behavior – ��

A Place Where Kids With the Toughest Behaviors Are Welcome and Can Heal

Andy Steiner — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 17:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Ann’s three young boys had been through a lot already. Her marriage to their father was marked by violence, and a divorce was followed by multiple violations of a protective order, she said. While their father sat in prison in North Dakota, she moved the family to the Twin Cities.

But while the move gave them distance, it didn’t solve their problems, said Ann, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her children’s privacy. Her sons, especially the two youngest, suffered mental health issues including , and anxiety. Her middle son was diagnosed with , characterized by angry and sometimes violent outbursts.

“I had 13 police calls within a nine-month period to my house,” Ann said. When a police officer handed her a domestic violence information card, she knew things had to change.

Ann’s middle son had been enrolled in public school in a suburb of St. Paul, but after being removed from his mainstream classroom due to his behaviors, he wasn’t receiving the support he needed academically or emotionally.

A social worker told her about , located in Minneapolis Public Schools’ Wilder Complex and offering intensive supports to children in grades K-8 struggling with mental illness. Despite her nerves, Ann scheduled a visit. In one of her first interactions, an intake person said, “‘Because you’re here looking for help, you’re more advanced than most adults,’” Ann recalled. “I knew at that moment we were in the right place.”

A trauma-informed approach for kids

Jessica Dreischmeier, Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment Program director, said that her program is a good match for children like Ann’s sons. Staff not only understand the impact that early childhood trauma can have on mental health, but the program’s approach helps them make progress with kids deemed unfixable by other schools.

“I would say a majority of the youth that come here for treatment have experienced some type of trauma,” Dreischmeier said. “We know that those symptoms can manifest themselves in a number of ways, including depression, aggression, anxiety, ADHD — and we have deep experience working with those kinds of kids.”

With the right approach, she said, most kids can recover from mental illness.

“One day might be hard, but over time we get there with pretty much everybody — which is awesome.”

A long and loyal legacy

Catholic Charities Children’s Day Treatment was founded in 1968 as an extension of , founded in 1869 as a residential shelter for orphans. The day treatment program was created to provide an alternative option for children at St. Joseph’s who needed extra mental health support.

St. Joseph’s Home closed in 2020, but the day treatment program continued. Enrollment is capped at 40 students who work with 17 full-time staff members. Students come from around the metro area but enroll in through a partnership with the district. Mental health services are billed through health insurance.

Many staff members have worked at the center for decades. Karen Johnson, a mental health practitioner who has been employed by the program for 24 years, said she feels a deep connection to the children in her care.

“I should have retired five years ago,” Johnson said. “Each time I have that thought, another kid comes through the door, and I’m like, ‘Now I have to stay until they finish the program.’ Then another kid comes.”

A focus on parent connection and long-term success for kids

According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, there are . Still, Dreischmeier said that Catholic Charities’ program remains in high demand.

“The need for mental health services for youth and children in Minnesota has been going up for a while,” she said, “but especially after Covid, it’s particularly evident.”

A typical day for students includes two three-hour blocks – one for academics and the other for mental health therapy and treatment.

Mental health support is delivered in individual and group settings with a focus on parent and guardian involvement, Dreischmeier said. Families are taught how to build strong connections with their child and to reinforce strategies they’re practicing at school.

The kids work on setting goals for their life beyond the program. While students’ individual goals look different, the overall aim is a return to home life and a less restrictive school setting. “We’re hoping our intervention helps kids stay in their home and with their family and not have an out-of-home placement,” Dreischmeier said.

‘We’re not going to leave anybody behind.’

For parents like Ann, the transition to day treatment often comes amid deep distrust of past educational settings. Families arrive feeling guarded, Dreischmeier said. They wonder: “‘Are you going to perceive my child as a problem?’ ‘Will you only see them for the behaviors they are having when they are having a hard time, or will you see my whole child?’”

