alaska lawyer referral

>> tricia haley: all right, everyone, onceagain, welcome to the first webinar in our expulsion and suspension prevention webinarseries. my name is tricia haley. i'm with the administration for children and families(acf). i'm going to give you just a few quick logistical announcements, and then we willget started. first of all, you have likely noticed thatall of our lines are muted. it's so that we can avoid getting any background noise. itdoes not mean that we don't want to hear your input, your thoughts, and your questions.and we would invite you to share those throughout the course of the webinar, through your chatand question boxes. we'll be watching those as they come in and then we're hoping to havea few minutes for q&a at the end of the webinar.

so, please do feel free to chat those in throughoutthe course of the webinar. the only other thing that i will mention,because we get this question every time and we will get it at least four more times probablyin the next hour, the slides in this webinar are not currently available online. the fullwebinar, both the audio and the slides, will eventually be available and as soon as wehave that posted, we will send it out to you. but the slides are not currently availableonline. with that, i will hand it over to shantelmeek, the policy advisor for early childhood development here at acf. >> shantel meek: good afternoon, everyone.i'd like to thank all of you for joining the

first in our series of four webinars focusedon expulsion and suspension prevention in early childhood studies. i think this is atopic that's really captured the conscience of people around the country and it certainlyhas ours. today's presentation is going to focus onthe research and data trends observed over the last several years and it will highlightwhat we know and what we don't know about expulsion and suspension in early childhoodstudies. if we could go to the next slide. >> shantel meek: next week we're going tofocus on policy, just to give you an overview of the series. we're going to unpack the fullfederal policy statement released by u.s. department of education (ed) and u.s. departmentof health and human services (hhs) in december.

we're also going to highlight colorado's workin addressing expulsion and suspension and children's social, emotional, and behavioralhealth through state policy. and finally, we're going to hear from chicago public schoolsand their efforts to curb expulsion and suspension in the early learning settings and into theearly grades to hear from a local example. the following week, we're going to focus onintervention and prevention practices, and we'll take a deep dive in the positive behaviorintervention supports as well as early childhood mental health consultation. we're also going to take a look at diversity-informedtenets for providers working with families and children, because given the racial disparitiesseen in these practices, we know that diversity

informed practice and things like implicitbias play into this issue. our last webinar is going to focus on data,and it's going to highlight data collection systems at both the federal and state levels.we're going to highlight washington state and connecticut and hear from dr. gilliamagain as well as from our office of civil rights from the ed on the data that they collecton the issue. so without further ado, i'll hand it overto linda smith, our fearless leader, who's the deputy assistant secretary for early childhooddevelopment here at hhs to provide some framing remarks before introducing and handing itover to our guest speaker today, dr. walter gilliam.

>> linda smith: okay. well, i want to thankshantel for putting together this series. this is linda smith and i want to welcomeyou all as well to this, i think very, very important topic that we're going to discussover the next several weeks. as you know, president obama launched themy brother's keeper initiative last year to address the persistent opportunity gaps facedby young boys and men of color and to ensure that all people could reach their full potential.this was a very important initiative and one that we completely endorsed and jumped onboard with, primarily because of the issues that we're going to start talking about today. the mbk initiative seeks to address stubbornopportunity gaps from cradle to grave for

certain portions of our portions of our population,and as you know, we believe wholeheartedly that ensuring that all children have a healthystart and enter school ready to learn is the first step in this process. i think everyone knows the brain researchand how critical that it is to the foundation for what happens in later life with the childrenand we completely endorse that and in fact have made getting more information on thebrain development now as the top priority for acf over the next year. so, it's veryimportant, and it's very important to children who live in poverty, including disproportionatenumbers of children who, because of their color, face an array of environmental factorsthat disrupt their healthy development and

ultimately their life outcomes. so, we know that many of the things that contributeto some of these disparities include poor- quality early childhood education, lack orpoor quality health, access to healthcare and other things like that. so these thingsalso, as we all know, have a long impact and are felt for years to come for children. theyalso contribute to many of what we know is going on in terms of the disturbing trendsaround school suspensions and expulsions, and that these are starting in preschool andearlier and that we really have got to take this on. there's no question about that. for example, a nationally representative studyfound that over 10 percent of preschool teachers

in state-funded, prek programs reported expellingat least one preschooler in the last year, a rate more than three times the average forteachers of k-12 public school students. so, these are unacceptable. it indicates whatwe know we need to do, and that is to take a look at what we do around the workforceissue. recent data from our own ed indicates the african american boys make up 18 percentof the preschool enrollment, but 48 percent of preschoolers suspended more than once. again, these are alarming trends and we needall hands on deck to make sure that we deal with this problem. we all share the responsibilityfor this. there's no question about it. these things start early in life and they can eitherbe turned around quickly and more easily or

grow into really major problems that put childrenon a trajectory that is very negative and that sets in motion certain things to happenwith their later life. as you know, as a part of the white housesummit on early education, we were pleased to release the first ever federal policy statementon expulsion and suspension practices. we did that in conjunction with the ed, and asshantel said, you will learn more about that in the next webinar. we hope that through this series of webinarswe can shed more light on the issue and partner with all of you around the country to callattention to the issue and figure out what some of the solutions might be that bringan end to these practices.

