Preventing Preschool Suspension and Expulsion: Part 1

Dr. Katie Herron and Lynne Hall from the Early Childhood Center talk about setting up your preschool classroom for suscess with clear communication, flexibility, and family engagement. They highlight the Suspension and Expulsion Prevention Checklist created by the Indiana Office of Early Childhood and Out of School Learning. It can be found here: https://www.in.gov/fssa/carefinder/files/IN_Suspension_-Expulsion_Checklist.pdf

Transcript

Welcome to the Early Childhood On-the-Go Podcast, where the Early Childhood Center team shares ideas and strategies for professionals and families. Dream big, start Early. Hi, everyone, this is Lynne Hall with the Early Childhood Center, and I'm here with Dr. Katie Herron, our wonderful director. And last time we got together, we talked about what a big problem the use of suspension and expulsion is in preschool settings. Preschool expulsion rates are 6.7 per 1,000 enrolled prekindergartners. That's three times higher than the rate for K-to-12 students. 2017 data showed that 250 children across the US are suspended or expelled daily. Also concerning is that children are not equally likely to be suspended or expelled. Research indicates that black children, particularly black boys, are more likely to be suspended or expelled compared to their peers. Given this problem, let's think about some solutions. In Indiana, the Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning has offered an Indiana suspension & expulsion prevention checklist since 2018 for early childhood programs to use to determine whether they are trying everything they can before using suspension or expulsion. The checklist has 27 items, so today we'd like to highlight just some of those for you today. Hey Lynne, looking forward to talking about this today. I know last time we talked a little bit about some of the data and it really is sad to be honest, because these are young kids who are just on the cusp of starting their educational journey and to get a message that they aren't welcome in a school setting is really troubling. And so, I'm excited to talk about the checklist. I just want to be clear that I'm the director of the Early Childhood Center at the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community. and we didn't build the checklist. I think it's a very good set of practices that the Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning put together, but we don't speak for them. So, they have certainly shared this checklist. And I know we had a survey a few years ago that indicated that some early childhood programs in Indiana are aware of it, but that some aren't. And so, I think that any time we can sit and talk and reflect on these practices, it's valuable. So, I will say that what I noticed, and this might be counterintuitive to some folks, is that most of the items on this checklist are what I'd call “foundational items.” In other words, they're not actions to take when a serious behavioral problem is happening. So, we’re not already in trouble here. These actions and the checklist items are really more focused on the program looking at what's happening before the situation has reached that point. So, for example, the second item says, “Do you regularly communicate something positive about the child to the parent?  Do your communications help the parent understand that you care about their child?” And so, you'd think, all right, this is about suspension or expulsion, and you're asking a question about positive relationship building with families. How are those two connected? And what we find is that that foundational peace around relationship building, and in particular trust, is so critical to everything else that comes after. And in a recent study that we're conducting, in the middle of conducting actually, we found through a series of family interviews that families who've experienced preschool suspension and expulsion, one of the things they tell us is that they rarely received feedback from the program on anything except the problems. They'll hear about the problems daily from teachers, from directors, but they are not getting those strength-based positive feedback as well. And that contributed to a great deal of confusion and fear. And honestly trust was something that came up over and over again for those families. And as you were talking about these being really strong, effective practices, they’re grounded in those from the Pyramid Model for supporting social and emotional competence for infants and young children, which actually came out of the Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning (CSEFEL)  from Vanderbilt. So, they really are research evidence-based high-quality practices that we're talking about today. And just a few minutes ago, you mentioned trust and certainly positive communication seems like one strategy for building relationships and trust with the family and the child. What other methods may prevent programs from reaching the point of suspension or expulsion? Yeah, and I know you're gonna talk about this in a little bit, Lynne, in terms of what happens when we do get to the point that behavior is an issue. But I want to emphasize again that, as you mentioned, this Pyramid Model that they base these checklist items on, the biggest part of that model is the bottom, the foundation, the bottom of the pyramid, and those are practices that are good for all children, and that when we engage in them with all children, we can often prevent behaviors from getting to the point where we would even consider suspension and expulsion. So, for example, another item on the checklist asks if a consistent predictable daily schedule is taught daily to the children. And you think, okay, so again, what does this have to do with behavior? But children, especially young children, value consistency. Beyond that, a consistent schedule can make it easier for childcare professionals to identify behavior patterns. Often challenging behavior happens at times of the day and specific times of the day, or in response to triggers. So, for example, several families that we interviewed as part of the study I mentioned previously identified nap time as a difficult time of the day. So, every day they would get a note home saying their child was defiant or misbehaving during that time, or right before nap time. So, if that's happening, every single day, I would hope that our childcare professionals have been equipped with the tools to be able to work with families and problem solve how does the child take naps at home? Wouldn't that be good to know? Are there certain things that they use at home? Is there music, is there a certain special toy? What are the acceptable alternatives that the childcare center has thought through for all children because there are lots of children who won't take a nap at certain times or ever, so what are those alternatives, and how have they been planned for? So, can we make sure that all of our providers aren't taking lunch right at nap time? Can we make sure that there is a provider that's available for those kiddos who don't nap regularly? Is there a room or a space for children who struggle with nap time? So those are things that we hope that childcare professionals are trained and supported to be able to think through, rather than simply saying, “Well, Johnny got upset at nap time again. We're gonna send another note home and after five notes, he's out of here. We'll go to the next kid on the list.” Thanks, Katy, and something that kind of struck me with what you said when I go back to my time when I was teaching preschool is that part of these strategies that are on this checklist really speak to how we're promoting children to be successful in all of our activities. So, if I take your nap time, for example, so yeah, there's definitely procedures in