I’m not sure why people are surprised that expulsions from preschool are much higher than that of K-12 schools. I suppose it is because people think that the behaviors of the little tots can’t be worse than what a teenager can throw at you. That much is true. But public schools, where most kids attend K-12, schools’ hands are tied with kids that are unruly.
A friend of my wife has a very young kid who was one-year old when he was kicked out of daycare because he was biting the other kids. My wife’s friend was given a couple of weeks to begin looking for a new daycare before the kid was left without one; if in the meantime he stopped, then he would be welcome to stay. Unfortunately, the kid didn’t stop, despite his parents best efforts.
Yesterday at my high school, (on the day of a full moon, of course) there was a great big fight first thing in the morning in the cafeteria. The nurse, had to run down to the office to help out some injured kids, so I was asked to stay in the nurses office, so I had kids coming and going for awhile while my student teacher taught a lesson. From what I learned from the kids in the fight there are two families that aren’t getting along. One family boarded a school bus posing as a relative of another student to get by the bus driver and then threatened a kid on the bus. The next day the kids who did the threatening where the ones who got beat up – pretty bad – while eating breakfast.
One girl who had her leg banged up pretty bad, but not bad enough to end up with the nurse, and not involved enough to end up in handcuffs was in the nurses office with me. She is scared out of her wits, and was really upset that the school didn’t do enough to protect her, although she admits she never told anyone about the threats. She may transfer to another school.
Some of the students involved were sent home, some for more than a couple of days. But not one of them is expelled.
Our schools have “Report Cards” and part of the report card is a score that involves about 40 indicators of success. One of them is the number of suspensions and expulsions. But in order to get a high score in that category, you want very little of them. So it is in the best interest of the school not to kick students out as far as this report card is concerned.
The NAACP was asked to come in by one of the parents, and they will fight the temporary suspensions as well, because we would be denying students their right to an education
So I was not surprised to find that expulsion rates at daycares and preschools were higher than K-12 schools. We should have higher expulsion rates, but we can’t. Preschools have the luxury of telling kids “no, or else”, whereas our public K-12 schools do not.
The survey also notes that
Expulsion rates also varied by classroom setting: the lowest in classrooms located in public schools and in Head Start programs, and the highest in faith-affiliated centers and for-profit child care.
I hope people aren’t surprised with this. I’d say this is one area where the public schools should match their private counterparts, but I don’t think that it will ever happen.
For what it is worth, the girl I wrote about in the last paragraph here was kicked out of a private school and came to our school (could we say “no”?). It was her first day at our school where she stole a teacher’s credit card and ordered clothes. She was not expelled; never served a suspension; we don’t have after school detentions so that didn’t happen either. But, she did stop showing up, so maybe that is good. However, it will look bad for our graduation rate since she was enrolled for a day and won’t graduate; but that is a story for another day.