Before Kimberly Dukes was an Atlanta Public Schools mother, she was a student in the system. She remembers how her mother couldn’t always be present during her educational journey.
“I had a single mother who worked,” Dukes said. “My mom didn’t understand advocacy. She put me from school to school to basically do what was convenient for her, not understanding that every school wasn’t set up to make sure every child had a successful outlook on life.”
Still, Dukes’ mother taught her the importance of Black parents advocating for their kids when it mattered most — at a parent-teacher conference. Her mother noticed that Dukes was being grouped with children the school had deemed “unteachable” after receiving insight from her teacher, Dukes said.
“My mama came and noticed the breakdown of the kids,” Dukes said. “I was grouped with the kids that they thought could not learn or didn’t want to learn.”
After that conversation, Dukes said, she was removed from that group and funneled into another cohort of students. The transition, she said, changed her education environment and outlook that she has today.
Dukes, now a mother of 10 children who all either attend or graduated from APS, teaches other parents the power of advocacy through the nonprofit organization she founded, Atlanta Thrive. She’s trying to help them have a voice in decisions that shape their children’s journeys at APS — by focusing their attention on the folks who run APS.
Dukes and other education equity advocates across the city are mobilizing Atlanta’s Black communities for the 2023 school board election. Polls opened for early voting on Oct. 16 and Election Day is Nov. 7. Advocates are using a variety of methods that include canvassing, community outreach through programmatic work, and reaching voters on social media — all as a means of boosting how residents engage with board elections this year.
In a district where…
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