so, i'm going to now hand it over to dr. waltergilliam from yale university, who has probably done more research on this than anyone inthe country, and who is going to talk to you about what we have learned and what he haslearned along the way that can help point us in the direction for future solutions.so dr. gilliam, if you want to take it away. >> walter gilliam: thank you very much, linda,and thank you, shantel. i certainly appreciate the leadership that acf has shown in takinga look at this very difficult, hard to wrap your head around sometimes problem that wehave with children being expelled and suspended from our early care and education programs. i'm going to dive straight into the presentationwith talking about how recently, in march

2014, the ed's office of civil rights releaseddata from a study that they had done themselves surveying superintendents of public schoolsystems across the nation. they were asking those superintendents in school systems wherepublic-funded prek programs existed about numbers of children being expelled and suspendedfrom those programs. and you can see here from the slide, one quote,black children make up 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 48 percent of the preschoolchildren who were suspended more than once. also, boys receive more than 3 out of 4 ofthe out of school preschool suspensions. it doesn't take a microscope or a magnifyingglass to be able to see that these rates are far more than what you would expect giventhe population of the children who are enrolled

in these programs. to try to drive this message home a littlebit more, i'm going to show you a video. this is a video of a little girl in st. petersburg,florida, about a decade ago. she was throwing a temper tantrum in her classroom and thenshe was brought to the principal's office and then later this is what happened. [video of young girl being handcuffed in office] >> walter gilliam: that little girl was a kindergarten child. shehad been in her classroom and was engaging in some behavior that the teacher didn't reallyunderstand how to deal with. as a result of

that, the child was brought to the principal'soffice. the teacher didn't know what to do from there. principal didn't know what todo from there. instead of contacting the school psychologistor the guidance counselor or the special education department or anybody else within the publicschool system, what they seem to have done instead, was to contact the st. petersburgpolice department, which then came into the elementary school and arrested the child andbrought her to the police department where her mother had to then pick the child up.some people do ask what could have possibly caused this kind of a response from the schoolsystem, so we do have a video of what was happening in the classroom.

the reason that we have these videos is thatlater on, the parents appear to have sued the school system and the lawyer found outthat there were videos taken of what was happening. the lawyer acquired those videos and thenmade them available online for people to be able to see. if you're curious what happenedin the classroom, this is what happened in the classroom that led up to the child beingarrested. [video plays] >> walter gilliam: you see one child therewho then was taken away. the classroom was basically evacuated. [video plays, child creating incidents]

>> walter gilliam: and basically, the video continues on like that for several minutes.this was a child who was struggling with some kind of an emotional challenge at the timeand was basically walking around the classroom and knocking things down onto the ground. the teacher's skillsets at the time were basicallyto follow the child around the classroom and to tell her that it makes them sad when sheknocks things down on the ground, and then when things escalated, eventually they movedthe child to the principal's office, i think contacted the st. petersburg police department,which then came to arrest the child. now, fortunately most expulsions in our preschoolprograms and our kindergarten programs are

not quite as dramatic as this one was. however,i do like to sometimes show this as an example, to be able to get our heads wrapped aroundexactly what we're talking about here. let me flash back for you, though, back to2005 when we first started becoming here at the yale child study center interested inthis topic of children being expelled from prek programs. it started out with some curiosity.i was conducting a fairly dry study about how state-funded prek programs were beingimplemented across the country, what kind of policies guided these programs at the statelevel and then at classroom level, how were these programs actually being implementedand what things gave rise to better policy appearance. was it per child spending or thetypes of monitoring structures and things

like that? but at the same time that we were designingthe study, i was also supervising child psychiatry fellows and child psychology fellows and pediatricians,and i was sitting on the other side of a mirror while they were working with young children,first at five years old. we started noticing that many of the children were being referredto yale for an evaluation, because they had been expelled from a preschool or a childcare program, or they were actually told by the directors of the program that if theydidn't go to a place like yale for an evaluation that they would be expelled or suspended fromthat program. of course, as both a clinician as well asa scholar, this made me quite curious as to

what it is that we know about children beingexpelled from these really young age programs. you know, i'd heard about children being expelledfrom high school before, but i didn't have much information about what it was like tobe expelled from a preschool program. so, i went to the literature to see what kindof research had been conducted in the past and basically found absolutely nothing. and so, since we were already going to collectthis data on state-funded prek programs, contacting the teachers in these programs with a sampleof about 4,000 classrooms across the nation, we thought that this would be a good opportunityto weave in some additional questions to ask the teachers about expulsions and suspensionsthat have actually happened in their programs

in order to be able to get a sense of whatthe rate of expulsion and suspension was, who is being expelled and suspended, and whatkind of programmatic features in those programs and classrooms might predict increased likelihoodof a child being expelled or suspended. >> tricia haley: hey, walter? this is triciaat acf. you are occasionally drifting away a little bit. can you make sure that you arestaying close to your microphone? >> walter gilliam: absolutely. can you hearme better now? >> tricia haley: thank you. yep, you're great. >> walter gilliam: so, this was a survey for40 states, 52 different, state-funded prek systems operating in those 40 states withabout 3,000 -- well, exactly 3,898 respondents.

