A key goal of the U.S. and its citizens is to promote positive development for young children and their families, particularly those who are marginalized and vulnerable. One way to achieve this goal is to provide access to high-quality early childhood education programs that help prepare young children to be successful when they make the transition into formal schooling and, ultimately, become responsible and productive members of society. Early childhood educators seek to produce these outcomes by helping young children be engaged and ready to learn (Williams et al., 2023). Achieving this goal requires, in part, that early childhood program educators successfully manage the behaviors of the young children in their care to ensure that the caregiving and learning environments are safe, secure, and conducive to learning.

Although there are many elements to the management of early education classrooms (Banghart et al., 2020), the discipline of young children's behavior is a significant facet. Discipline is an adult decision, typically in response to a child's behavior or perceived behavior, that is intended to change that behavior. Positive, proactive forms of discipline promote academic and socio-emotional development and can improve emotional and behavioral regulation. Other forms of discipline are harsh, harm student development, and catalyze a set of events that negatively impacts a student's life trajectory (see Sege and Siegel, 2018). In particular, the use of out-of-school suspensions (OSS) has been found to undermine student wellbeing and educational achievement, as well as contributing to the “school to prison pipeline” by initiating a possible transition from the educational system to the criminal justice system (Morris and Perry, 2016; Welsh and Little, 2018b; Zinsser and Wanless, 2020). Additionally, researchers have found children who were suspended early in their schooling suffer long-term educational consequences (Andrew and Blake, 2023).

Considerable attention has been given to the use of OSS in U.S. public K-12 schools (Fabes et al., 2021a; Perry and Morris, 2014; Skiba and Losen, 2016), yet, with few exceptions (Chow et al., 2021; Gilliam and Shahar, 2006; Zinsser, 2023), there remains little published information in the peer-reviewed scientific literature focusing on the predictors of OSS among children enrolled in U.S. publicly funded pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) schools. Such an oversight is significant as almost 1.4 million children are enrolled in state-funded Pre-K schools with almost 30% of all 4-year-olds in the U.S. enrolled in such schools (National Institute for Early Education Resarch, 2022).

Importantly, the degree to which public Pre-K schools are capable of providing safe and high-quality care and attention is likely in part a reflection of local community resources and opportunities. In the present research, we focus on neighborhood opportunity—the extent to which neighborhoods provide conditions and resources that matter for children's healthy development (e.g., access to healthy food, clean air, homeownership, etc.; see Clemens et al., 2020). Thus, the extent to which a Pre-K school is located in a neighborhood that can provide adequate resources and safety, as well as opportunities for healthy growth and development, likely affects the quality of the Pre-K program (Valentino, 2018). These neighborhood opportunities also likely affect the degree to which a Pre-K school relies on the use of OSS with its young students, although no research exists on this topic. Given this, there is a need for research that can help us better understand how neighborhood opportunity is related to the use of OSS in Pre-K. Such information can then be used to develop strategies to curtail and interrupt the adverse cycle associated with the use of OSS in early childhood education programs. The present study was designed to fill these gaps by examining how the relative level of neighborhood opportunity predicts the prevalence of OSS use with Pre-K public school students, as well as how racial/ethnic and gender disparities in the use of OSS were related to neighborhood opportunity.

Although early childhood education in the U.S. is intended to be inclusive and provide equitable access to developmentally appropriate early childhood education that helps children, families, and communities thrive, many young children are suspended from Pre-K and are thus deprived of the opportunities needed to be successful in school and beyond. Suspension, or the temporary removal of a child from her/his classroom, undermines the goals of helping young children and their families thrive and be prepared for the start of formal schooling (American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on School Health, 2013). Moreover, the adverse consequences of early OSS can be serious and cumulative, as students are separated from their peers, their teachers, and the early educational environment that serves as the foundation for later success. For example, children who experience early suspensions are more likely to hold negative attitudes about school, perform poorly in school, dropout, and experience more subsequent suspensions than children who do not experience OSS (Petras et al., 2011; Sundius and Farneth, 2008). OSS also puts added stress on families who must unexpectedly manage the care of their young child who has been suspended from Pre-K.

