Nakiya Wakes was 38 and pregnant when she moved to Flint from Battle Creek six years ago. She had two children and two on the way.
She relocated to live with her children’s father and start a new life. But after a year of drinking lead-tainted tap water from the toxic Flint River, she miscarried her twins. The day she got home from the hospital’s critical care unit, she found a flyer on her front door advising that pregnant women should not drink the tap water.
“I was mad!” she said.
But her challenges had just begun. She said other residents warned her that the city was using water from the Flint River, but she said she didn’t understand the severity of their warning until she began seeing behavioral changes in her children.
Her son, Jaylon, who was 5 and had been diagnosed with attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), got worse, more anxious, more easily frustrated, she said. “And he developed a tic.”
She said school officials told her that they could not handle her son. Their solution? They kicked him out of school — over and over.
Jaylon Tyson, 11, of Flint zips his hoodie before going outside of his home on Flint's north side on Wednesday, December 11, 2019.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
“My son was suspended or sent home more than 50 times,” she said. “When they stopped suspending him, they just called me every day to come get him.”
How Flint has handled the nearly 30,000 child victims of the water crisis is indicative of how school districts across the state are dealing with trauma.
Flint Community Schools officials declined to comment. But according to state records and news reports, the percentage of special education students increased by 56% from 13.1% in the 2012-13, the school year before the water crisis began, to 20.5% in the last school year. And suspensions in Flint rose from 144 in 2012-13, the year before the water crisis began, to 425 last year. (Those numbers are for students with disabilities. Michigan school districts are not required to report the number of students they suspend in their general student population.)
What Wakes didn’t know was that she had moved into the heart of an international water crisis.Thousands of students in the Flint Community Schools and more than a third of Flint residents were subjected to improperly treated water tainted by lead leaching from water pipes.
For the world, it was an international news story, an indictment of state leadership, a cause. For Nakia Wakes, it was a personal nightmare. She watched her son watch the news, talking heads telling him he was being poisoned. She watched her son’s behavior deteriorate. She used bottled water to bathe him and boiled water to cook. But still, Jaylon, who just turned 11, grew worse.
One day, school officials called her, and “I could hear my son screaming at the top of his lungs over the phone,” she said. “They were like, ‘Yes, we're having a problem. Three of us had to restrain your son.’ So as soon as they said three people, I'm like, 'Didn't I tell you all not to put your hands on my child?’ ”
“Jaylon doesn’t like any parts of him being held down,” she said. “He automatically goes into fight or flight. So, with three adults on a child? He was feeling it. That was just too much. ..."
Jaylon Tyson, 11, of Flint climbs on the refrigerator to get an item while preparing food as his mother Nakiya Wakes sits on the the couch of their home on Flint's north side on Wednesday, December 11, 2019.
Nakiya homeschools her son, who was diagnosed with ADHD and developed a tic at age 5, after she says that officials told her they were unable to handle him and he was repeatedly suspended.
Nakiya says the exposure to the Flint water caused her to lose twins and having her son's issues after having him tested to find high levels of lead in his body.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Over three years, Jaylon attended three schools, including International Academy and Brownell Stem Academy, the site of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s 2016 Town Hall on the water crisis and a school thrust into the national spotlight the year before when a 7-year-old was child placed in handcuffs at school.
Eventually, Wakes lost her job as an administrative assistant for missing so much work picking Jaylon up and caring for him.
“I’m trying to tell the school ‘You cannot deny my son an education because of the lead water. He has an IEP (an individual education plan, which is required for students in special education).’
“They didn’t care,” she said.
Flint Superintendent Derrick Lopez must contend not only with how to equip teachers to teach children who have been traumatized and how to increase services for the increased numbers of students in special education classes, but he also most deal with lawsuits resulting from the Flint water crisis and lead poisoning of children.
A successful class action lawsuit brought the ACLU of Michigan, the White & Case law firm and the Educational Law Center of New Jersey resulted in funds to create the Neurodevelopmental Center of Excellence in Flint. It is operated by the Genesee Health System, the county’s mental health provider. The center’s job is to screen and evaluate children for potential cognitive disabilities, using those assessments to determine what special education services they might need. But the ACLU and the center are concerned about the lack of screening for behavioral challenges. "There is a large concern around challenging or difficult behavior patterns that are developing in more frequency and more severity, and the schools are grappling with that problem," said said Lauren Tompkins, vice president of clinical operations and director of the NCE. Tompkins added that the screenings are optional and it is up to the school district to provide services after diagnoses.
The center, which was approved in April 2018, only opened last December. By last week, out of about 10,000 children possibly affected by water, the center received 1,984 referrals and had evaluated only 283 children, said Lauren Tompkins, vice president of clinical operations and director of the NCE. About 70% of those students were found to have some type of intellectual impairment or learning disability.
So, most children in Flint still have not had an assessment to determine the level of cognitive impairment and other learning disabilities that resulted from the bad water.
“The children have definitely been impacted by the lead and also by the trauma and all of the things that have been a ripple effect from the Flint water crisis,” said Kristen Totten, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Michigan education attorney who worked on the successful lawsuit. “I’ve seen it manifest in children through behaviors that have been challenging and inexplicable.
Kristen Totten is an education attorney with the ACLU Michigan.
