Alec McGillis reports for ProPublica.

He covers politics and government.

But over the last few months, he's been thinking a lot about education,

who's getting an education right now, and who isn't.

In his off hours, Alec Tudor's kids in his hometown of Baltimore. He started thinking about all this

when one of his students, a kid will call Shamar, went into lockdown the way most of us did last spring.

Shamar is 12 years old, and his lockdown was especially chaotic. Shamar's mom struggles with addiction, and he was moving from one

house to another, staying with whatever relative could take him in. The one stable thing in

Shamar's life, Alex says, had been school. The story that I tell in the piece, which just really

kind of stuck with me was this time where I went to pick him up from school.

And instead of running around the playground, you know, jumping on the jungle gym like he usually did, he came walking up the sidewalk toward me and looked really, really sad.

And he thrusts this paper at me.

And I assumed it was some kind of letter from school saying

that he had misbehaved or that his grades had plummeted.

And instead, it was this form letter that went out to the whole class,

just saying that their very young social studies teacher had quit for unspecified reasons,

just about halfway into the school year. And I read this and I look up at

him and he actually had, this is, this is not, you know, Hollywood, he actually had a single tear

streaking down his cheek. Why was this so emotional for him? Well, because she, she had been his,

as he said to me in that moment, he said she was my favorite teacher.

She was this nice young woman who he would often stay after class to help kind of straighten up a room with her and just was kind of her little buddy.

And they had just somehow hit it off.

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