we had an 81 percent response rate. we useda computer-assisted telephone interview to collect the data from the teachers and weoffered the teachers $10 as well as a letter of appreciation. now, what's interesting about this study,at least for maybe some of the people who are on this telephone call, is that 81 percentresponse rate. that is a terrific response rate. usually, you shoot for about 40 percent,and if you get 60 percent, that's phenomenal. we didn't have a hard time at all gettingpreschool teachers to talk to us, and i think part of it had to do with the fact that wewere asking them questions, not just about their classrooms, but also about job stressand teacher depression and why they entered

the field in the first place and so we werereally quite pleased with this response rate that we got. we initially just planned on giving them $10,but then many of the teachers said that what they would have really liked instead was aletter of appreciation from yale for participating in a survey, which is one of those touchinglittle anecdotes from research that will probably never end up in a research paper, but i thoughtthat i would pass it along to you. that really what seemed to motivate these teachers themost was just having some recognition from somebody that their work really mattered andcared. so, what is expulsion? in k-12, there is variousdifferent definitions depending on the state.

one state was identified in 2004 as sayinganything that was more than three days of consecutive exclusion from the program wasconsidered an expulsion. most states that had some kind of a definition say that anythingmore than 10 days of exclusion, they would call an expulsion. but as you can see, themajority of the states, 32 of those states, leave it up completely to local discretionas to what constitutes an expulsion, versus just being suspended, versus being told notto come back for the rest of the day. we have no research and data that supportsthe effectiveness of expulsion. as a matter of fact, according to some research by russskiba at indiana university, one of the best predictors of being expelled was having beenexpelled before. and so, if expulsion is an

intervention aimed at improving children'sbehaviors, it doesn't seem to be working very well. in prek, there's no formal definitions ofwhat an expulsion means or what it means to be expelled until fairly recently, when caringfor our children started to, as a publication, try to pass some guidelines to actually definewhat an expulsion was and a suspension. eighteen states, back in 2005, stated thatthey disallowed expulsion, but it wasn't clear at that time exactly what they were disallowingor how they were even defining it. thirty-two states either explicitly allowed programsto expel, these are state-funded prek programs. thirty-two states either explicitly allowedthe expulsions to happen or they pass it down

to the local level for local implementersto decide exactly what the policies and procedures would be. so within our survey, we asked teachers thisquestion. "over the past 12 months, have you ever required a child to terminate participationfrom your program due to a challenging behavior? do not include children who were transitioneddirectly from your program to a special education preschool program, therapeutic preschool program,or some other more appropriate setting." and so you see, what we did here was we optednot to call it expulsion, but instead just define what we're talking about. terminatingall enrollment from the program in a very permanent kind of way. that was the questionthat was asked. in terms of who we were surveying,

we were surveying teachers in state-fundedprek programs. these are programs that are administered ata state level and funded with at least some degree of state dollars, serving childrenin the 3- to 4-year-old age range. these are classroom-based programs and these are programswhere the explicit goal of the program is to provide some kind of a school readinessexperience for the children or these were programs that were funded and administeredthrough a state department of education, which we took as a de facto statement of the programbeing about education school readiness. you can see the 40 states here that we weresurveying. fifty-eight percent of the classrooms that we surveyed were in the public schools,29 percent were in head start (hs), because

you can see half of those hs classrooms werehs classrooms where the public school was the grantee. and then, 13 percent of thoseclassrooms fell into this other category, which included non-profit child care programs,for-profit child care programs, and faith-affiliated programs. so what were the results? we found that 10.4percent of the prek teachers reported expelling at least one child due to a challenging behaviorover the past year. of those teachers who did report expelling a child, most of them,78 percent, reported expelling only one. fifteen percent of the teachers reported expellingtwo children. six percent of the classroom teachers reported expelling three childrenin the past year and we had some teachers

at 1 percent reporting expelling four or morechildren in the past year. when we piloted this survey in massachusetts in child careprograms, we actually ran into, in that survey, one teacher who reported expelling 6 childrenout of a class of 16 in the course of a 12-month period. when we computed out a rate of expulsion,we found that for every 1,000 children enrolled in our state-funded prek programs, there was6.7 expulsions. in order to be able to get a sense of what that compares to, we thoughtthat we would compare that to k-12 rates. now, we couldn't find any published ratesor expulsion for children in grades k-12, however, the office of civil rights at theed had collected data on them, but they had

never apparently written up a report thatwas available at that time. the data were available online and so we downloadedthose databases, about 16,000 different databases, one for every school district in the unitedstates and computed out the rates ourselves. when we did that, the rate that we found fork-12 expulsion was only 2.1 expulsions per 1,000 children. so, you can see from herethat the rate of expulsion for our prek children, 3- and 4-year-olds, was more than 3 timesthat for children in grades k-12. but in child care programs, the rates seemed to be muchhigher. there was a survey done back in 1999 in detroit,michigan, with a sample size of 127 and a response rate of 28 percent that reportedan expulsion rate of 28 expulsions per 1,000

and these were children in preschool programsand child care programs serving children 3-to-4 years old. massachusetts, in our pilot studythat we conducted, we found a rate of 27 expulsions per 1,000, 39 percent of the classroom teachersreported expelling at least one child in their classroom in the past 12 months. after we conducted the research in massachusetts,the massachusetts department of education decided to run its own study to see whetheror not they would replicate that, so the massachusetts department of education in 2003, after wehad told them what the findings were from our study, did another study with 764 childcare providers and found that 2 percent of the children in those programs had been expelled,1 percent had been suggested to leave.

