A Thursday presentation of data on disparities in preschool suspension and expulsion spurred Minnesota experts to think about the future of accessible mental health and support services for preschool children.
The studies, which analyzed data from the 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health, indicate that Minnesota was ranked 11th in the nation for preschool suspension and expulsion, said Tim Zeng, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the director of research at the Institute for Early Education Leadership & Innovation. Currently, Minnesota law does not allow for the suspension of preschoolers in publicly funded programs.
Expulsion is possible for Minnesota’s younger learners, but with caveats, according to the Department of Education. In Minnesota, expulsion for students from preschool to the third grade is only acceptable as a last resort after nonexclusionary discipline – such as speaking with parents and putting in place supports for the child to participate in class – has been used and there is an “ongoing, serious safety threat to the child or others.”
These rules, however, do not apply to non-public settings, something that Cisa Keller, president and CEO of Think Small, an organization providing access to resources for early childhood care, pointed out during the panel discussion following Zeng’s presentation of his studies at the University of St. Thomas.
“Here in Minnesota, over 80% of our children (from) birth to five, are in some sort of early- childhood setting,” explained Keller. “Of those, 73% of them are in community-based settings. This legislation does not apply to those settings.”
In response, Minnesota should support the mental health of young children, according to panelist Jane Perry, MSW, LICSW, chief clinical officer at St. David’s Center for Child and Family Development, which hosted Thursday’s event. Perry said the Legislature could expand K-12 mental health funding to preschoolers, noting that early intervention through access to mental health services would allow kids to “do better by the time they get to kindergarten.”
Expanding mental health support for younger children is in keeping with takeaways from Zeng’s research.
“My studies showcase that children with disabilities and children with trauma(tic) experiences, especially children (with) parents (experiencing) domestic violence and parents who have mental illnesses, are more likely to be suspended,” Zeng said. Zeng added that while suspension requires documentation, informal removals also occur, which have the same effect of removing a child from preschool, but without documentation. As a result, the data he analyzed from 2016 may be an undercount of the actual number of children who are asked to leave schools.
Zeng’s analysis found that children facing any of seven identified adverse childhood experiences – events that may cause childhood trauma – were more likely to experience expulsion or suspension. Additionally, around 5.4% of students with disabilities had experienced either suspension or expulsion from preschool, compared to an estimated 1.5% of their peers without disabilities. When that was broken down by individual disability, children with ADHD or ADD were the most likely to be expelled or suspended.
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Racial and ethnic disparities were also present in Zeng’s analysis and in prior literature. Within Zeng’s analysis, he found that Hispanic children were 3.3 times more likely to be suspended than their peers. During his presentation, Zeng also mentioned findings from the Office for Civil Rights’ 2013-2014 Civil Rights Data Collection, which indicated that Black children, who represented 18% of public preschool students at the time, made up a full 48% of one or more suspensions. As of 2020’s Civil Rights Data Collection, Black children made up 17.3% of public preschool students but constituted 30.6% of suspensions and 24.6% of expulsions.
For Zeng, finding that children with ADHD or ADD were more likely to be expelled or suspended was personal. Though Joshua, Zeng’s 7-year-old son, was born in the U.S., he spent the first five years of his life in China before moving back. After Joshua started school in the U.S., Zeng would receive emails and calls from teachers detailing how Joshua was acting out – from stepping on and kicking other children to forming his fingers in the shape of a gun directed at his teacher.
In a lot of cases, said Zeng, Joshua, who has ADHD, “was on the edge of suspension or relocat(ing) to another school.” When Zeng asked Joshua why he did certain things, Joshua let his father know that he had seen a classmate do something similar once before, or was reacting to bullying.
To understand challenging behavior from Joshua – as with other children with disabilities or who have experienced traumatic situations – it’s important to look past surface-level “bad behavior” and to evaluate the conditions that may be causing children to act or react in certain ways.
To address these behaviors, panelists noted the importance of cross-sector collaboration. Dr. Gigi Chawla, chief of pediatrics at Children’s Minnesota, said medical providers who serve young children want to be “a cross-sector resource in this work.”
Panelist Cindy Hillyer, MPA, director of early childhood education at Minneapolis Public Schools, noted that in 2012, a state report found that it took 20 months for native-born, English speaking children with a disability in Minnesota to get access to services, while for non-native-born children speaking a language other than English took nearly five years to get access to services.
“From a healthcare perspective, we wish we would be involved sooner (with concerns about the behavior of young children),” Chawla said, adding that what appears to be “bad behavior” may come out of various pressures on the child’s health – not just mentally or emotionally, but physically.
“From a medical standpoint, I also want to make sure that people are thinking ‘What are the other medical reasons why a child would be reactive in this way?’ Everything from vision abnormalities, hearing abnormalities, significant dental decay to the point where they’re in pain every single day, sleep disturbance, iron deficiency, just flat-out hunger – there are reasons to think about why behaviors exist, and if we could all connect the dots a little bit sooner, maybe we could tackle (behavior) before you get a whole laundry list (of complaints about behavior).”
Deanna Pistono
Deanna Pistono is MinnPost’s Race & Health Equity fellow. Follow her on Twitter @deannapistono or email her at dpistono@minnpost.com.
