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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
My 2-year-old son was booted out of his preschool for biting -- and now my wife and I are facing a summer of hell.
May 28, 2005 | One afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I picked up my son Elijah from school. The other kids were all napping or playing quietly. His teacher was sitting at a low table with him, in a chair four sizes too small for her. She was surrounded by a palpable aura of exhaustion and defeat.
"I'm at my wit's end," she said.
This wasn't some early-childhood education major in her first job since graduation. Elijah's teacher had been doing this for 25 years. And now she was admitting defeat at the hands of a 2-year-old.
"He bit again today," she said. "There was blood. We've tried everything. We can't stop him."
The next day, Elijah chomped on another kid, and scratched still another one over the eye. The day after that was a Friday. An afternoon teaching assistant called us at home. Elijah had put a rock up his nose, and they couldn't get it out. When we picked him up to take him to a doctor who would stick a vacuum up his schnozzle, Elijah's teacher told us we had to have a conference Monday afternoon.
"We're probably going to talk about solutions," my wife, Regina, said.
"No, we're not," I said. "They're gonna expel him."
"Don't be negative," she said.
That Monday, Regina took Elijah to school in the morning. Teacher was there, a cloud of dread hanging over her. "I got a call at home about the rock," teacher said. "Last week, I pulled another rock out of his nose. Two weeks ago, I pulled spaghetti out of his nose."
Suddenly, Regina realized that the school was probably going to posit one "solution." She came home and said: "If they do boot him out, screw them. I'm tired of feeling like I have a child who's especially difficult. Every kid has his issues. It's not like he's 7 years old and doing this."
"Yeah!" I said. "Screw them!"
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The very same day we were called in for a meeting at Elijah's preschool, the Yale Child Study Center released a report, "Pre-kindergartners Left Behind," which said preschool students were being expelled, across the country, at three times the rate of all students from kindergarten to 12th grade combined, and that a high percentage of them were boys. Karen Hill-Scott, an expert on "children's development and their readiness for school," told the New York Times: "What the data tells us, as does the show 'Supernanny,' is that there are a lot of out-of-control kids out there." Yes, some of the kids are immature or even borderline violent, but there's a reason for that: They're kids.
The real problem here, one that the study barely addresses, is that parents, because they have to work, have no choice but to send kids to expensive, overcrowded preschools, for far more hours a week than kids are emotionally and mentally ready to handle. The waiting lists for the "best" schools are as long as those for some private high schools. Even getting accepted at second- and third-tier schools takes months. Many preschools have no reputation to protect, few standards to follow, and a long line of desperate parents at the gates, so they don't have to deal with your kid if he or she is hard work. There's always someone behind you waiting to pony up the $200 to $500 a month.
The survey backs this up. Expulsion rates are far higher in "faith-based" and for-profit programs than they are in Head Start schools and preschools located in public-school classrooms. Publicly funded schools have easier access to behavioral consultants, often as paid staff, who can step in to help teachers with difficult cases. But those of us who have their kids elsewhere are just shit out of luck.
Except for the few hours a week when she teaches a class at the local community college, my wife and I both work at home. The house is small. I write in a corner of the living room, and Regina, when she can, goes to paint in the garage. Even if we hired an inexperienced nanny on the cheap, the kid would still be underfoot most of the day, screeching. We're in a strangely common situation: If we don't put our kid in preschool, we can't afford to send him to preschool. In the last two months, we've had to put our taxes on a credit card, and put our house on the market because that's the only way we're going to be able to pay off our credit-card debt. This is one of those years that, hopefully, we'll be able to look back at and say, "That was one of those years."
When Elijah was around 14 months old, we started looking. Regina hadn't worked since he was born, and her brain was starting to melt out her ears. The two hours a day of "daddy time" that we'd set aside for me were only occasionally tenable. I may have been working in the same room where we kept the diaper bag, but I was still working. We had a couple of flimsy recommendations from friends. Most preschools don't have much Web presence. So we flipped open the phone book.
We got ourselves on the waiting lists at two Jewish schools, but there won't be an opening at either of them until 5750, and I don't mean the Hebrew calendar. There was a near-miss where we almost sent Elijah to an outlet of a for-profit chain school that mostly preys on children of healthcare employees, and a brush with a place that was run by uptight marms out of a Dickens novel. One afternoon, we got a call from our fourth or fifth choice, a not incredibly expensive Montessori school 10 minutes away from our house. They had our check within an hour.
Elijah was in school from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The school was OK. Within a few months, Elijah knew his alphabet, his days of the week, the state of Texas on sight, seemingly hundreds of songs, and he could count to 40. At the same time, they showed the kids Barney videos while they were changing their diapers and gave them Country Time lemonade while calling it "juice." When we complained, the director ignored us. But at least we had our mornings.
And then he started to bite.
