they end up on a waiting list for services. Restore Hope, a nonprofit, spends about $100,000 a month in rental assistance, but those funds only cover about 30% of the eviction cases, said Josh Geppelt, executive director. Plus, to qualify, applicants have to show they have “means to maintain the rent after we do the assist.”

Living in limbo during that application process, while also bouncing from one living situation to the next, is draining, said Aspen Allen, a mother of three.

“You’re waiting for them to call you, and if nobody answers, they move to the next person,” she said. 

She leaned on the district last fall for clothes and backpacks for her kids in between leaving a rental home with plumbing problems, spending time in a former hotel run by a local church and moving into Parkview Terrace on the west side of town, a public housing development known for gun violence. It’s the same complex where she’s currently waiting for a subsidized apartment. 

“I haven’t been able to have my own spot for my kids to be happy, go to school, go on vacation and just have a good life,” said Allen, who works as a DoorDasher and was waiting to hear back about a part-time FedEx position. “I’m trying to keep them in school, not missing any days, which is very difficult at times.”

‘They grab what they can’

Inspired by Tulsa’s example, nonprofit leaders in other cities nonetheless face the same obstacles in trying to serve families with scarce resources. 

“There is no system,” said Aqua Porter, executive director of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative in New York. “There are just things that people have to navigate through, and they are not connected.”

Most of those other nonprofits have something Oklahoma does not — a longer timeline between eviction notices and court appearances.  In New York, for example, nonprofits have roughly 30 days from an eviction filing to help families find legal aid, point them toward sources of financial support and encourage them to attend their first court appearance.

Because Oklahoma’s system is designed to get renters with delinquent payments out as soon as possible, it’s often too late to prevent eviction. Those with nowhere to go may stay in the apartment after they’re evicted until they’re forced out by the sheriff’s department, said Melissa Vowell, a homeless education program specialist for the Tulsa Public Schools.

They usually have about an hour to collect belongings. 

“If it’s a sheriff’s eviction, they grab what they can in the time a sheriff will allow,” she said.

Their next stop might be Vowell’s office, which connects to a storeroom packed with school uniforms, socks and underwear, and personal hygiene products.

She also maintains a detailed spreadsheet filled with organizations offering food, transportation and housing. One nonprofit on the list is Family Promise of Tulsa, tucked into a serene, wooded area west of downtown. Out of a small white cottage, Executive Director Tina Massey runs an eviction diversion program that provides one-time payments of up to $1,000 for those who have fallen behind on rent. Massey estimates that the program reached close to 90 district families last school year.  For those who lose their housing, a shelter on the same property offers fully furnished apartments for up to three months.

Brooklyn Cloud found Family Promise on Facebook last year while living in a Mazda SUV with two daughters, one in preschool and another in second grade. After an eviction from Harmony Glen, a 74-unit complex owned by a Texas-based company, they spent six months sleeping under the lights in Walmart and QuikTrip parking lots. 

“I didn’t even know a 7-year-old could get depressed,” Cloud said. “Her grades started to slip, lack of appetite. She wanted to sleep all the time.”

While staying in one of the apartments, Cloud and her husband paid off the eviction and saved for a new home. Their oldest now “has her own space.” 

“She’s more bubbly and her personality is back,” she said. “She’s not so down-in-the-dumps and snappy.”

‘Legal first aid’

Most parents in a crisis like Cloud’s don’t even show up to court. 

“They can’t get time off work or child care,” said Hallett, the legal aid attorney.

That was clear the day Courtney’s case appeared on the docket. Of the 89 eviction filings before Judge Tammy Bruce, who hears about 13,000 eviction cases a year, less than half of the tenants showed up. 

If they do appear, they’re unlikely to have legal representation. In nearly every case, Judge Bruce told them they could either meet with their landlord’s representative or see if they qualified for legal aid. Court documents show Courtney represented herself, while a Vesta employee appeared for the company.

Courtney was evicted two weeks later. Attempts to reach her by phone and text since then were unsuccessful.

Last year, Hallett began asking tenants if they have children in the Tulsa schools. It’s his contribution to the district’s effort to identify more families. 

On the district side, about 40 teachers at East Central MIddle learned how to offer “legal first aid,” like helping parents construct timelines of the events that led up to eviction. Missed or partial payments, maintenance issues reported, and messages to landlords and property managers are important to document because when apartments change ownership, new managers don’t always honor previous attempts to pay. 

Barros, with ImpactTulsa, expected some resistance from staff to the training. She’s a former social studies teacher at East Central Middle.

“Teachers are like ‘Whoa, that’s not my job. You’re adding something else to my plate,’ ” she said. But schools play a unique role in eviction prevention, she said. “Kids are legally required to be here. So let’s take advantage of that.”