Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Trump's Head Start rule would hand preschool expulsion decisions to local providers
Trump's Head Start proposal would drop federal rules against suspending and expelling preschoolers, leaving students in 70% of states with fewer guardrails. Each provider would write its own discipline policy under state licensing rules, so local directors would decide when a child can be removed.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
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What happened
- South Carolina suspended 604 public preschoolers a total of 1,181 times in 2023-24, while Minnesota reported no preschool suspensions at all.
- Florida expelled 466 public preschoolers that year, more than any other state.
- When Xavier Rogers began biting and hitting around age two, his Chicago-area Early Head Start gave his family a mental-health team and kept him in class.
- The public can comment on the proposed rule through Oct. 6.
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Why it matters
- constraint Head Start would stop setting one national discipline floor, so whether a preschooler can be removed would depend on which state the program operates in.
- exposure Children in states without their own limits, Florida and South Carolina among them, would face more risk of removal, and suspensions and expulsions are linked to lower achievement, lower graduation rates and depression.
- cost When a program removes a child, the burden moves to the parent, who could be left scrambling to find other care.
Tying discipline to state licensing requirements means a Head Start child's protection from removal would depend on the state's own code [2]. Illinois already has rules against suspending and expelling preschoolers, so a family there, like that of Joanna Isitt, Xavier's mother, would keep roughly the protection it has now [3]. South Carolina and Florida have no such rules [3]. In those states the provider's own policy would be the only limit [2].
The state laws that do exist are narrower than the count suggests. Around half of them appear to apply to all children under 5, the age group Head Start serves, according to researchers at Arizona State University's Children's Equity Project [5]. Only Minnesota's rules explicitly include Head Start programs [5].
Wanda Minick, executive director of the Florida Head Start Association, said: "If the state of Florida doesn't have standards related to suspension and expulsion, and that's what the administration wants us to go by ... I think as a country we should all be very concerned that we're taking our most vulnerable children and families and potentially putting them in an environment where they're going to have no protections" [16]. Her concern has support in the record. An analysis of 2023-24 federal data by The 74 and the Associated Press found that states with flexible rules or no laws remove the most preschoolers, while states with tighter rules suspend far fewer [17]. The data covers pre-kindergartners in public school districts, not Head Start classrooms [8]. South Carolina's figures work out to close to two suspensions for every child suspended [1].
Advocates said the proposal also rolls back tools that keep behaviour from escalating, including lower adult-to-child ratios and a required number of monthly mental-health consultations [10]. The support Xavier received comes from those same longstanding regulations [18]. "With these supports in place, I feel like he has grown tremendously," said Isitt, who is herself a Head Start teacher [15].
The two changes would give a program director a discipline decision and a budget decision at once. In a state with no rule of its own, the director would choose between paying for consultation that the federal rule, by the advocates' account, would no longer require, and adopting a policy that permits removal [2][10]. The report does not include the administration's reasoning, what the consultations cost a program, or how liability for a removal would be handled.
What to watch
- Whether the final rule keeps the required monthly mental-health consultations and lower adult-to-child ratios once the comment period closes.
- Whether South Carolina, Florida or other states without their own limits adopt state rules on suspending and expelling preschoolers.
- Any federal count of suspensions and expulsions inside Head Start programs themselves, which the public-school data does not measure.