An event held on May 8, 2008 at the University of Texas highlighted the issues of a survey of licensed child care and registered family child care centers across Texas.
The findings of that survey showed the following:
• 66% said that they have children in care with suspected and diagnosed behavioral or emotional difficulties
• 58% have seen an increase in challenging behaviors in the past 5 years
• 60% said that it had become necessary to ask a parent to remove the child from care
• 81% said that they had received somewhat or no training at all to address emotional behaviors
• 24% received no training to address emotional behaviors
Texas expels more preschoolers than double the amount of any other state in the U.S. This is in spite of the fact that Texas has a state policy against expelling the state’s youngest pupils.
These expulsions cost the state and the children who are denied an education during their earliest years. In the past 5 years 110 Texas school districts have referred Pre-K and Kindergarten students to Alternative Discipline Programs. The state policy is that children under the age of six are not to be referred to such programs unless they bring a firearm into the school. More than 3,000 first graders were also referred to the alternative programs.
While behavioural problems do make it difficult for a child to excel in the public school setting when children are expelled they have to also deal with cognitive delays as well. Texas retained 47,000 children in Kindergarten through second grade in the 2005-2006 school year at the cost of $343 million dollars to the state. Most of these retentions dealt with behavioral problems and not academic ones.