The kids often wonder the same thing, Johnson said. “A lot of these kids come here with no hope. They think, ‘People say I’m bad so I’m never going to be nothing.’ I try to change that narrative.”

Dreischmeier said that her staff remains undaunted even by the students’ most challenging behaviors.

“If something is hard, we’re going to all come together and work on it and talk about it,” she said. We’re going to move forward all together. We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”

Academically, the aim is not just to keep students on track, but to move them ahead. In traditional school settings with larger class sizes and fewer supports, children with serious mental health issues are often separated from their peers and fall behind.

Dreischmeier said things are run differently at Children’s Day Treatment, where the ratio of adults to students is much higher – often three adults to every six or seven students. “Students are really able to focus in and learn,” she said.

On average, students participate in the program for a year to a year and a half, Dreischmeier said. Most then move back to their local community school. Some are recommended for further services, including residential and outpatient mental health programs.

Surprised by hope

After two years at Children’s Day Treatment, Ann’s middle son graduated last year. Though he struggled in the beginning, she said, he eventually settled in and found success.

“His graduation was the most incredible thing,” Ann recalled. “Staff said he’d emerged as a leader. We did not know that about my son. To hear his peers get up and give their testimonies about him – there was not a dry eye in the room.”

Today, he’s enrolled at a school in her home district – something she never thought possible – where he continues to receive special education support. Ann’s youngest son enrolled at Children’s Day Treatment in the fall. She’s optimistic: “I’m just grateful for people like them who want to help children like mine.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Why is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?

Amanda Geduld — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 10:30:00 +0000

Before Thomas Guskey became a leading academic expert on grading and assessments, he was a middle school math teacher.

One day he was chatting with an 8th-grade student, who he described as a “superstar,” and asked if she had studied for that day’s exam. He was shocked to hear she hadn’t.

“Well Mr. Guskey,” he remembers her saying, a quizzical look on her face, “I worked it out. I only need a 50.2 to get an A [in the class]. I don’t need to study for a 50.2.”

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This was a moment of realization for him. “This 8th grader had worked it out to the tenth decimal place what she needed to do to get an A in my class,” he said. “And she was surprised I didn’t get it. And I thought, ‘Wow. What have I done?’”

For this student — and so many others — school was not about learning. It was about getting a good grade. And with flawed traditional grading systems, those two outcomes didn’t always coincide.

Thomas Guskey, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky College of Education (The School Superintendents Association)

Every time Guskey tells this story to other teachers, he said they shake their heads and share similar anecdotes of their own. Other experts in the field echo these sentiments, noting that schools have spent far too long grading students based on whether or not they turned in a pile of work or showed up to class on time, rather than focusing on if a student has learned academic content. This can ultimately lead to final grades that inaccurately reflect and communicate what kids actually know.

Today, as schools combat post-pandemic learning gaps, it’s become even clearer that traditional grades are not precise communicators of learning. In some cases, this leads parents to believe their kids are performing at grade level, when in reality they’re falling behind.

As educators push for more clarity and transparency, a number of schools and districts are turning to what’s known as standards-based grading, a system and communication tool that separates academic mastery from behavioral factors. When done correctly, it should more accurately reflect what students know and correct for both inflating — and deflating — grades.

But a misunderstanding of standards-based grading’s true principles, a lack of proper training for educators and a rush to quickly adopt a complex new system often leads to messy implementation, various experts told ��. And, they warn, districts looking for support are turning to grading consultants, a number of whom aren’t qualified in the field.

Laura Link, associate professor of teaching and leadership at the University of North Dakota (University of North Dakota)

“So many districts are getting into this and they’re failing miserably,” said Guskey, the grading and assessment expert and professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky College of Education. “Schools are jumping into this without a clear notion of what they’re doing and what the prerequisites are to being standards based,” he continued. “And then when problems arise, they have no recourse except to abandon [it] completely.”

