How young is too young to be suspended from school?
Deepa Fernandes / KPCC
Norwalk preschool teacher, Stefanie Servin, reads to her class as her LAUP coach, Astrid Feist, observes and takes notes from the back of the classroom.
Last September, Ronan started at his forth school in two years. He did well for a few weeks, but then moments of aggression reappeared. He’s been sent home twice for acting out. One more and Ronan will be expelled yet again.
“You would never know about the bad days on the good days because he’s so charming,” said his mother, Juliane Crump, as he played with blocks a few feet away.
Ronan is 3-years-old and the schools that have expelled him are local private preschools. He’s never seriously hurt another child, but he can be trying.
Crump’s experience puts her at the center of a raging debate: is suspension or expulsion the right punishment for children who misbehave in school at any age, or is it just hampering their education?
In March, the U.S. Department of Education released statistics showing 5,000 preschoolers nationwide were suspended at least once during the 2011-12 school year. Half of them were suspended more than once.
That’s not even the complete picture; Those numbers only include children at public schools, not private preschools or home-run childcare centers like Ronan attended.
And one national expert doubts the federal numbers are accurate even for public school-based programs.
Some of the largest school districts in California – Los Angeles, Santa Ana, Oakland, San Francisco – showed zero preschool expulsions in the 2011-2012 federal data, the first year the federal government required school districts to report it. The state doesn’t require school districts to break out expulsion reports by grade.
L.A. Unified has an unwritten policy against suspending or expelling preschoolers, said Maureen Diekman who runs the district’s early education programs.
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