place, but how are we supporting children to understand and follow through with what they can do at rest time? So, for example, when I would put my kiddos down for nap time, we always came together and talked about why we were having nap time. Why was that important? Why was it important for them to have rest time as we called it? And we talked about how it gives our brains a chance to rest, it gives our bodies a chance to rest. And even if you don't want to go to sleep, that's okay. But we're going to be quiet so that your friends that really need to have that rest time are able to fall asleep, and we had a certain length of time that we had asked children to lay on their cots quietly. It was about 10 minutes, so that the children that did need to fall asleep were able to do so, and then it is about incorporating some flexibility, right? So, I had other alternative activities that children that didn't need to fall asleep could do. And we can underestimate our young children. When we give them the purpose of why we're doing something, right? We're not just telling you to do this because I said so. There's a benefit to you. And here's what it's going to do. Here's how we respect our classmates, our peers, and these are some alternatives that you can do if you don't necessarily need that. It makes a huge difference. That's a great example. And honestly, you just looped us back to the checklist item, which was about teaching daily routines consistently, right? So, and I like how you expanded the routine that I gave the example of from nap time to rest time, because even that allows for that individual difference of it's not necessarily sleep. It's just we're going to be quiet, you explained the why, and the item even says that not only do we have a consistent routine, but we teach it daily to the children, and that's what you are referencing around that sharing why we're doing this, which also builds social-emotional skills, which is something we're always working on in Pre-K. Absolutely, and just to go back to your example of even the visual schedule, having a visual to incorporate when you're teaching that routine, right? So, as we're talking about nap time, rest time, every day, we have a visual that kind of shows children what we expect. So, we're going to lay on our cots for 10 minutes, you have children laying on their cots. Then we're going to be able to do the coloring the puzzles, whatever it might be, and there's a picture of that, and we have visual supports for timer so they can actually see how much longer do I have to lay on this quietly, and I can do something else? And so putting all of those pieces into place, support all kids to be successful. Absolutely. And, you know, again, it all comes down to we know that kiddos are going to come into early childhood settings at a range of levels, developmentally. We also know they're going to come in with just different strengths and different areas that are going to be hard for them and things that they're going to need to work on. And so, when we provide them with information in different ways, like you're just describing, it also allows them to feel that this is a safe place. This is a place where they can understand what is expected of them, and some of the behaviors that you may see may not happen or be more manageable just because of some of those things. And that's what we mean by that foundational part of the pyramid. Exactly. And some of the things that I talk about, it's easy to think those are extras. Those are something else when we talk about in our next podcast about what do we do for children and even more support and really being able to differentiate between what is a foundational practice and what is a target or even an intensive practice and being able to understand that we need to do what's going to support everyone as those foundational practices. Exactly. Well, and that's why, you know, to be honest, my background is around disability. And so even though we're talking about all kids here, I really think about kiddos with disability. And when we did this study where we interviewed a lot of families, most of them had a kiddo with a disability, who had been suspended or expelled from Pre-K. And so, it's really important for us to remember those differences, whether it's a disability that's diagnosed or whether it's just remembering that kids are all different. That's whatever it is. But we need to focus on where they are in development. So, they might have a developmental delay or they might just be a little bit slower in a particular area, right? That nothing is attached to it and we need to be aware of that. So, when we talk about a consistent routine, we don't want something that's part of our consistent routine to be something that isn't developmentally appropriate. So, if we have circle time for 20 minutes and we expect our kiddos to have their little butts on the ground for that 20 minutes, that's not developmentally appropriate. And so one of the items on the checklist actually asks, “Do you have a circle time that is the right length of time and that is interactive and that it is setting these kids up for success?” and additionally, it asks, if you are looking at these kiddos and what they might need developmentally?  Because as we said, we've got these variations that are very typical and we would expect to see, but sometimes we see a kiddo that is really struggling more than what we would expect. And in that case, we need to be sure we're watching out to make sure, has that kiddo screened? Have we talked with the family about what they're seeing at home and are we offering resources and maybe outside referrals if that's something that everybody agrees that kiddo needs? Because again, if we're catching these things and they're getting the extra support, we may not get to the point where we're sending home notes every day for a month and we're so frustrated that the director says, “Okay, this kiddo’s got to go.” Exactly. If we have time now just to share another kind of concrete example for you. So, using your example of circle time, right? So, there's this thought that, do we all have to be at circle time to participate in circle time and how can we make that flexible as a foundational practice? So going back again to my teaching years, we would have circle time every morning to kind of start our day, which I think is pretty common in early childhood settings. We also had breakfast just before. So, I intentionally had the tables surround the area where we did circle time, because I had children that would come in at different times and need to eat. Some children took them a lot longer to eat, but we could still start circle time. They could still listen to circle time. They could still be a part of that circle time while finishing their breakfast at a pace that was okay for them. So again, not something extra, but that is something to do, just a small example of how to accommodate everybody's needs and still do what we feel like we need to do as part of our curriculum. I love that and I think so much of that foundational part of the pyramid is just making sure that when we have struggles, that they really need to happen. Because if we can set up some of these things, have them in place, and just know that, yeah, maybe sitting at a table is kind of the same as sitting on the floor and that it maybe doesn't matter hugely. Some of that is just a mindset shift. It's not even changing your room or changing what you're doing. It's simply a mindset shift. So, excited to talk more about this and think about what happens when we do these great foundational things and we're still struggling. So, we'll talk about that next time. Thanks, Katie. Thanks for listening to the Early Childhood On-the-Go podcast from the Early Childhood Center team at Indiana University. Learn more at IIIDC.Indiana.edu/ECC/