As schools look for an effective fix to learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire and does backfire very easily,” said Laura Link, associate professor of teaching and leadership at the University of North Dakota.

In a she and Guskey wrote, “although many schools today are initiating SBG reforms, there’s little consensus on what ‘standards-based grading’ actually means. As a result, SBG implementation is widely inconsistent.” This creates uncertainty, confusion, frustration — and resistance, which can ultimately lead to it being tossed aside, the authors said.

The many meanings of a “C”

Standards-based grading is not new. While it’s challenging to pin down just how many schools are currently using it, post-pandemic interest in a system that’s seen as more accurate and equitable appears to be growing.

Link is now working with the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania school district on implementation. It can also be found in at least one school district in the San Francisco Bay Area and is particularly prevalent in schools in Wyoming, New Hampshire, Maine and Wisconsin, with more cropping up in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Oregon, in November.

Another expert, Cathy Vatterott, who wrote Rethinking Grading: Meaningful Assessment for Standards-Based Learning and is professor emeritus of education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, said: “After we got through COVID, all of a sudden I started getting offers to come and speak to people about standards-based grading.”

Regardless of what model teachers practice, they typically grade using three different criteria: what academic skills students have learned and are able to do, such as solving for “x” in an algebraic equation; what behaviors they bring that enable learning, such as attendance and turning in work on time; and how much they’ve grown and improved.

In traditional models, teachers combine these three, muddling them together and assigning a single mark for an assignment — often a letter grade or a percentage. At the end of a semester, these assignment scores get averaged into a final grade that goes onto a transcript or report card. Proponents of standards-based grading argue that this presents an unclear and inaccurate picture to parents, students and colleges.

“It makes the grade impossible to interpret,” according to Guskey. For example, a “C” on a paper could mean the student really only understood the material at a “C” level or it could mean they turned in an excellent paper but two weeks late. Further adding to the confusion: what goes into a grade is inconsistent from teacher to teacher and school to school.

Traditional grading not only presents accuracy concerns but also equity ones, according to Matt Townsley, assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Northern Iowa. “For example, if we award points for assignments that are completed on a daily basis — called homework — outside of class, you can imagine a scenario where some families are more privileged in their ability to do it,” he said.

Some students have access to a quiet place to work, tutors, parents who can help them with assignments, and other key resources, while others work after-school jobs or take care of younger siblings. When teachers grade homework, experts like Townsley argue, they are grading for these factors, rather than what students have actually learned.

To combat this, standards-based grading does it differently. Rather than lumping together academic, behavioral and improvement grades, it separates them and reports them out individually in what Link calls a “dashboard of information.”

Too often, she said, consultants and other self-proclaimed experts, who are not researchers, will push to throw away behavioral grades altogether. But she warned “that becomes problematic very, very quickly. We shouldn’t be using our gradebooks to punish and control. But those factors — those behavioral factors — are academic enablers, and we know that to be true as well.”

An illustration of the Multiple Grades Report Card that associate professor Laura Link is putting in place with Bethlehem Area School District leaders. (Laura Link, all figure rights reserved)

Reporting it out separately makes students recognize that these other components still count and, in some ways, it makes them each count more because they can no longer be disguised by other factors, like extra credit, according to Guskey.

It’s important for schools to decide upfront what behaviors they want to prioritize — whether that’s attendance, work ethic, responsibility— and then build a guide on how teachers will score for them. “By giving these kinds of dashboards of information, it helps colleges, trade schools, etc. have a deeper understanding of what kind of students they’re accepting into the programs and what kind of support they will need in college,” Link said.

The academic grades should be based on grade-level standards and learning objectives, like the ability to find strong evidence to support a claim if a student is writing a paper or answering a test question.

A second key criteria is moving away from handing out percentage grades based on 100 to using a much smaller measurement scale, like 0 to 4. On each standard, students could also be graded as “exceeding,”, “meeting,” “almost” or “not yet.” Guskey noted that while this all may sound novel and unusual, other countries around the world, including Canada, have been using these practices for decades.