we're not sure exactly what that means tobe suggested to leave, and 1 percent was transferred. of course, if you were to convert percentsinto thousands, then 2 percent is about 20 per thousand having been expelled and 1 percentis another 10 per thousand, and so basically they found pretty close to the same ratesthat we had found in massachusetts the year previous when we collected the data. coloradodid a study. you can see the results there in 2006. wisconsin recently did a study where theyfound that 68 percent of the providers had reported at least expelling, had reportedexpelling at least one child in the course of their career and 52 percent of the childcare providers, and again, these are child

care providers serving children 3-to-4 yearsold, had reported expelling at least one child in the past two years. alaska had done a similarstudy, 35 percent of the centers reported expelling at least one child in the past year.the chicago study is interesting. it was conducting by -- >> tricia haley: walter? you're fading a littlebit on us again. >> walter gilliam: sorry. the chicago studyis interesting in that it was conducted in infant-toddler centers, and in these infant-toddlercenters, 42 percent of these centers serving children birth to 3-years old had reportedexpelling at least one child from the program due to some kind of a challenging behavior,and in most cases what they found was that

the challenging behavior was biting or somethingsimilar to that. if we were to graph out the rates of expulsion,this is what you'd basically find. in k-12, it's much lower. our state-funded prek programsadministered through our state departments of education, typically, quite a bit higherand in our child care industry that are not part of our state-funded prek programs, therate's higher still by a large margin. you can see here from this map, some statesseem to have a much higher expulsion rate than others. the states in red are expellingat more than 10 expulsions per 1,000 children enrolled. then, you can see various differentshades of color showing less rates of expulsion, but nonetheless, some degree of expulsionhappening. of course the states that are not

colored at all, the states in white, reportedzero expulsions because they didn't have any state-funded prek programs from which to expelanyone. so of course, when you have results like this,it tends to get front line news coverage in a lot of newspapers and in 2005 when we releasedthe results, it hit the front page of just about every major newspaper in the unitedstates as well as television news. [video of national news show highlights] >> walter gilliam: as you can see from thiskind of coverage that most of what they, the focus of the coverage was really on the sensationalaspects of what the rate of expulsion was without getting into too much detail aboutwho exactly was being expelled. what we know

is this. in mixed age classrooms with 3- and4-year old children combined, 4-year olds are more than 50 percent likely than the 3-yearolds to be expelled. also, boys are expelled at 3.5 times morelikely than girls and african american children are expelled at twice the rate of europeanamericans and five times the rate of asian americans. of course, this degree of disparity,both in terms of gender as well as race, is something that's extremely troubling to usfor a lot of reasons. one of the reasons i'll share with you, that it troubles me a lot,especially the rate disparities, is that when we think about our early care and educationprograms in the united states, we tend to think of these as investments.

we're investing in early care and education,because it pays dividends later on down the road. and many people in this business knowabout the perry preschool project that found that for every $1 spent in preschool programs,$7.14 was yielded back in societal savings by the time the children were 27 years old,and the abecedarian study, and the chicago child parent center study. but what a lot of people don't realize aboutsome of these studies, especially the perry preschool study, which is obviously the mostwidely cited reason for investing in our preschool programs, is that not only was it a studythat randomized children to preschool programs in ypsilanti, michigan, just outside of detroitwith a sample size of 123 back in 1964, but

another element of that study was that everysingle one of the children in that study, this study that's used by scholars all acrossthe united states as evidence for investing in preschool programs, was a study conductedwith a sample completely comprised of african american children. so in other words, what we're doing is weare using data that belonged to african american children to justify creating preschool programsfor all of our children and then sitting back and allowing those same african american childrento be disproportionately pushed out the back door of those programs. those programs werecreated, in large part, on data that belongs to them.

