Over the course of a year, Tunette Powell’s sons received a total of twelve preschool suspensions. Their ages were three and four.
According to Powell, a 39-year-old mother of three who currently resides in San Antonio, Texas, “it was definitely a shock and a rock for our family. I still can’t quite make sense of it.”
According to Powell, the first call came in March 2014 from the child care facility on her husband Jason’s Air Force post in Omaha, Nebraska. JJ, her 4-year-old son, was suspended, according to the school.
Powell claims, “I felt like I was being punked.”
She claims that while eating breakfast with other kids, she was informed that her son had been weeping.
He was told to leave the table to avoid spreading germs because he was sobbing and his nose was running, but no one inquired as to why he was upset or whether anything was wrong.
She remembers the school telling her that he had to go home because he had thrown a chair. However, her son claimed that he hardly moved the chair when she spoke to him.
“It didn’t even fall over,” he told her. “He stated, ‘But I was sad that they made me get up and I was crying and no one checked on me.'”
Behavioral problems were still reported by the school: Joah, her 3-year-old, was suspended once again for making a gesture that suggested he could strike a teacher but didn’t.
Powell claims that she wished to gain a deeper comprehension of the situation involving her children and the other youngsters.
“I would always say, ‘Let me see the video cameras. Let me see the footage,'” she says. “And they would always say, ‘No, you can’t see the footage. There are other kids in it.'”
Powell claims that at some point, a different preschool parent expressed her opinion that Powell’s boys were receiving different treatment.
“Something’s wrong with this, Tunette,” commented the other parent, who is White, at a birthday celebration. “This is not okay. My kid made another kid bleed. That kid had to have an urgent care visit. And I only got a phone call home about it.”
“That rocked my world,” Powell said. “I’m forever grateful for her saying something doesn’t seem right about any of this, because it changed my life. I probably would’ve just been so depressed and internalized everything and just felt like a complete failure if someone had not shook me and said like, ‘Hey, something doesn’t seem right about this.'”
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Powell chose to concentrate on Black children and preschool expulsions, which are a persistent problem across the country, according to reports.
She conducted interviews with 25 additional parents from throughout the United States and prepared a PhD dissertation on the expulsion of Black children from preschool.
Despite making up a much lower portion of preschool pupils, statistics show that Black boys account for over half of those expelled more than once.
Powell says, “It’s so triggering and traumatizing.”
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She spoke with a mother from California who believed her 3-year-old child might have a handicap.
“She kept fighting for a diagnosis for her child. And in that process, her son was being suspended all the time. And the quote that always stands out to me is that she asked herself all the time — ‘have I given birth to a monster?’ It broke my heart,” Powell said.
Powell also spoke with a mother who was enrolled in school and worked full-time, but she had to quit school because she had to pick up her kid every time he was suspended.
Powell, who is currently the Children’s Equity Project’s director of parent and family partnerships, says she wants to change the way that early childhood programs talk about severe discipline, such as removal.
“Every day I wake up and I talk to parents all across the U.S. and Puerto Rico and on reservations throughout the country of trying to understand how we support children and families better,” she stated. “After I shared my experience, I was overwhelmed with the number of families who reached out, I just couldn’t turn the other way. I didn’t think it was enough for my kids to be okay.”
For many years, Walter Gilliam, executive director of the University of Nebraska’s Buffett Early Childhood Institute, has been researching preschool expulsions.
He claims that hundreds of thousands of families have been impacted, with social development and learning loss among the outcomes.
Why? According to Gilliam, the variables can be complex and include the ways that COVID-19 altered kid behavior, excessive class sizes, and teacher stress.
According to him, the answers lie in strengthening ties between schools and families and providing better support for both teachers and students, making expulsions a last choice.
By monitoring teachers’ reactions to footage of children of various races that they thought were misbehaving but were actually hired child actors told to just play together, Gilliam has also investigated how race and unconscious bias can impact punishment.
“The question there was: Is it possible that we expel more children of color, especially Black boys, from preschool programs simply because we expect more challenging behavior there, we look for it there and we find it there?” Gilliam said. “And that’s one thing I know is — if you’re looking here for something, chances are greater you’ll find it.”
Powell’s oldest two sons were suspended from preschool ten years ago, but now all of her boys are doing well.
JJ, her eldest child, is a sophomore in high school at the age of 15 and does exceptionally well in challenging coursework. He works at his uncle’s food truck, enjoys traveling, and won a junior chef competition last summer.
Powell claims that in the finals, “They had to cook wildebeest in the finals.”
Joah, 13, recently released his first book, Books or Basketball, and is inspiring young people to pursue writing. I want to write another book, he says.
Jordan, her youngest, is ten years old. Powell said that he is the most sympathetic youngster she has ever encountered and that he is a star athlete.
“They’re all very kind kids,” she said. “Still, 10 years later, every time I see an email from anybody’s teacher, my heart starts just racing and I’m very concerned.”
