At school, Taniya Shockley was the smart kid, the one everybody wanted to work with, the girl teachers wanted to take home.
At home, no one wanted her.
The oldest of six children, Taniya was born in Decatur to a mother unable to take care of her. She lived with a series of people — a grandmother, family friends, an aunt — until she ended up in foster care in New Jersey where by her own account she was beaten, punched and berated.
Even your own mother doesn’t want you, her foster mother told her, she said.
After a family member molested her, she moved in with another relative and then another, eventually ending up back in Atlanta as a teenager, living in a house rented by a woman she barely knew with no food, no electricity and no way to get to school, she said.
Then a neighbor’s daughter introduced her to pastor Gary Burke.
Today, when she graduates in the top 10 percent at Atlanta's Carver High School for Health Sciences and Research with a full ride to the University of West Georgia, Gary Burke and his wife Felisia — the couple Taniya now calls mom and dad — will be cheering her on.
“This is the first actual family where I’ve never had to think well, what am I going to do now” after they kick me out, she said.
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