there's something about that the, one, justdoesn't sound fair at all, and two, underlies the fact that when we're expelling childrenfrom these preschool programs, especially children who might come from low income backgrounds,we are basically undercutting our collective investment. now, these programs tend to yielda better return on investment for children who come from disenfranchised backgroundsand disadvantaged backgrounds. and to expel those children from these programs is a formof undercutting our investment. some of the other things that we know aboutare state-funded prek programs and expulsions is that teacher/child ratio predicts expulsion.as the number of children per teacher increases, the likelihood of an expulsion goes up aswell. also, in our programs that are open

for longer lengths of the day, it increasesthe likelihood that an expulsion will happen. also, teacher job stress. the teachers inour sample completed a job stress inventory and teachers who reported high levels of jobstress were far more likely to report expelling at least one child in the past year than teacherswho reported low levels of job stress. in fact, the teachers also completed somethingcalled the center for academiological studies depression scale, which is a depression screener.teachers who screened positive for depression expelled at twice the rate of teachers whoscreened negative for depression. here's a cartoon. today, we're going to exploreand paint how we feel when we're picked up late from preschool, this one teacher says.job stress. but here's another example of

job stress in the classroom. i want to showyou a clip from a newscast that happened from houston, texas back in february 2008 thatgives a sense of what it's like for a teacher to be experiencing high levels of job stressin the classroom and what kind of an impact that might have on the children who are inher care. [video featuring girl at home and at school featuring covert audio of teacher beratingstudent] >> walter gilliam: unfortunately, i don'tthink that this is a very isolated incident. these things happen in a lot of our earlycare and education centers and kindergarten

programs across the nation. in order to beable to conduct some of the research that we've been doing on expulsion as well as onearly childhood mental health consultation, we've created a measure called the preschoolexpulsion risk measure. now, this isn't the measure to decide whoshould be expelled, and i would certainly never create a measure like that, but ratherit's a measure to finally determine just how at risk a child seems to be at expulsionsso that we can then see if we can change that degree of risk for a child through providingsupports to the teacher. you can see that many of the items here onthis measure has to do with the teacher rating the degree to which she feels or he feelsthat this child's behavior somehow impacts

or interferes with his or her ability to bea good teacher or the other children in the classroom to be able to learn or benefit fromthe classroom experiences. but you can also see some of these items on the measure, especiallythe ones here in bold, also have to do with a different factor. they have to do with the degree to which theteacher feels some degree of hope that this child's behavior might actually improve overtime and some of the emerging findings that we're finding right now is that when teachersfeel that the child's behaviors, whatever those behaviors are in the classroom, somehowimpact on that teacher's ability to feel that she or he is doing a good job in the classroomand that teacher feels a low degree of hope

that anything could improve in terms of thatchild's behavior, then the likelihood of that child being expelled seems to go much higher.in terms of its relationship to job stress, you see that for this one item, this child'sclassroom behaviors are not likely to improve significantly. teachers who report high levels of job stressare far more likely to agree or strongly agree with an item like that. also, for this itemthere is little that i or anyone else can do to significantly improve this child's behavior.teachers with high degrees of job stress are far more likely to endorse an item like thatfor a specific child. this child's parents will not be much help in improving the child'sbehavior. again, a strong degree of relationship

to job stress. and then this final item, some mornings ifind myself hoping that this child will be absent from my classroom. teachers reporthigh levels of job stress far more likely to say that this is true to agree or stronglyagree to this regarding an individual child. in fact, 50 percent of teachers who reportedelevated levels of job stress in classrooms feel this way on a daily basis about at leastone of the children in the classroom. from a positive standpoint, we did find this,that there seems to be a significant relationship between access to a behavioral consultantor an early childhood mental health consultant in terms of its likelihood to decrease thelikelihood of children being expelled from

preschool programs. we see that when teachershave no access to any supports regarding children's' challenging behaviors in the classrooms, thisis the likelihood that that teacher is going to report an expulsion within the past 12months. when there is somebody available on an on-callbasis, the likelihood is significantly less and when there's somebody available to theteacher onsite in the program, even less likely still. what we're finding from this, is strongevidence for at least a correlation that having access to an early childhood mental healthconsultant or some other type of person who can provide supports to the teacher regardingchallenging behaviors significantly decreases the likelihood of somebody being expelledin the course of that year.

in connecticut, where yale university is located,we have a fairly high rate of expulsions in our state-funded prek programs and as a resultof that, the state of connecticut decided to invest increasing amounts of money in earlychildhood mental health consultation. they created in 2002, the early childhood consultationpartnership program, and you can see here from the information on this slide some informationabout what that program looks like. it's available to literally every single privateand public-funded early care and education program serving children 0-to-5 years oldthroughout the entire state of connecticut. if a teacher or a director requests the services,then an early childhood mental health consultant, who is trained and credentialed, is placedin that classroom to provide supports to that

teacher. the intervention is brief. it's onlythree months long, but it's fairly intensive during the time that the consultant is inthe classroom. the consultant spends at least 6 to 8 hoursper week and in some cases more than that, coaching and consulting directly to the teacher,while the teacher is working with the children. definitely modeled after a coaching modelwith lots of home-based intervention as well and working with the teacher and the parenttogether in order to create a more solid partnership between the parent and the teacher. we have been evaluating this program in threedifferent randomized control trials throughout the state of connecticut. the first two studieswere within preschool classrooms and the third

study was with infant-toddler centers. inmost cases, these were child care centers with a few hs centers thrown in and everyonce in a while some public school programs as well. what we found basically was this. in a three-monthperiod of time, significant reductions in comparison to control children as rated interms of oppositionality by the teacher. when the teachers were rating hyperactivity, significantdecreases as well, in comparison to the control, restlessness and impulsivity, and overallexternalizing or acting out behavior problems. that was study one. study two largely replicatedthose findings. again, significant differences in the treatment group over a three-monthperiod of time and no significant differences