A third component — providing students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and mastery of a standard — is often where the greatest controversy crops up and things are most likely to go awry. Some educators argue that students should receive limitless opportunities to redo specific assignments. Researchers such as Link, though, argue that while students need multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understanding, that does not necessarily mean redoing the same assignment.

“This is where a lot of non-academic proponents encourage that standards-based grading means you give as many retakes as it takes for mastery. Not true. Not true. That’s an assessment issue. That’s not a grading issue.”

So, while a second chance at one assignment is perhaps the fair thing to do, it is not inherent to the ethos of standards-based grading. She emphasized that if schools do implement retake policies, the process needs to be purposeful: If a student doesn’t get it the first time, they need to get corrective feedback and instruction. But “if they don’t get it on the second chance, you’re going to record their grade and move on,” she said.

There is no empirical evidence supporting the benefits of endless retakes and, she added, such practices can be a time-consuming and unrealistic ask of teachers.

Because many of the people who write about and consult on testing don’t fully understand what’s behind assessing students more than once, Guskey said, their recommendations on how best to do it are often untested and can’t be supported in practice. Their inconsistent advice, he said, can lead teachers and administrators to forsake efforts to reform grading.

While it’s important to understand what standards-based grading is, it’s also essential to debunk what it’s not. At its core, experts say, it’s purely a communication tool. It doesn’t tell educators how to create assessments, build curriculum or manage behavior. It can make space for teachers to provide more individualized feedback and for students to move through the skills and knowledge they need to master at their own pace. But these things aren’t inherently a part of it.

“Basically everything is just to pass.”

When Kenny Rodrequez became superintendent of the Grandview school district a decade ago, he knew the grading system needed to change. He was concerned that as it stood, the traditional grading model they relied on wasn’t communicating students’ progress to their parents accurately. Leaders in the district, located just outside of Kansas City, ultimately decided to shift to standards-based grading for kindergarten through 6th grade.

Now, in his eighth year as superintendent and ninth year overseeing the transition, he feels good about what they’ve accomplished. One key factor of the successful implementation, he said, was “not trying to do it all at once.” It can be tempting to “just say, ‘Let’s bite the bullet and let’s just roll it all out at the same time,’” he added. It was important, though, to fight this urge and instead find a balance that allowed for deliberate policy shifts that still didn’t take an inordinate amount of time to implement.

Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez has overseen Grandview School District’s shift to standards-based grading over the past nine years. (Sheba Clarke, Grandview School District Public Relations Department)

Another key factor: making sure there was strong teacher and parent buy-in. The first year in particular, staff was nervous to explain this new system to parents before they even fully understood it themselves. Rodrequez said they created talking points for teachers and gave them the resources they needed.

In the future, the district plans to bring standards-based grading to 7th-12th grade classrooms, but he anticipates at the high school level this will be trickier. “Our challenge … is nationally we still have a system that’s still pretty based upon our letter grades. And that system’s been around for so long and never was designed to do what we’re trying to get it to do right now.” Demands for GPAs and class rankings, in particular, are incongruous with the standards-based model but often necessary for college applications.

These very challenges have played out in one New York City high school, according to parent Talia Matz. When her stepson started 9th grade at Future High School in Manhattan, the school had orientation sessions to explain to parents how their standards-based grading system works. Still, she and her husband were skeptical. And over the past three years, they’ve only become more concerned, she told ��.

Some of the major assignments that the school uses instead of statewide Regents exams “are a bit of a joke,” she said, and students are not held accountable. “Basically everything is just to pass. It doesn’t matter how well you do,” she said, adding, “it doesn’t seem like there’s any love of learning. It’s just kind of to get it done.”

