Hotline averts preschool expulsions
Preschool children in the U.S. are more than three times as likely to be expelled from school as K-12 students, often for biting, kicking and other aggression.
Statistics are hard to pin down because the early childcare system is largely private and decentralized, but a 2005 study showed that, in Ohio, between four and seven children per 1,000 are removed from their preschools and day-care centers.
Knowing that school expulsions — even among children younger than
5 — can lead to problems
in adulthood, the state has invested in programs to solve the problems before they get that serious. Officials point to early evidence that it’s working.
The teachers and director at ABC’s Educare day-care center on the South Side were reaching the end of their rope earlier this year with a few children who were prone to uncontrollable meltdowns and biting.
“If it starts to affect the other children, you just have to do what’s best for the whole center,” said ABC’s Educare Director Tina Jenkins. “When they get in your face, when they cuss you out, when they spit in your face, that’s when you think, ‘I need help beyond myself. I’ve already tried everything.’”
She recalled receiving some literature about a service that could help: a statewide hotline run out of Nationwide Children’s Hospital to help child-care centers work out problem behaviors instead of resorting to expulsion. Within 72 hours, experts show up to help the teachers.
Jenkins made the call, and when the two
early-childhood mentalhealth consultants arrived and started offering advice, “it just felt so warm and friendly,” she said.
Their recommendations centered on how to calm the environment: Space out the furniture so that the children are less inclined to run. Post classroom rules. Set up a calming space for overwrought children who need to be apart from others to regulate their emotions.
Jenkins said the family of a particularly troubled child ended up moving away, so the teachers were unable to see the results of their work, but the advice has definitely helped.
The call from ABC’s Educare was one of 562 made to the state’s hotline under the Whole Child Matters program since it started in April 2016. Of those calls, 93 percent of the children in question have been able to stay in their child-care centers, just by offering some support and training to the teachers, said Kristopher West, the head of Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Early Childhood Mental Health Program, which fields the calls.
The state has budgeted about $5 million a year for the hotline and to beef up professional development
for teachers.
The preschool system is mostly private and commercial, with 8,000 licensed providers in the state. Preschools in public-school districts are governed by the Ohio Department of Education, and expulsions are less likely to happen there. Private day cares and home providers are licensed and inspected by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Job and Family Services does not collect data from the centers and home providers about how many children they expel.
But when the expulsion problem first came to the state’s attention about 12 years ago, Ohio verified that the numbers were correct, said Valerie Alloy, the director of the Whole Child program for the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.
Being asked to leave school in the early years often leads to negative feelings about school and to lower grades and reading scores, West said. Early expulsion is a predictor of later suspensions and expulsion.
Some of the funding went to hire more than 65 new mental-health experts to make sure that
all 88 counties had someone nearby to respond to calls.
That sounds like a lot, Alloy said, but “they can only stay for a hot minute, and then they have to move on.”
Still, West said not everyone seems to be taking advantage of the service. The 562 calls came from 59 of Ohio’s 88 counties, the most typically coming from urban areas.
“As with everything, it takes awhile to ramp up,” West said. “We would love to have double or triple the calls. We don’t feel like we’re being utilized as well as we should be.”
Training for early childhood teachers is a huge piece of this movement, Alloy said. The state hired eight master trainers, and they have zeroed in on topics that make a difference, for example, managing challenging behaviors and learning to communicate with parents who come from different cultures.
Teaching teachers how to care for children who have been traumatized is important, Alloy said. Often, what a child experiences at home — poverty, addiction, crime and job stress among the parents — follows the student to the classroom.
“We’re seeing those poor little brains and bodies not being able to cope,” she said.
In 2005, Walter Gilliam, a psychologist at Yale Medical School, first measured how many preschool children were being removed for behavior and who they are. The rate nationwide was about 6.7 children per 1,000, compared with 2.1 children per 1,000 expelled in grades K-12. Gilliam found that black children are two to 3½ times more likely to be expelled than children of other races, and boys are 4½ times more likely than girls.
Teacher stress correlated with the most expulsions.
Jenkins of ABC’s Educare confirmed that. She’s seen young children pick up chairs and throw them across the room, a dangerous situation for kids and teachers alike. “You think to yourself, do I really need to deal with this? It’s hard enough with babies that are cranky.”
Gilliam found through a controlled study in Connecticut that having mental-health consultants to support preschool teachers when they call for help, exactly what Ohio has set up, led to a significant decline in expulsions.