at all in the control group. in the infant-toddler centers, some of thethings that we found was that in the course of the intervention, after three months theteachers in the programs rated the level of family involvement for the children as significantlyhigher, in large part due to the fact that the intervention was largely aimed at tryingto get the parents and the teachers to work and collaborate together and to meet on aregular basis regarding the children's development as well as significant improvements in peersocial competence, and this is actually looking at the children who were not the focus ofthe intervention. in children who were not the focus of theintervention in the treatment classrooms,

those children were rated as being significantlymore socially competent in relationship to their experiences with their peers and thething to highlight with this is that we're talking about a three-month intervention andto be able to get these kinds of impacts in a three-month intervention is really quitestaggering. here's a cartoon that ran at about the timethat the expulsion data were first coming out. this mother says, "this is your fifthexpulsion. if you don't stop your constant name calling, do you know where you mightend up?" and the child says, "in congress?" now of course, i don't know if this childis going to be in congress, but we've been very happy to know that many of the expulsionpolicy recommendations that we have been making

on the basis of some of these data have indeedmade it to the highest levels of u.s. government and congress and to the white house. some of the recommendations that we've madeare this. first, prek programs should not be expelling prekindergarteners. we need toinstead be assessing the needs and the developmental needs of these children and providing supportsand facilitating direct and supported transfers if necessary from that program to anotherprogram that might be more well equipped, but certainly in no instances just expellingthe child without any supports offered or without some kind of a guided transfer toanother appropriate setting. all prek teachers should have regular accessto behavioral consultants, but unfortunately

only about 1 in 5 in the united states dohave something like this. also, all prek teachers should be in classrooms with no more than10 children in there per adult, however, unfortunately 16 percent of our state-funded prek programsduring the time that we collected this data reported having significantly more than 10children per adult. supportive policies and services regardingteacher job stress, these could include reasonable hours with rates for our preschool teachers,better conditions, compensations, and supports. in the end, the degree to which these teacherscan do a good job for our children has to do with the degree to which these teachersfeel supported in their work, and if we treat them poorly, it shouldn't come as to muchof a surprise when some of our teachers in

turn might treat our children less kindlythan what we would hope. also, supportive services focusing specificallyon teacher job stress. early childhood mental health consultation really shouldn't be justabout the mental health of the children, but also it should be about the families and thesupport staff, the teachers that are in those classrooms as well. federal and state funding for these typesof services to support early childhood mental health consultation and reduce teacher jobstress, tracking expulsion rates and disproportionality at the federal level as well as the statelevel, and implementing and evaluating promising models and programs for reducing challengingbehaviors, and reducing expulsion and suspension

practices for all of our children. if you want to know more about these, i encourageyou to go visit the zigler center's web site, www.ziglercenter.el.edu, where you can downloada variety of different policy briefs on all the topics that we talked about today. now,we're open for questions. thank you. >> tricia haley: thanks, walter. so, feelfree to please type in your questions in the chat box and we'll funnel those over to walter.one question that we got, i think this is in reference to the prek study that you talkedabout, was "what did the studies find for latino boys?" walter? >> walter gilliam: well, what we found forlatino boys was that the -- yes, i'm still

here. can you hear me? >> tricia haley: yes, we got you, yep. >> walter gilliam: we found for the latinochildren that the rate of expulsion in the program that we were surveying anyway, thesewere state-funded prek programs was no different than other european-descent children. thereal race and ethnicity outlier here was the african american children. >> linda smith: and then i think one of thethings -- another question, walter, that we got was access to behavior staff for the teacher,the child, or both. i mean, when these consultants go into the classroom, i think is what they'reasking about here.

>> walter gilliam: now the answer will beyes. yes, yes, and yes, that the role of these supports really should be to go into the classroomand to provide coaching and support directly to the teacher. that the idea behind this is not that thesewould be people who would go into the classroom, pull the child out and do some kind of therapeuticmagic on the child and insert the child back into the classroom, but rather instead whatthese people should be is people who can be a support to the teacher, who can come intothe classroom, provide some objective eyes on what's happening in the classroom and thencoach the teacher in terms of ways in which that teacher can be interacting differentlywith that child as well as having more developmentally

appropriate behavioral expectations for theclassroom on the whole. we're never going to be able to get aheadof this problem if we try to address the simply one child at a time with specialists. we reallyneed to be providing much better, clearer coaching strategies for all of our teachersso that once the consultant leaves the classroom, they've left behind a greater degree of competenciesand expertise with the teachers who are going to remain. >> linda smith: walter, we have a questionabout the credentials of the people doing the work and i think this is something thatpeople are interested in for the people going into the classroom. what are you finding thereand what are your recommendations?