Although the use of OSS undermines these goals of supporting and sustaining students, precise national estimates of the use of OSS in U.S. public Pre-K schools are lacking. Gilliam (2005) conducted the first-ever analysis of preschool expulsions in a sample that included data from the 40 U.S. states that provided funding for preschool. Findings from that study suggested that the rates of expulsion (suspension was not included) were three times that of their older peers in K-12 grades and that the rates varied considerably from one state to another. In another study, Gilliam and Shahar (2006) examined rates and predictors of preschool exclusion and suspension in a random sample of schools in Massachusetts and found that 39% of preschool teachers reported expelling at least one child and 15% reported suspending at least one child. Moreover, the expulsion rate for children was found to be 34 times greater than the state-level K-12 rate and more than 13 times greater than the national K-12 expulsion rate. In contrast, rates of preschool suspensions were less than those for K-12. National rates of Pre-K OSS were, however, not reported.

Although Gilliam's research captured national media attention, it was not until nearly a decade later that the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) began collecting suspension data in public Pre-K schools. The Pre-K public school discipline data were released to the public for the first time in 2014. In those data, the U. S. Department of Education (2016) found that about 6% of public Pre-K schools reported suspending at least one child. Moreover, the report identified inequities in the use of suspension for Pre-K children, where Black preschool children were 3.6 times more likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions than white preschoolers, and Black boys, despite comprising 19% of all preschool students, accounted for 45% of all Pre-K suspensions. Similarly, Black girls represented 54% of all female out-of-school suspensions but made up only 20% of the Pre-K female public school enrollment.

Using a different dataset in which preschool OSS was reported by parents (in the 2016 National Child Health Study), the Center for American Progress (Malik, 2017) found that an estimated 50,000 preschoolers were suspended at least once and that about 17,000 preschoolers were expelled. Across all types of settings, these data suggest that roughly 250 preschoolers were being expelled or suspended every school day. Additionally, Chow et al. (2021) found that at least one preschool-aged child was subject to some form of exclusionary discipline in more than 25% of responding teachers' classrooms.

These limited findings provide a foundation for understanding the use of OSS in Pre-K, but as noted by Stegelin (2018), there is a critical need to conduct such research across multiple contexts, including national, state, and community levels. Such research is needed as OSS in U.S. public schooling use has been found to vary substantially from one state to another, from one school district to another, and from one school to another (Fabes et al., 2021b). For instance, in work with K-12 schools, it was found that 10% of the schools were responsible for 50% of the suspensions (Skiba and Rausch, 2006). To date, however, no such work exists for public U.S. Pre-K schools. The present research was designed to address this issue by focusing on the use of OSS in public Pre-K schools and how its use may vary as a function of the quality of neighborhood opportunities that facilitate the growth and wellbeing of young children. Such research is essential for understanding the role of neighborhood factors in predicting the prevalence of and disparities in the use of OSS in Pre-K.

Researchers have found that the degree to which a neighborhood provides resources and opportunities for the healthy development and wellbeing of children has important consequences for both the short- and longer-term outcomes for them, their families, and their broader communities (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2020a). Supportive neighborhood conditions (e.g., safe playgrounds and parks, clean air, healthy foods, etc.) can provide protective and promotive opportunities that help mitigate the effects of adverse experiences (Kim et al., 2019; Newburger et al., 2011). Unfortunately, many children live in neighborhoods that limit access to these supportive resources and conditions and thus do not have access to some of the protective and promotive opportunities that exist in more advantaged neighborhoods, including key elements of housing and food security.

Although a growing body of research has linked neighborhood characteristics to the physical, social, and academic development of young children (e.g., Dupere et al., 2010; Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn, 2000; Witherspoon et al., 2023), much of this research has focused on income-related disparities within a neighborhood (Dupere et al., 2010). For example, schools in low-income neighborhoods tend to have fewer social, financial, and instructional resources, and poorer student achievement than schools in high-income neighborhoods (Baker et al., 2018; Owens, 2010). Moreover, when neighborhoods are highly segregated by income, these disparities in school quality and their associated outcomes have been found to be exacerbated (Owens and Candipan, 2019). Bassok and Galdo (2016), for instance, found that low-income communities of color offered state preschool classrooms that were rated significantly lower in classroom quality than were classrooms that served high-income, low-minority communities. In another study, childcare center quality was found to be lower in disadvantaged neighborhoods than it was in advantaged neighborhoods (Burchinal et al., 2008).

