Centering Belonging and Hope for BIPOC Students

In a webinar last April, Oakland preschool teacher Nini Humphrey told fellow educators about a boy who transferred into her classroom in the middle of the year. The young Black preschooler had been labeled “challenging” by his previous teacher and Humphrey soon understood why. He threw chairs, swore, and called the teachers names. But instead of punishing him or calling his parents to come pick him up, as previous teachers had done, Humphrey, who is also Black, did the opposite, centering belonging and hope instead. She gave him leadership roles in her classroom. She worked to set routines and establish trust. “The transition was immense,” Humphrey said. “By the end of the year, the child was able to thrive without feeling like he was ‘the bad child.’”

Until recently in Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), as in many places in the country, strategies to center belonging and hope like Humphrey used were too often the exception. Though the California Department of Education does not require school districts to track suspension or expulsion in preschool [1], experts say that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) families are too often discouraged from keeping their children enrolled in state-funded preschool programs. Families are pushed out in a myriad of ways, including by educators who ask families to pick up their child early multiple times a week due to behavior challenges, suggesting that perhaps this program is not a good fit for their child or that their child's needs are beyond the support the school can offer.

These experiences, scholars say, are often the beginning of both overt and mundane racism that BIPOC children and their families experience in schools. BIPOC children are subject to surveillance and punitive discipline beginning in their early childhood years. Research has shown that young Black children specifically are disciplined at higher rates than their peers, are both over and underrepresented in the special education population, and are more likely to be chronically absent than White children.