>> walter gilliam: well, the program thatwe have here in connecticut is a program where all of the consultants are master's degreesand some form of mental health or mental health services are also given specialized trainingin how to work with young children and how to understand the culture of early childhoodcare and education. head start programs, state-funded prek programs,programs in public schools, as well as child care programs all have a unique culture tothem and so the mental health consultant would also have to have some understanding of that.so in connecticut, the program that we've been evaluating, all of those people who areproviding this support to teachers are all mental health professionals at the master'slevel, but they've been given specialized

training in how to consult and how to consultspecifically with early care and education providers. i do know that there are other states thathave programs like this that might use consultants who have less than a master's degree and insome places they might even have not only a bachelor's degree. they might be paraprofessionals.we don't know of any compelling research to suggest that that's a smart way to go. i thinkinstead what we should be thinking about is providing the same level of expertise in socialand emotional development as what we would provide for speech language consulting oroccupational and physical therapy consulting in our classrooms.

our early care and education teachers oftentimes, and if they're in the public schools, will have access to speech language pathologistsand these speech language pathologists are not people with a high school diploma whoare interested in speech. these are people who have very specific training in early languagedevelopment who can be coaches and resources to the teacher. we think the same should goas true as well for social and emotional development. >> tricia haley: we're getting a lot of questionsabout early childhood mental health consultation. i'll just remind folks that the third webinaris actually going to focus a big chunk of time on early childhood mental health consultationand give a lot more information and resources, but a follow up question, somebody asked.delaware's early childhood mental health consultation

service maintains a 97 percent success ratein avoiding expulsions. is that a standard effect you see in other states with this service? >> walter gilliam: it's hard to say. i don'tknow of a lot of state early childhood mental health consultation programs that have beenable to document the exact rate of expulsion for children who went through the programversus those who didn't. in connecticut, we were doing randomized controltrials, and so we were randomly assigning classrooms to either get the interventionor randomly assigning them to wait three months and because the intervention was only threemonths, it allowed us to be able to do that because we were already running a wait listanyway. but because our control group also

gets the intervention later, it doesn't allowus to look at long-term impacts. and so in connecticut, we haven't reportedout what the rate of expulsion was for children getting the treatment versus those who don't,because eventually everybody who requests the treatment gets it. and so we were onlyable to look at short-term impacts. i'd love to be able to answer the question, but i don'tthink that we have good data across a multitude of different programs like that across thenation to be able to say so. >> tricia haley: we've gotten a few questionson disabilities on kids in early intervention and special ed. preschool programs. did yourstudy find anything specific with those groups of kids?

>> walter gilliam: no. we weren't able toactually find out anything specifically on that, because we weren't able to address thosequestions in there. it was part of a much, much larger survey that was asking about everythingyou could possibly imagine that could happen in these state-funded prek programs. we weren'table to put in a lot of the questions that we would have liked to, but if we were todo this survey over again with funding to do another national survey, i would certainlywant to look at rate of expulsions among children with developmental disabilities. it's a tricky question, though, because you'dwant to know what the rate of expulsion is for children who have a disability, not justthose who have been identified as having a

disability, and it's quite possible that someof these children who are being expelled are children who do have developmental challengesand developmental disabilities, who instead of being expelled, really should be identifiedand referred for special education services. >> linda smith: here's another one, walter.i'm going to read this one, and it is a very interesting question. "do you see any differentrates based on the racial ethnic mix of children or the staff?" in other words, if there arefew african american students, is expulsion of african american students more likely andare african american teachers more or less likely to suspend african american students? >> walter gilliam: linda, that's a terrificquestion and every time that i've presented

on these findings for the past 9, 10 years,eventually if the q&a session goes long enough that question comes up, because it's a verycompelling question. i can tell you this. we found disparities in gender and we founddisparities in race. in terms of gender, it allowed us to then be able to ask the questionof "do male teachers expel boys more likely than girls the same as female teachers?" that was a fairly easy question for us toanswer, because even though we only had -- 2 percent of our sample was male teachers, wehad a very large sample and male teachers, men, tend to have about 50 percent boys inthe classroom and 50 percent girls in the classroom, the same as our female teachers.and so when we looked at the data, we found

that female teachers, women, tended to expelboys at 4.5 times the rate of girls and male teachers tended to expel boys at 4.5 timesthe rate of girls. and so there was no significant difference between men and women, however,when we tried to answer the same question for race, it was much more complicated. the reason why, is that the racial compositionof the children is not random in comparison to the racial composition of the teachers.in other words, if the lead teacher is african american, then in our sample, overwhelminglythe likelihood was that the vast majority, if not all the children, were african americanas well. and the same thing if the teacher were latino or latina and spoke spanish, thenpretty much every single one of the children

in the classroom were the spanish-speakingchildren in that school district. race and ethnicity of the children isn't randomlyassigned on the basis of the race and ethnicity or even balanced assigned on the race andethnicity of the teacher, so we really couldn't answer that question. it's an important questionand it's something that we want to get at, but it's not something that we can answerwith that kind of methodology. however, i can tell you that it's a question that we'repursuing, but we're wanting to pursue it with much more in-depth, fine-grain studies thatwe can do in the future. >> tricia haley: we've got another reallyinteresting question. it says, "what do we know about how the relationship between parentsand teachers influences the likelihood of