Rochelle Riley, Detroit Free Press
"We have worked very closely with the teachers union and repeatedly they are telling us about the children coming into kindergarten not being able to write their names, and really struggling with letter formation. So, there are definitely some delays in preschool and kindergarten.
"We need to pay very close attention to the psychological trauma that’s causing the children of Flint to first of all feel neglected, disposable," she said. "And we’ve had a lot of children experience their parents’ illnesses that could be related to the water. Just seeing their family members, the ones that are protective and strong for them, becoming weak and impacted and not being able to come up with any solutions or help the family.”
Totten also said that many families in Flint who live below the poverty level are trapped in the water crisis. “Some of our parents have just paid off their mortgage and can’t go anywhere because they can’t sell their house for more than the cost of a Chevy.
The water crisis “was systemic injustice that was inflicted upon people because of the color of their skin and the income level that they are,” Totten said, citing civil rights reports with those findings. “Hearing that, knowing that you’re in that population is highly traumatic.”
Totten said the ACLU filed the lawsuit because of a lack of state response.
“We went to the governor and said, 'what are you going to do for the children?' ” Totten, a special education attorney, recalled of seeking help from former Gov. Rick Snyder. “And they didn’t have a plan. They were throwing leafy green vegetables, things that would help with iron and calcium … but that’s not sufficient.”
Government, activists and politicians have spent years hurling blame. But who was focused on the children?
That would be community and philanthropy leaders, Hurley Hospital, Michigan State University, foundations and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the whistleblower pediatrician who alerted the world to the lead poisoning. They have created groundbreaking programs to help.
But the ACLU has been unable to get a comprehensive plan from the school district. District officials declined to release any plan to the Free Press.
“I have never seen a plan where that was laid out clearly to us,” Totten said. “But that is something we have been asking to see. The children of Flint are being denied access … to necessary and required resources.”
Parents like Nakia Wakes are left without many options.
“They said they didn’t have nowhere else to put him,” she said. “But if you don’t have nowhere else to put him, why are you all getting money for special education students and you can’t provide the care?”
The greatest shame is that Jaylon had no severe learning disability before moving to Flint, Wakes contends. But he missed so much school that he was constantly behind in his studies.
He is in fourth grade, but performs at kindergarten and first-grade levels, she said.
Jaylon Tyson, 11, of Flint gives his mother Nakiya Wakes a high-five while sitting on the the couch of their home on Flint's north side on Wednesday, December 11, 2019.
Nakiya home schools her son, who was diagnosed with ADHD and developed a tic at age 5, after she says that officials told her they were unable to handle him and he was repeatedly suspended.
Ryan Garza, Detroit Free Press
Wakes not only had to become her son’s teacher. She became an activist. She joined other parents in a class-action lawsuit filed against the Flint school district. The successful suit forced the district to provide the help students had been denied. For instance, Wakes said she didn’t know that her son was supposed to have, but he didn’t get, an occupational therapist, until after the lawsuit decision.
Eileen Hayes, who knows Wakes and works with church congregations and grassroots groups to fight for policy change, said she has seen Wakes’ growth.
“She had so much stress on her just trying to deal with keeping him stable and calm and being treated fairly in the school system,” she said. “Sometimes, he was accused of having anger issues, and she’d have to intervene. She had to be a strong advocate for her son. He’s a little kid constantly being kicked out of school. He’s had all kinds of different issues that she’s had to deal with that did take her away from work. He’s had to go to doctor in Ann Arbor, down to the U of M. It’s not one thing. It’s a series of things that you can trace back to the water.”
The water. Its impact is palpable, horrifying — and unyielding.
“He’s doing more. I’m his learning coach, so I help him, me and my daughter,” Wakes said. His classwork is provided by the Michigan Virtual Academy. He sees an occupational therapist once a month and a social worker every week.
“He's doing a lot better,” she said.
But Jaylon reads at a first-grade level and struggles with math.
He has spent half his life learning that he was poisoned by something as basic and omnipresent as water.
“He deals with it,” she said. “He knows about the lead exposure. When I do documentaries or when I talk to the reporters, the first thing he says is, "Governor Snyder poisoned me."
“That was the main face that he seen, you know, about the lead exposure.”
And, she said, Jaylon gets mad because he has to wake very day and get the water jug to brush his teeth. And he has to get the jug to wash his face.
“And we still don't have clean water here,” Wakes said. “And we still have to pay water bills. It's ridiculous. “
And Wakes now says she’s worried about a new generation in her family.
Her daughter had a miscarriage last fall.
“Now it's just got me thinking with my daughter having a miscarriage, will she ever be able to have kids? Will I ever be able to have grandkids?"
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Footnotes
1 About this series
Former Free Press Columnist Rochelle Riley studied how trauma and toxic environments impact how children learn. She unravels this issue through the eyes of three children and their caregivers in Detroit, Romulus and Flint. And she offers some solutions to ensure that children are mentally prepared to learn. This special report was sponsored by a $75,000 Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship from Sigma Delta Chi. The award is given to "an outstanding editorial writer or columnist to help broaden his or her journalistic horizons and knowledge of the world" and can be used to cover the cost of study, research and/or travel that may result in editorials, writings or books.
