In the wake of 8-year-old’s death, officials and experts ask: Where were Hayward schools?

HAYWARD — Fifteen months before her tragic death, Sophia Mason stopped showing up to her first-grade classes in Hayward — but school personnel apparently did not follow their own policies designed to protect student welfare.

Now, as Sophia’s mother faces charges of murdering her eight-year-old daughter after more than a year of reported neglect and abuse, officials, experts and family members say the girl’s educators should be added to the list of those who were responsible but failed to protect her.

Sophia began missing her virtual classes in January 2021, after she was removed from the care of relatives by her mother, Samantha Johnson, who had a history of mental illness and a criminal record for prostitution. A Bay Area News Group investigation published in June revealed that seven separate abuse complaints were made to Alameda County’s Department of Children and Family Services beginning around that time, but county workers repeatedly determined she was safe, often without bothering to make an in-person evaluation.

Email correspondence shows that Sophia’s aunt also sought to alert the Hayward Unified School District to the girl’s uncertain situation after her absences stretched to more than four weeks, saying that she feared Sophia was in danger. But school officials – who won’t comment specifically – seem not to have followed their own protocol for cases of chronic absence, which could have led to welfare checks and reports to social workers or law enforcement.

Whether the school’s intervention would have saved Sophia is impossible to say. The crime of truancy – illegal absence from school – is usually a low-priority offense, and it may never have been more so than during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic when many students lost their connection to the education system.

But experts say that educators play a key role in protecting child welfare – and that absence from classes can be the first sign that something is terribly amiss at home.

“We know if a student is experiencing attendance issues in those early years, something is wrong,” said Terri Martinez-McGraw, CEO of the National Center for School Engagement. “The more time that lapses, the more alarm bells should go off and more concern we should have.”

Hayward Unified would not disclose whether Sophia, an enthusiastic student when she began her education while living with her grandmother, ever returned to school after her extended absences from the district’s Faith Ringgold School of Arts & Science, although her relatives believe she did not. Sophia’s aunt, Emerald Johnson, knows only the details of Sophia’s 18 days of recorded absences in early 2021 because of her frequent interactions with school officials at the time.

Family members lost track of Sophia and her mother for months at a time afterward. Hayward Unified officials said Sophia was unenrolled in the spring of 2021 when a school in Fullerton requested her records.

After returning to the Bay Area that summer, Sophia briefly attended Jefferson Elementary in San Leandro, according to the San Leandro Unified School District. Sophia does not appear to have been enrolled in school after the end of October 2021, when she moved to Merced, where months later, she was found dead in a house rented by her mother’s boyfriend, Dhante Jackson.

Hayward Unified spokesperson Michael Bazeley declined to answer a list of questions regarding how district employees responded to Sophia’s prolonged unexcused absences, citing privacy restrictions. But, generally, Bazeley said, “every district in the state and country faced unique challenges with monitoring and logging attendance during COVID when students were working from home.”

Emails reviewed by this news organization show that Emerald Johnson tried desperately to enlist the help of the Hayward Unified School District in early 2021 after Samantha Johnson, an inconsistent presence in Sophia’s early life, suddenly reasserted custody.

Emerald said she met with Faith Ringgold principal Gabriel Morales in late January and informed him of her concerns about Sophia. Emails show she then repeatedly tried to get answers from district administrators about what action they could take to protect the girl.

In a Feb. 2 email – nearly two weeks after Sophia stopped showing up for virtual learning classes – Emerald informed administrators in an email that Sophia’s case had been reported to the county Department of Children and Family Services, known as DCFS. In that email, Emerald told the school’s family engagement specialist that Sophia’s mother, Samantha Johnson, was developmentally disabled, homeless and “into a dangerous lifestyle that is not safe for herself, let alone Sophia.”

“We are worried sick about Sophia and really need all the help we can get to get her back in her safe home/environment and back in school,” Emerald wrote in the email, imploring the school administrator to contact DCFS.

In the weeks that followed, Emerald emailed and called the district’s child welfare and attendance specialist, begging the district to mark Sophia as truant and refer the matter to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.

“I thought that it would be another angle to try. I thought it would help me to get her back,” Emerald said in a recent interview. “At first, they said they’d do everything they could to help, but they didn’t.”

It is unclear whether the school district ever communicated directly with the child welfare agency regarding Sophia, given DCFS’ sparse disclosures in the case. Unlike school districts, child welfare agencies are required to release detailed records following suspected abuse deaths, but Alameda County DCFS has refused to do so. However, guidelines from the state list chronic absences and lateness among the warning signs of abuse that school employees should identify and report to social workers.

And records and interviews with Sophia’s family members appear to indicate that the district did not follow its own requirements when it came to marking Sophia as truant and working to locate her.

Under Hayward Unified policies, truancy letters are supposed to be sent out when a student accumulates three or more unexcused absences. Students who are repeatedly deemed truant may be subject to referral to the School Attendance Review Board for intervention from school leaders and counselors and potentially referred to the District Attorney’s office for possible court action against the student’s parents or legal guardians.

Bazeley of Hayward Unified would not say specifically what was done in Sophia’s case, nor would he address whether the district continued to follow its protocol around truancy during the 2020-21 school year when Hayward schools were still limited to virtual classes.

School officials, he said, “continued to utilize an attendance policy that included reaching out to student families and having conversations with them in the same way that we would in any other context.”

But according to Emerald Johnson, a truancy letter was never received at her apartment or Sophia’s grandmother’s house — the only addresses that were listed on the girl’s school paperwork — and no contacts were ever arranged by school officials. Rather, it was Emerald who repeatedly sought help from the district.