expulsion?" >> walter gilliam: well, we know from on someof the studies that we're doing here on the early childhood consultation partnership programthat when teachers are given access to the mental health consultation, that means thatthe parents are given access to it too, and one of the byproduct findings we have is thatit tends to increase the amount of cooperation and collaboration between the parents andthe teachers and that that seems to play some role in decreasing the likelihood of childrenexpressing challenging behaviors in the classroom, just having the teachers and the parents onthe same page. i can tell you this much too, and i guessthis really isn't based on hard data as much

as it's based on just my own experiences,having seen many children being expelled from state-funded prek programs and child careprograms and consulting myself and doing early childhood mental health consultant work formany years. i've never seen a case where a child was expelled from a preschool or childcare program where the teacher and the parents knew and liked each other. i've never seenit happen once. and so when i'm providing early childhoodmental health consultation in these programs, my first task is to meet with the teacher,then meet with the parent, find out the story from the parent and then once i find out thatstory from the parent, ask that parent, how comfortable is that parent in sharing thatinformation with the teacher and then using

that as an opportunity to build some empathyand some shared degree of understanding of the child between the parent and the child.if that doesn't solve the problem, it will at least buy me a lot of time to actuallybe able to provide some consultation to the teacher in order to try to have some solutionthat can work. i'm a firm believer in the importance of parentinvolvement, but i'm also a firm believer in the importance of teacher involvement inthe lives of the family as well. it's a bidirectional street and that we really should be focusingon trying to create as strong of a collaboration between our parents and teachers as possible. >> linda smith: here's another question that'sinteresting. "are the consultants that you've

trained or been working with able to identifypoor teaching or environments that could be causing or contributing to the behavior issues?" >> walter gilliam: yes, often. as a matterof fact, in many cases when consultants go out into early childhood classrooms, theyfind things that could be done differently in the classroom that would be beneficialto every single child in the classroom, not just the child who prompted the referral inthe first place. now, in some cases, the teacher does seem to be having very developmentallyappropriate and very consistent behavioral strategies that she's employing in the classroomand nonetheless, there's a child with some very severe, challenging behaviors, but inmany cases it's not just about the child.

it might be about the teacher's practicesalong behavioral management as well or the fit between that child and that teacher. andso a big part of the consultation really isn't necessarily specific about the child, it'sreally much more about what can this teacher be doing differently that would be beneficialto not just this child, but all the other children in the classroom as well as all theother children who will come after these children in the course of this teacher's career. >> tricia haley: great. so i think we havetime for one more question. we had a lot of questions and a lot of them on mental healthconsultations. again, the third webinar will really dig into that, but we have all thesequestions and we'll look forward to thinking

about them more. the last question, "how are we addressingteacher bias that might lead to disproportionality? are early childhood mental health consultantstrained in culturally responsive practices?" >> walter gilliam: i can't speak to that nationally.i don't really know what every state is doing in that, but i do know in the connecticutmodel that there is quite a bit of attention that's paid to that, and when you're talkingabout teacher bias and potential for teacher bias and decisionmaking, it's definitely somethingthat we're looking at much more closely, but it's something that we're having to look atwith some very specialized research protocols that we're going to have to follow in orderto be able to get at that.

you can't just survey teachers regarding doyou think you're biased, because most biases are probably at a fairly subconscious level.you have to have some very specific strategies for how to go about that and that's somethingthat we're pursuing right now. we're hoping to have some better informationon that fairly soon. it's an extremely compelling issue, and it's extremely important, and weneed to be making sure that all of our children get a good start as possible to their educationalcareer and that begins in our preschool and our child care programs. if there are biasesthat are involved in the decision regarding who is being expelled or suspended from ourprograms, then we absolutely have to get as good a handle on it as possible and be ableto get rid of that problem and reduce that

problem to the degree possible. expulsion and suspension is not a child behavior.expulsion and suspensions are adult decisions. the child's behavior might impact that decision,but there's probably a whole host of other things that impact those decisions as well,and we really need to be able to get our head wrapped around that much better in order tobe able to make better suggestions on how to help our teachers. >> tricia haley: i'll just add to that, thatthe third webinar is also going to be looking specifically at culturally responsive practicesand diversity-informed tenets of working with children and families.

>> linda smith: yeah, i think that we do havea lot of other questions which we are not going to be able to get to in this particularwebinar, but we will try to get answers to. it was an excellent conversation and we wantto thank our speaker, walter gilliam, and all of you who participated and for the excellentquestions. we really hope and suggest that you tune intothe next three, because i think you'll get more answers to some of these questions thatwe weren't able to get to today. just finally, as tricia will say, yes, we've gotten morequestions and we will ultimately have these webinars posted online. it does take us alittle bit of time to make sure they're compliant with federal regulations. stay with us, ultimately,you will get them.

>> tricia haley: and just this slide, a bunchof free tools and resources on the acf website looking at all of the different componentsof expulsion and suspension. walter, if you'd got to the last slide, just a reminder ontimes and dates for the last three webinars. so, the next three wednesdays at 1:00 p.m.eastern time for the rest of the webinars. thank you again to walter and linda and thankyou all for joining. we look forward to the next one. have a great day. >> walter gilliam: thank you. [end]