It’s shocking: Preschoolers are three times more likely to be expelled than children in elementary, middle and high school, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. Boys are four times more likely than girls to be kicked out, and African American children are twice as likely as Latinx and White children.
One organization with childcare centers and mental health providers in Kentucky and Ohio began a long journey 15 years ago, when they began hearing about young kids getting expelled. By integrating a whole family approach and the science of adverse childhood experiences, the Consortium for Resilient Young Children (CRYC) took a radically different approach to help little kids stay in school.
“We came together 15 years ago to start addressing the growing need for social emotional supports for young children,” says Carolyn Brinkmann. “Our organizations were getting phone calls from their own programs about younger children being expelled from preschool and childcare, and we tried to figure out how to start responding to that.”
Brinkmann is the director for the Resilient Children and Families Program (RCFP), a coaching and training arm of the CRYC. The CRYC comprises five childcare or educational agencies and three mental health provider agencies in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky. The RCFP provides coaching and training to around 50 community-based programs that serve around 1,541 children.
Brinkmann and her colleagues began by looking for programs that address stressors and promote resilience in the whole family.
“We’re not working with little ones in a vacuum,” says Whitney Cundiff, the team leader of early childhood services for Northkey Community Care in Covington, Kentucky, part of the consortium. Along with Brinkmann, Cundiff led the research and training for the Consortium and they decided to use something commonly known as a two-generational approach—little kids and their parents or caregivers.
In 2008, Brinkmann trained childcare providers in the Strengthening Families Protective Factors approach, a framework developed by the Center for the Study of Social Policy. It includes building resilience in parents, strengthening families’ social connections in their communities, educating parents about child development, and helping parents link up with organizations that can help them when they’re struggling to feed and house their families or provide other basic needs. It does not, however, train people in PACEs science.
Then, in 2016, the RCFP joined a Cincinnati-based collaborative called Joining Forces for Children, a cross-sector collaborative that focuses on building resilience and preventing adversity in children and families. Among its founding members was Cincinnati Children’s Hospital pediatrician, Dr. Robert Shapiro, who was interested in their two-generational focus.
“He wanted us to think about how we could get childcare providers to do more in-depth work when it came to understanding and preventing ACEs,” Brinkmann says.
The term ACEs, or adverse childhood experiences, comes from the landmark Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which tied 10 types of childhood trauma —such as experiencing or witnessing abuse, neglect, or having a parent with mental health or addiction struggles—to health problems in adulthood in 17,000 adults. The study found that ACEs were remarkably common, with most people reporting at least one ACE. People who have four or more different types of ACEs —about 12 percent of the population—have a 460 percent higher risk of depression and a 700 percent higher risk of becoming an alcoholic, compared with people who have no ACEs. (PACEs Science 101; Got Your ACE/Resilience Score?)
By David Levine, 
