Mother, 3 Daughters Graduate On Same Day

The twins, Kamiya and Kalaya, had been born just a few weeks earlier, and Rakiya, her oldest daughter, was 9, watching from the audience as her mother accepted a Master of Public Administration from Kentucky State.

Quila Lee, 53, is an educator at Clayton County's Babb Middle School.

When Quila Lee received that degree in 2003, her three girls were part of a proud moment for her. On May 7, Kamiya, Kalaya and Rakiya will once again be there as their mother completes a degree, but this time, Quila will also get to watch her daughters earn their own diplomas.

The four members of the Lee family, who have called Austell, Ga., home since 2007, are members of Georgia State’s Class of 2025, and will be participating in commencement exercises at Georgia State’s Convocation Center on the same day.

Quila, 53, who is now a seventh-grade teacher at Clayton County’s Babb Middle School, will earn a Master of Arts in Teaching with a concentration in secondary education.

Rakiya (B.S. ’17), now 31, will be earning a Master of Public Administration — just like her mother did previously — from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. It’s Rakiya’s second degree from Georgia State, following a bachelor’s in criminal justice.

And Kamiya and Kalaya, now 22 years old, will both be earning biology degrees from GSU’s College of Arts & Sciences. Kamiya plans to pursue medical school to become a physician, while Kalaya has her sights set on veterinary medicine.

“Twenty-two years ago, you never could have told me these girls and I would be graduating together,” Quila says. “As any mother would be, I am so proud of them.”

Originally from Detroit, Quila earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from Kentucky State, an HBCU where she met her husband Erik when both were members of the track team.

While working as a police dispatcher and finishing up her M.P.A., she found out she was pregnant with the twins. She says her pregnancy almost derailed her pursuit of the degree, but with the support of the officers she worked with and her school, she was able to finish on time.

“When the twins came, everybody was excited and so happy,” Quila says. “When I had them, the officers were saying ‘These are our babies, too!’ And I made sure they were with me at my graduation.”

But after 15 years in Kentucky, the Lees pulled up stakes when Erik, a civil engineer, got a job with the City of Atlanta.

The family settled in Austell, where the Lee children attended South Cobb High and Quila began work as a social worker for the Department of Family and Children Services. Looking for more flexibility to be with her family, she left social work to be a substitute teacher.

One day, while working in a middle school, a colleague encouraged her to apply for an open position as a paraprofessional.

From working in a classroom for children with emotional and behavioral disorders to working one-on-one with an assigned student, Quila found teaching rewarding and after a few years, decided to further her career as an educator by taking the state test to become certified.

At the beginning of the 2024-25 school year, Quila was hired as a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Babb, leading her own class for the first time. It’s a career she says enables her to have a profound impact on young people at a critical point in their adolescence.

“Just seeing them grow is amazing,” Quila says. “And every job anyone has, no matter what it is, they have that job because of a teacher.’

After graduating from South Cobb High, twins Kamiya and Kalaya enrolled at Alabama State, an HBCU like their parents attended, and far enough from home they could enjoy their independence.

They had both played in the high school band, and Kamiya was a track team captain at South Cobb, following in their parents’ footsteps.

But with COVID-era restrictions still in place, it wasn’t the campus experience either of them had hoped for. As they began to think about the benefits of transferring to a college near home — in-state tuition, closer to family support — they began to consider the school their older sister had attended.

“I wanted to be at a place that would challenge my thinking and help me grow,” Kalaya says. “And going to my sister’s alma mater is really nice.”

Though she’d been away a few years, Rakiya continued to watch Georgia State grow and transform. A permit technician in the city’s Department of Watershed Management who was recently promoted to the position of project manager, she’s had a front-row seat to the ways the university has been transforming downtown.

She wholeheartedly endorsed the idea of her little sisters attending Georgia State and helped show them around on an impromptu campus tour. Rakiya had even considered returning, herself, for a master’s program not long after receiving her bachelor’s, but was intimidated by having to submit graduate entrance exam scores.

But not long after her sisters decided to transfer, Rakiya got an unexpected and fortuitous email from her old school, the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, explaining it was waiving the testing requirement.

So she applied and, with the recommendations of her old professors, Dean Dabney and Michael Shapiro, was accepted to the M.P.A. program beginning in August 2022.

“I still have the acceptance email on my phone to this day,” Rakiya says. “It was a really surreal feeling, because I knew my sisters were going to be there, and I could be there for them and on the journey with them.

“When twins came home in May 2022, we were looking at their course catalog and they said they’d be done in May 2025. It didn’t dawn on me until a year later that I’d be done in May 2025, too.”

Around the same time, Quila had been considering her options for advancing her career as an educator. She was weighing online programs, but wanted to be in a classroom, having one-on-one and group discussions with peers and professors. Her husband, Erik, noted Georgia State is right downtown. Then, Rakiya endorsed it, too.

“It was almost like a no-brainer,” Quila says. “I wouldn’t have chosen another university.”

As the Lees close out a special chapter in their lives and get ready for the next, they’ll be taking the time to enjoy the moment together. With family coming in from Detroit and elsewhere for their May 7 graduations, including Quila’s twin nephews, they have an eventful few days planned to mark the occasion.

Twins Kamiya and Kalaya will be there to cheer on their mother and older sister during the early ceremony for graduate-degree candidates, and after plenty of smiles, hugs and pictures — and some lunch — Quila, Rakiya and the rest of the family will file back into the Convocation Center to celebrate the twins as they receive their bachelor’s degrees.

But while savoring the moment, they’re still doing what they always do — looking to the future.

Finishing up her first schoolyear as a classroom teacher, Quila is now certified to teach in secondary school as well, up to high school seniors, though she has no immediate plans to move on from Babb Middle. She has, however, already approached her school’s administrators with her plans to one day apply to doctoral programs in education. She can see herself as a school administrator, in the future, and has plans to a establish a youth-focused nonprofit to be named for her mother, Sheryl. It’ll be called SHERYL’s Haven, an acronym for Sharing Hope through Empowerment and Repositioning Yourself for a Lifetime of Success.

“I know I’m going to be a lifelong learner,” Quila says. “But for now I’m going to take my foot off the gas and enjoy teaching and immerse myself in that.”

Rakiya Lee (B.S. '17) will complete her Master of Public Administration at the same time her younger sisters and their mother complete their own degrees.

Rakiya, who recently got the promotion, has a soft spot for children as well, and is weighing whether to enroll in law school in preparation to practice family law, or pursue a Ph.D. Like her mother, she doesn’t seem to have had her fill of note-taking, research, term papers and syllabi.

“I always want to keep advancing and keep my brain sharp,” Rakiya says. “If you can do something you thoroughly enjoy doing, it doesn’t seem like work.”

Her next step, she says, is to figure out her next step.

For younger sister Kamiya, that next step is starting the Georgia State School of Public Health’s Master of Public Health program in spring 2026. In the meantime, while working as a pharmacy technician, she’s planning to log some time as an assistant in a women’s clinic, with her ultimate goal of becoming an obstetrician/gynecologist.

As a volunteer at Wellstar Cobb Hospital, just down the road from her high school, Kamiya’s already gotten an insider’s view of the emergency department, neonatal intensive care unit and other areas, experience that will bode well when she later begins applying to medical school. The connections she’s made as a member of GSU student organizations like the Minority Association of Pre-Health Students and the Student Government Association will also surely pay dividends.

“It’s been nice making all of these connections,” Kamiya says. “Georgia State has endless opportunities for healthcare students.”