Such disparities in Pre-K quality have significant implications for the children who attend these programs (Hatfield et al., 2016; Weiland et al., 2013). Schools that serve students from disadvantaged backgrounds often employ teachers and administrators with less experience and poorer credentials, have less equipment and technology, and enroll children who are lower-performing and experience more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Research has found, for example, that almost half of all public-school teacher turnover takes place in just one quarter of the population of public schools; namely, high-poverty public schools that serve large number of students of color (Ingersoll et al., 2018). These race/ethnicity-based gaps in Pre-K quality likely also reflect income-based quality disparities, as research suggests that programs that are racially segregated tend to be economically segregated as well (Orfield and Frankenberg, 2014). For instance, Latham et al. (2020) found that the large racial disparities in the quality of Pre-K programs in New York City were partially explained by lack of proximal access to Pre-K programs that are of high quality. It follows that understanding the disparities between neighborhoods and their conditions are important to informing policies and practices that reduce disparities in education and related outcomes.

Despite a rich history of research focused on the impact of neighborhood characteristics on children's development (e.g., Leventhal et al., 2015; McCulloch and Joshi, 2001; Minh et al., 2017), there has been a call for more multidimensional conceptualizations of neighborhood opportunities (McCoy et al., 2023; Wei et al., 2021) and that reflect young children's experiences in their neighborhoods (Browning and Rigolon, 2019; Kiziltaş and Sak, 2018). In the present research, we utilized such a multidimensional assessment of neighborhood opportunity and examined how this predicts how young children are disciplined in their neighborhood Pre-K schools.

Although there is limited research exploring how neighborhood opportunities influence the use of OSS in Pre-K, Zeng et al. (2019) provide some preliminary evidence for this. In this research, community-level ACEs were found to contribute to the likelihood that children received OSS. Based on parent-reported OSS data, these researchers found that the odds ratio for OSS increased by 80% per unit increase in ACEs and suggested that exposure to toxic stress and unsafe and unstable neighborhood environments increases the risk of suspension in Pre-K. Given that ACEs are more likely to be greater in neighborhoods that do not provide the opportunities and resources that foster healthy development, Zeng et al.'s findings support the hypothesis that, compared to high-opportunity neighborhoods, OSS use will be greater among Pre-K children enrolled in programs located in low-opportunity neighborhoods.

Moreover, based on the large body of research documenting the disproportional use of OSS with Black relative to white children and with boys relative to girls (see, for example, Fabes et al., 2021b), we predicted that disparities in OSS would be greater in for young students enrolled in Pre-K schools located in low-opportunity neighborhoods relative to those located in neighborhoods that provide greater opportunities to their young children. Such a prediction is based on the expectation that conditions in low-opportunity neighborhoods undermine teachers' effective classroom management and reinforce implicit and explicit bias, thereby increasing the likelihood that the use of OSS will be disproportionally used with Black and male Pre-K students. This prediction is also based on the fact disadvantaged families tend to be segregated into communities that are low-resourced, high in insecurity and stress, and are subject to stereotyped and discriminative beliefs and practices that propagate experiences related that foster marginalization, bias, and racism (e.g., Chetty et al., 2019; Leventhal et al., 2015).

We tested these hypotheses by integrating national school-level data on the use of OSS in public Pre-K schools with a measure that reflects neighborhood resources and conditions that matter for children's healthy development—The Child Opportunity Index (COI) 2.0. The COI is a summary measure of the quality of the neighborhood for all census tracts in the U.S. in 2015 and reflects a multidimensional characterization of Pre-K communities (see Methods section for more details about the COI). We used these data to ascertain the degree to which disparities exist in the use of OSS in Pre-K programs that are located in neighborhoods that vary in the resources and opportunities they provide.

In the present research, we have three related goals. First, to address the lack of published documentation on the use of OSS in U.S. public Pre-K schools, we present descriptive information detailing the landscape of its use. Second, we examined how variation in the use of OSS in public Pre-K schools was associated with the opportunities provided within their school neighborhoods. We predicted that, relative to Pre-K schools in relatively high-opportunity neighborhoods, both the likelihood of using OSS in a Pre-K school and the count of incidences of use of OSS (controlling for enrollment) will be greater in Pre-K schools located in low-opportunity neighborhoods relative to Pre-K schools in high-opportunity neighborhoods.

The final goal was to examine disparities in the use OSS and how these varied between Pre-K schools located in relatively low- vs. high-opportunity neighborhoods. We expected to find evidence that the use of OSS would be greater for Black relative to white children and for boys relative to girls. We focused our attention on disparities for Black children rather than other marginalized racial/ethnic groups of students based on data showing that Black students receive the most inequitable use of OSS (e.g., McIntosh et al., 2021). Importantly, we expected that these disparities would be greater in Pre-K schools in low-opportunity neighborhoods compared to those located in high-opportunity neighborhoods.

