Sitting in a conference room alone at Cabot School in early December, a first-grader drew two pictures of several stick figures with X’s for eyes. The boy’s mother had once instructed him to draw “comic strips” when he was frustrated, instead of acting out physically.
School staff had sent him to the conference room after he had shoved a classmate, who had earlier cut him in line while the class was sledding. When asked about the drawings later, he reportedly told school staff “I am Death” and named several of the figures in the drawings as his classmates.
The school’s response? To suspend the child for 10 days.
In a letter to his parents, principal Glenda Cresto said the drawing “depicted a specific threat of violence,” and said the boy would not be allowed to come on campus or participate in any co-curricular activities for the length of his discipline.
“We take threats of violence very seriously, and are committed to ensuring the safety and well being of all of our students,” Cresto wrote.
The suspension stunned the boy’s parents, who say they struggle to understand how a 6-year-old could present a credible threat. VTDigger is not naming them to protect the identity of the child.
“I hadn’t heard of another case like this. Where the child was as young as mine, getting suspended for 10 days — I mean, I’ve never heard of it,” his mother said.
The suspension also threw a wrench in the professional lives of his parents, both of whom work outside the home.
“It’s just crazy to do that to two working parents,” she said.
Exclusionary discipline in the early grades is increasingly controversial, and some districts and states are considering banning the practice altogether. But in Vermont, data collected by the state show hundreds of very young children were suspended from class last year alone.
Students who are suspended or expelled are far more likely to have worse educational outcomes than their peers, and research consistently shows that it is kids of color and students with disabilities who are the most likely to get kicked out of the classroom. In 2015, a report from Vermont Legal Aid found that students of color and students with disabilities were two to three times more likely to be disciplined than their white, non-disabled peers.
Elementary school students in the Green Mountain State are suspended far less often than kids in middle and high school, according to data provided by the Agency of Education. But exclusionary discipline in the younger grades is not rare.
Eighty-eight first graders received suspensions last school year, according to the state. In total, more than 300 students in grades 1 through 3 were suspended that year. Numbers provided by the state combined in-school and out-of-school suspensions, including suspensions for less than a full day, according to an agency spokesperson.
Both Rep. Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, and Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, who chair Vermont’s House and Senate education committees, said it was difficult to parse how alarming these numbers were, given that they combined out-of-school and in-school suspensions.
But Webb added that the Cabot situation sounded, on its face at least, like a “very concerning story,” and that she intended to follow up with the Agency of Education.
“These are critical years for social emotional development where children learn to function within a community. Such behaviors are opportunities for learning and should be treated as such,” she said.
The boy in Cabot is also bi-racial, and his parents said he is often picked on and called racial slurs by his classmates. They haven’t pursued those issues with the school in the past, they said, out of concern that it would only bring more unwanted attention to their son.
And while they worry that their child’s race contributed to the school’s response to what they consider benign, typical behavior for a 6-year-old, they also repeatedly tried to de-emphasize racism as their chief concern.
“It’s more of the suspension thing, than the racial thing, for us. That we don’t think it’s fair for kids under 10 to be suspended at all. No matter what color they are,” the boy’s father said.
School officials declined to discuss the suspension with VTDigger, citing confidentiality protections.
At a reentry meeting with the school in late December, at the conclusion of the boy’s suspension, district officials reportedly told his parents and an advocate brought by the family that the discipline was a reaction to more than the boy’s drawing. His parents say school officials told them he had acted aggressively toward his peers on several prior occasions, including by shoving another child that had cut him in line while the class was sledding.
This, too, surprised the boy’s parents. School officials had made no mention of these prior episodes in their written communication to the family notifying them of their son’s suspension.
And it also left them assuming the worst — that school officials were routinely opting to simply separate their son from his peers, instead of working constructively with him to address misbehavior.
Emails between school officials and the family from earlier in the year, shared by the boy’s parents, do indicate their son did sometimes act inappropriately. The first grader sometimes swore at his classmates and school employees, and at one point urinated outside.
But those same emails also suggested that school officials were working to bring the boy back with his peers as quickly as possible, as soon as he was settled down and ready to return to the classroom.
The boy, meanwhile, had regularly returned home from school distraught, his parents said, complaining that he had been pulled out and left alone in a conference room all day. Their meeting with school officials left them under the impression that this was precisely what was happening.
“They kept him out for the whole day, over tiny little things,” his father said.
Marilyn Mahusky, a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid, said parents frequently call the organization when their kids are kicked out of class.
A trend in Vermont schools — as elsewhere in the country — toward restorative justice and early intervention emphasizes addressing the root cause of a child’s behavioral problems instead of simply punishing them.
“The response should not be suspension. There ought to be services that are put in place,” Mahusky said.
Critics of exclusionary discipline argue that it only further alienates children who are struggling from school. A policy statement from the U.S. Department of Education notes that young children who are suspended or expelled are 10 times more likely to drop out of high school, experience academic failure, hold negative attitudes toward school, and face incarceration than those who are not.
But parents still often feel like schools are unfairly excluding their children from class, often for long stretches of time. And Mahusky said schools should be thinking twice, in particular, about suspending very young children.
“I think it’s very concerning to suspend a 6-year-old child for 10 days. That’s a pretty young child to be suspended — for any behavior,” she said.
In an email, Mark Tucker, the superintendent of the Caledonia Central Supervisory Union, declined to discuss the 6-year-old’s case, citing confidentiality concerns. But he said the district’s schools used suspensions and expulsions extremely infrequently, and maintain “extensive internal supports” to help students who are acting out.
“These supports are based on positive behavioral intervention principles, and they focus on two key areas – understanding and then addressing the infraction(s) in a prosocial manner, and returning the student to class as soon as they are ready,” he wrote.
Tucker said that the district does not treat the decision to suspend a very young child differently than it does the decision to suspend an older one, although he added that a first grader wouldn’t necessarily be held to the same behavioral standards as a junior in high school.
“Decisions on suspension happen when the internal interventions are unsuccessful and/or the behavior is egregious. They are episodic, case-based, and rare,” he said.
Reading Tucker’s quote, the Cabot first grader’s father laughed.
“It’s not rare for my son,” he said.