Contrary to best practices, on his report card there are no separated out comments or grades about behaviors. All standards are scored on a 0-4 scale, and parents and students can see grades on an online platform called JumpRope. But, the school then converts this scale into a traditional percentage grade, which is ultimately sent to colleges — another big no-no, according to experts. (According to the , schools may choose from a number of grading scales, including A-F, but it appears that regardless of what they select, all grades are ultimately converted into percentages.)

An example of a School of the Future High School transcript. Grades are not separated out by standards and have been converted into percentages, two practices standards-based grading experts warn against. Parents are encouraged to look online for access to a breakdown of grades. (Talia Matz)

Students have a number of opportunities to redo assignments and no clear consequences for late work, Matz said. Rather than getting grades on daily assignments, he gets a “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score, which his stepmom said never appears on a transcript. This, she said, provides no incentive to turn assignments in on time or get them right the first time.

School administrators did not respond to requests for comment. The school’s website contests this point: Their official policy states that the “Work Habits/Independent Practice” score becomes 10% of a student’s final grade. Never reporting the behavior grade or averaging it into a single final grade would both go against standards-based grading best practices.

Matz fears all this lends itself to lowered standards, which will leave her son unprepared for college. In the fall, he’ll enroll at SUNY Buffalo, “but we’re concerned because there’s going to be different expectations … You have to study on your own, you don’t necessarily get second or third chances.”

New Data: Post-COVID, School Leaders Frustrated in Efforts to Curb Misbehavior

Kevin Mahnken — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 05:01:00 +0000

U.S. school leaders feel increasingly hampered in their ability to curb student misbehavior, according to federal data made public Thursday. Inadequate training in classroom management, pushback from parents, and fear of student retaliation were all cited as greater obstacles than they were before the pandemic.

The revelations came from the latest release of the , an ongoing data collection effort led by the National Center for Education Statistics. And while the results don’t include data on the number or rate of behavioral problems observed by school staff, they illustrate the methods that educators are embracing to address those problems and their sense of their own effectiveness.

Especially during a period when many teachers say they are dealing with more violence and disorder among their pupils than in the pre-COVID era — of a Virginia teacher by her six-year-old student stands out as the latest and most extreme example — the findings will likely influence discussions on school discipline at local, state, and federal levels.

Thurston Domina, a professor of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina, said that he believed that behavioral struggles have “become more acute in the last few years” both as kids have returned to full-time, in-person instruction and as schools have come to grapple with the effects of controversial disciplinary strategies like student suspensions.

Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia, where a teacher was shot by a six-year-old student in early January. (Jay Paul/Getty Image)

“These data suggest two things: First, that schools are facing substantial behavioral challenges, and second, that they don’t feel confident about the strategies they have to address them,” Domina wrote in an email.

The School Pulse Panel solicits survey responses from school officials (primarily principals) around the country, periodically circulating findings to paint a picture of COVID’s impact on K–12 schools. Thursday’s update presented responses gathered from over 1,000 public schools last November, each relating to school safety, attitudes toward security personnel, and the post-COVID classroom environment.

Those school responses are of particular interest in that they can be directly compared with answers to similar questions from another authoritative NCES report from before the pandemic: the , which also quizzed school leaders on the disciplinary climate of their institutions and the strategies they employed to improve it.

Notably, 50 percent or more of all respondents to the panel survey said that they were limited in either major or minor ways by a wide array of hindrances. Nearly three-quarters of participants said they were constrained by a lack of “alternative placements or programs” for disruptive students, while majorities said the same of inadequate funding (61 percent), lack of parental support (60 percent), insufficient teacher training in classroom management (60 percent), and likelihood of complaints from parents (50 percent).

Less numerous, but perhaps more disturbing, were the minorities who said they were held back by lack of support from teachers themselves (40 percent), or by teachers’ own fears of retaliation from students (32 percent).

In most cases, these factors were cited significantly more than they were in the report from five years ago. For example, while just 6 percent and 33 percent of 2017–18 respondents said that they were limited (in either a major or minor way) by lack of teacher training in classroom management, 12 percent and 48 percent said the same thing last November.

