Mom Wants to Help Other Parents Avoid ‘Traumatizing’ Preschool Expulsions (Exclusive)

• The high rates of preschool expulsions and suspensions are an issue around the country, experts say
• Statistics indicate Black boys make up about half of preschoolers who are removed more than once despite being a far smaller percentage of students
• Tunette Powell experienced this firsthand and says, “I still can’t quite make sense of it”

Tunette Powell’s sons were suspended from preschool a combined 12 times during the course of one year. They were 3 and 4 years old.

“It was definitely a shock and a rock for our family,” says Powell, now 39-year-old mom of three living in San Antonio, Texas. “I still can’t quite make sense of it.”

Powell says she received the first call in March 2014 from the child care center on the Air Force base in Omaha, Neb., where her husband, Jason, was stationed. The school said her 4-year-old son, JJ, was being suspended.  

“I felt like I was being punked,” Powell says.

She says she was told that her son had been crying while eating breakfast with other children. No one asked why he was upset or if anything was wrong — but because he was crying and his nose was running, he was told he needed to leave the table so he wouldn’t spread germs.

The school told her that he threw a chair, so he had to go home, she recalls. But when she spoke to her son, he said he barely pushed the chair.

“It didn’t even fall over,” he told her. “He said, ‘But I was sad that they made me get up and I was crying and no one checked on me.’ ”

The school continued to report behavioral issues: Another time, her 3-year-old, Joah, was suspended because he made a motion like he might hit a teacher but did not.

Powell says she wanted to better understand what was going on with her kids and the other children.

“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.’ ”

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Eventually another preschool parent told Powell she felt Powell’s boys were being treated differently, Powell says.

During a birthday party, the other parent, who is White, said, “Something’s wrong with this, Tunette. 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 says. “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.’ ”

Powell decided to focus on preschool expulsions — an ongoing issue nationwide, studies show — and Black children.

She wrote a doctoral dissertation on the expulsion of Black kids in preschool and interviewed 25 other parents from across the United States.

Statistics indicate Black boys make up about half of preschoolers expelled more than once despite being a far smaller percentage of preschool students.

“It’s so triggering and traumatizing,” Powell says.

One California mother she interviewed had a 3-year-old whom she thought might have a disability. “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 says.

Another mom Powell interviewed was working full time and going to school but then had to drop out of classes because she kept having to pick up her son when he was being suspended.

Powell, now the director of parent and family partnerships at the Children’s Equity Project, says she wants to reframe the discussion of major discipline, like removal, in early childhood programs.

“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 says. “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.”

Walter Gilliam, executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska, has studied preschool expulsions for decades.

Hundreds of thousands of families have been affected, he says, with consequences like learning loss and disruption to social development.

What’s behind it? The factors can be complicated, Gilliam says, including educator stress, overly large class sizes and the ways that COVID-19 changed child behavior.

But solutions stem from supporting kids and teachers better, and fostering stronger relationships between schools and families, such that expulsions become a last resort, he says.

Gilliam has also examined how race and unconscious bias can affect discipline, including by tracking educators’ responses to videos of kids of different races whom the educators believed were misbehaving — but were really paid child actors instructed to simply play together.

“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 says. “And that’s one thing I know is — if you’re looking here for something, chances are greater you’ll find it.”

Today, 10 years after Powell’s oldest two sons were suspended from preschool, all of her boys are thriving.

Her oldest, JJ, is a 15-year-old high school sophomore who excels in advanced academic classes. He loves travel, works at his uncle’s food truck and last summer he won a junior chef competition.

“They had to cook wildebeest in the finals,” Powell says.

Joah is 13, just published his first book, Books or Basketball, and is encouraging other kids to write. He says he wants to write another book.

Her youngest, Jordan, is 10. Powell says says he’s a star athlete and the most empathetic child she’s ever met.

“They’re all very kind kids,” she says. “Still, 10 years later, every time I see an email from anybody’s teacher, my heart starts just racing and I’m very concerned.”

She recently received an email with her one of son’s initials in the subject line.

“When I saw the email, I prepared myself, I’m like, ‘Do I want to read this? What is this going to say?’ Even though I have no reason to feel that way,” she says. “When I read it, it was the most beautiful email about my youngest son just demonstrating so much good character.”