Despite a robust literature on out-of-school suspensions (OSS) among K-12 populations, limited national estimates of OSS are available for publicly funded U.S. Pre-K schools. Moreover, knowledge of the role of neighborhood factors in the use of OSS is greatly understudied. The present research was designed to address these limitations by examining the relation of community opportunities to the use of OSS with Pre-K children enrolled in U.S. public schools. Using national data, we found that Pre-K schools located in low-opportunity neighborhoods were more likely to suspend young students than those schools located in neighborhoods that were relatively richer in the opportunities and resources they provide. Additionally, we found that the Black/white and male/female disparities in the use of OSS were greater in Pre-K schools located in lower- than higher-opportunity neighborhoods. These findings highlight the role of neighborhood context related to how Pre-K schools function and the link this has to the use of OSS with young students.

As noted previously, there is considerable research documenting the problems associated with concentrated neighborhood advantage/disadvantage (Catherine et al., 2024; Coulton et al., 1996). The current research adds to the extant research by focusing on the role of neighborhood advantage/disadvantage in the use of OSS with Pre-K students but does so using a more multidimensional assessment of neighborhood opportunity (e.g., the Child Opportunity Index 2.0; Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2014). Using national data, the results of this research suggest that OSS is more likely to occur and be used at higher rates in Pre-K schools in low- relative to high-opportunity neighborhoods. Additionally, the results revealed that disparities in the use of OSS for Black and male students were greater in low-opportunity Pre-K schools.

These findings are in line with other research on the use of OSS that has found that Black and male students are disproportionally likely to be suspended (Bottiani et al., 2017; Ispa-Landa, 2017; U. S. Government Accountability Office, 2018; Welsh and Little, 2018a). Fabes et al. (2024) explored these disproportionalities in depth and found strong evidence of consistency in across time, place, and a wide variety of school and district qualities. Fabes et al. (2024) also found that although there has been a general decline in suspension rates over the past decade or so, the disparities in the use of OSS remain generally at the same levels across this period.

Such findings suggest that when OSS is used, there is a strong tendency to use it inequitably (Zinsser and Wanless, 2020). Moreover, there is a growing need for research directed at understanding the ways in which schools might disrupt inequities in the use of OSS (see Sartain et al., 2015; Welsh et al., 2023). Using the sample of all U.S. public schools, Fabes et al. (2024) identified schools that stopped the use of OSS and noted that there were thousands that did so. Importantly, preliminary analyses suggested that these schools did not suffer negative consequences as a result of their decisions to stop using OSS. Thus, many schools were able to find alternative ways to manage classroom behavior that did not rely on removing students from school. One important avenue for further research is to gain a better understanding about these schools and how these schools addressed classroom management in ways that do not exclude students from the classroom.

As with any research, there are important limitations to consider when interpreting our findings. Although the sample of Pre-K public schools was large, the data were only available at the school level. As such, we could not determine how individual children were affected or differentially impacted by the use of OSS. Moreover, the results presented in this research are correlational and caution must be used to avoid drawing causal conclusions.

That only about 5% of public Pre-K schools reported using OSS may reflect a limitation as to how widespread the issues of OSS in Pre-K really are. Given that the data were obtained only from public Pre-K schools the findings tell us nothing about OSS in private Pre-K schools or other childcare settings, contexts where many children are placed in their early years (only about 40% of 3- to 5-year-olds were enrolled in public Pre-K programs in 2022; NCES, 2023). Additionally, the CRDC does not contain information about “soft suspensions” that are less formal than traditional suspensions (e.g., sending a child home early due to an incident related to behavior, requiring partial day attendance, etc.). As such, the counts and rates of OSS are likely to be underestimated, especially in a Pre-K setting where these “soft suspensions” are commonly used but not officially reported.

Despite these limitations, the findings of the present study add significantly to our understanding of the use of OSS and disparities in its use, in public Pre-K schools in the U.S. That the use of OSS in public Pre-K schools was found to be tied to the neighborhood resources in which the schools reside is a new finding that highlights the fact that one of the ways that neighborhoods influence children's health and wellbeing is through the disciplinary culture of its schools. The present findings also highlight that disparities in the use of OSS are tied to these neighborhood opportunities and conditions. To improve outcomes for children, these findings suggest that we must move beyond a focus on individual behaviors and school qualities and focus on changing neighborhood conditions and on reducing neighborhood inequities (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2020b).