The apparent desire for increased training stands out particularly given that it was one of the only behavioral and safety strategies listed in the survey that is not offered more frequently by schools than it was five years ago. By contrast, significantly higher percentages of schools now report engaging in “positive behavioral intervention strategies” (93 percent), crisis intervention (84 percent), recognizing self-harm or suicidal tendencies (84 percent), and recognizing bullying (84 percent).

In a development that reflects the national and local efforts to reduce the use of what some detractors call “exclusionary” disciplinary policies, a significantly lower percentage of schools reported using out-of-school suspensions than did in 2017–18 (69 percent versus 74 percent). The widespread move to curtail the practice has come as federal authorities, including Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, have explicitly urged schools to keep kids in class as much as possible.

Matthew Steinberg, a professor of education at George Mason University who has conducted on the effects of school discipline reforms, noted that Thursday’s release didn’t clearly show that behavioral conditions were deteriorating inside American schools. Still, he added, the documented decrease in exclusionary discipline and the lack of new guidance suggests that schools aren’t “providing the necessary supports for teachers and educators to address student behavioral issues in the classroom.”

“The question is whether or not student behavior and misconduct have gotten worse in the wake of COVID, independent of whether suspension is used as a disciplinary consequence,” Steinberg said. A reduction in suspensions might result in the presence of more students exhibiting COVID-related behavioral problems, he added — which might, in turn, “adversely affect the environment within classrooms, with potentially important implications for student learning.”

Study Backs Efforts to Focus on Preschoolers’ Mental Health

Linda Jacobson — Wed, 05 May 2021 15:05:18 +0000

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Zakiya Sankara-Jabar was taking nursing classes at Wright State College in Dayton, Ohio, when she started getting phone calls from her young son’s teacher at the on-campus child care center.

Amir was having a tantrum; he threw a toy or was “refusing to transition,” the teacher told her. Sankara-Jabar repeatedly had to leave class to get her son, and ended up having to withdraw from school that semester. The center’s staff suggested maybe Amir, the only Black boy in his class at the time, needed therapy and offered to call in psychology majors to observe him. They eventually asked her not to bring him back.

“It just continued to escalate,” Sankara-Jabar said. She told the teachers, “You guys seem like you don’t expect this. He’s 3.”

Zakiya Sankara-Jabar and her son Amir, when he was in preschool. (Courtesy of Zakiya Sankara-Jabar)

Amir’s preschool days are far behind him, but now Ohio has a program that helps preschool teachers solve behavior challenges before they reach the point of removing children from the classroom. from Yale University supports the model, showing that specialized training and support for teachers improves preschoolers’ behavior and reduces the risk of suspension and expulsion. In addition, the study found that the intervention has the same positive benefits on other children in the classroom. The findings are timely as schools prepare for the transition to pre-K and kindergarten this fall for millions of young children who underwent a critical stage of their development during the pandemic. Many have missed out on classroom experiences, and Black and Hispanic families with young children have faced particular hardship and loss.

Even in a typical year, young children entering school can have a hard time separating from parents and adapting to teacher’s expectations. But shows parents reporting their children are experiencing more hyperactivity and other behavior problems compared with levels found in a nationally representative, pre-pandemic survey.

“With disruptions resulting from the pandemic, I worry that schools want to play ‘catch up’ rather quickly and … undermine [children’s] social and emotional learning and mental health,” said Chin Reyes, a developmental scientist at Yale and co-author of “All children experienced stress and disruptions — some significantly more than others. And not just the children, but also the teachers.”

Chin Reyes (Yale University)

Published in the journal Development and Psychopathology, the research focused on Ohio’s program, in which early-childhood mental health consultants make at least six visits to preschool classrooms to help educators develop positive relationships with children. Fifty-one classrooms were randomly assigned to participate in either the program or a control group.

The results showed that teachers who work with consultants feel a greater sense of control over challenging situations with children, a key finding since “expulsion is largely a teacher decision,” wrote Reyes and co-author Walter Gilliam, a professor of child psychiatry and psychology at Yale.

The “target children” — those who were getting in trouble — showed improvements in social-emotional skills, such as greater independence and ability to self-calm. The same improvements were seen in the children’s peers, adding to Gilliams’s on a similar program in Connecticut.

In a fall 2020 survey, parents reported higher-than-normal levels of behavior issues in their young children. (National Institute of Early Education Research)

Racial disparities

The Ohio study builds on Gilliam’s , which found expulsion rates among preschoolers exceeded those of K-12 students, especially for boys and children of color.

Federal data confirmed those trends in 2014, showing Black children made up 18 percent of preschool enrollment but accounted for almost half of those suspended at least once — a cycle that data shows leads to later discipline problems and contributes to what has been described as the “.”

Tunette Powell, a Black mother of three, knew that experience all too well. Also in 2014, an Omaha, Nebraska, child care center repeatedly sent two of her boys home for acts such as throwing a toy and pushing over a chair, when no one was hurt.

Once Powell’s boys entered public school, they were never suspended again. “I put in a lot of work to try to strip that from who they were,” she said. “You don’t want that to become their narrative.”

Gilliam’s work prompted nationwide efforts to prevent expulsions in early learning programs. Twenty-six states now have programs like Ohio’s or have passed legislation limiting the practice, he said. But telling teachers they can’t remove a child without giving them tools to address problem behavior can lead programs to become more selective about which children to enroll in the first place, he said.

“State regulations ban hard expulsions, but not necessarily soft expulsions,” added Reyes. Teachers might frequently ask a parent to pick up a child early or say the child isn’t the “right fit” for the program.

Iris Williams, a Black mother of two in San Antonio, Texas, called it a “workaround.” Her state passed legislation in 2017 banning most out-of-school suspensions in pre-K through 2nd grade. But that didn’t stop Williams from receiving calls at work when her daughter Heaven Ellison, who has ADHD, had problems at school.

“I hate to say they just didn’t want to deal with her, but that’s what I feel like,” Williams said about her daughter’s teachers. “She never got suspended. They would send her home and say, ‘We’re sending her to a safe place.’”

In addition to state laws requiring teachers to seek alternatives to removing children from the classroom, the and the either restrict or discourage suspension and expulsion of young children and recommend programs in which teachers have access to mental health professionals. The recent federal includes $24 billion in child care funding that states can draw on to support children’s mental health.

‘Not a fix-it approach’

In California, Donmonique Daniels has been a teaching assistant at a preschool in Oakland for three years. Recently, a 5-year-old boy in the class, who is about to be adopted, became aggressive toward other children. If a child took a toy away from him, he would retaliate by hitting.

But Daniels works for Kidango, a network of San Francisco Bay Area preschools that in 2018 launched a program in which mental health professionals meet weekly with teachers to discuss common behavior issues. Talking with a consultant and the boy’s adoptive father, the teachers learned that the child “has some separation anxiety due to being swapped around.” And he would become especially agitated if teachers told him he was having a hard day.

Consultation, Daniels said, gives teachers “perspective on how to tap into the way kids need us emotionally.”

Donmonique Daniels is a teaching assistant at Kidango’s Castlemont Center in Oakland, California. (Kidango)

The consultants don’t wait until a child is considered a problem to get involved, said Tena Sloan, a vice president with Kidango.

“We are available with support in challenging times and in times that are working,” she said. “That’s why it’s not a fix-it approach.”

At the center where Daniels works, she said teachers are already mentally preparing for the fall, and thinking of how to make the space “as familiar as possible” for new children enrolling. They’ll label chairs and put photos of the children on their “cubbies.”

“The pandemic has definitely changed a lot for the kids,” she said, “and for us.”