You kids have a place. Just not with us.

So. Here we are again.

My younger daughter's preschool told us we need to find another care site for her, "sooner rather than later." Her needs are more than they can handle. I have opinions about the reasons (shocking, I know).

In all fairness, they tried to the best of their abilities. What they did is, to them, the full extent of what they could do.

However, as a parent, I expect better than a system where a child's needs can exceed what the adults caring for her have been given to work with.

And at the same time, I don't.

My brain lives in that split. I expect more, and I expect exactly this. That's the bleakest part.

We have been here before. Different kid, different school, uncomfortably similar circumstances, same family rearranging work and care and calling around, trying to figure out where our child is supposed to go next. Where she fits in.

History repeats itself, so I am not surprised. Forgive me for still hoping we can build something better than this.

What does “the best they can” actually mean?

I have never fully embraced the idea that people are always doing the best they can. What actually makes it possible for someone to do better?

One behavior-change framework offers a less tidy answer: people act when capability, opportunity, and motivation align. Wanting to do better is important, but so is skill, time, staffing, habits, fear, and what the surrounding system makes possible.

Maybe "the best they can" is neither a full excuse nor a lie. Maybe it describes a limit.

And limits can still be challenged, funded, trained, and changed.

Preschool protections are a patchwork, and what a program is officially called can change which protections apply. In Vermont, children under eight in public schools, approved independent schools, and prequalified private pre-K programs  generally cannot be suspended or expelled unless they pose an imminent threat of harm or danger to others. Licensed child-care programs are also supposed to work with families and professionals on a plan aimed at keeping a child enrolled before moving to expulsion. That does not mean children are never pushed out.

Those requirements still have to be carried out by real people, in real classrooms, with the staff and support they can actually get.

Vermont does have ways for child-care programs to get more help. Depending on the program and the child, that can include special education through the local school district, consultation and behavioral support, or grants that can pay for training, equipment, or even an additional person in the classroom.

But none of those things magically produces another qualified adult the moment a classroom needs one.

Eligibility has to be established. Programs have to qualify for some funding. Applications have to be submitted. Different agencies and systems have to talk to each other. And all of that has to happen while the classroom is still running every day.

It means the distance between what is prohibited, what is reported, and what a family experiences can get very complicated.

I also recognize that the child-care workforce is burned out and understaffed, particularly when programs need qualified staff. That part is not imaginary.

Vermont's 2026 Act 76 monitoring report calls workforce shortages the single largest barrier to expanding child-care supply and reports an average 2024 child-care wage of $18.93 an hour.

And the staffing crisis doesn't erase what happens to the child when all of the available resources still aren't enough.

What does the child learn?

What does a 3-year-old eventually make of being the person who has to leave?

Maybe she gives it a meaning I would never guess. Maybe she barely remembers it at all. I don't know. Research doesn't give me permission to pretend I know.

But uncertainty doesn't make me stop wondering.

Everyone loves to tell you kids are resilient, and I always want to ask what exactly they mean by that. Physically? Emotionally? Mentally? Because children can look "just fine" while building an entire understanding of themselves from what keeps happening around them.

Therapists would be out of a job if that weren't the case.

We can tell them all day that they're perfect just the way they are, but kids dgaf what you say. They care what you do.

And actions become information.

If you keep being the child who has to leave, what do you decide the common denominator is?

Maybe it becomes I don't belong. Maybe it becomes something is fundamentally wrong with me. I can't prove preschool exclusion creates either belief in a particular child, and I'm not going to pretend research says something it doesn't.

In fact, a systematic review found that research on the exact consequences of exclusion in early childhood is still minimal, and much of the broader discipline literature is correlational rather than proof that exclusion caused a later outcome.

But still, I ask:

What does repeated experience teach when adults say one thing and the doors keep pointing somewhere else?

What does exclusion mean when you're 3? Or 5? Or 8?

Yes, it even has a name

Now, you might be thinking, wow, this is unheard of. But I hate to tell you this: it is not.

The foundational national study found that children in state-funded pre-K were expelled at more than three times the rate of K-12 students. Boys were expelled more than 4.5 times as often as girls, and Black preschoolers about twice as often as Latino and white preschoolers.

Even with Vermont's restrictions, 46 exclusionary-discipline incidents involving children enrolled in UPK were reported between October 2023 and September 2024. Forty-seven percent involved children with IEPs; 33 incidents occurred in private programs and 13 in school-based programs.

And those numbers still cannot capture every unofficial removal. Researchers call one version "soft expulsion": practices that leave a family technically free to stay but make staying practically untenable.

In a 2024 study of teachers and administrators working under non-expulsion policies, about one-third of administrators, and slightly fewer teachers, reported suggesting that a school was not a good match for a child without formally requiring the child to leave. Participants also endorsed sending a child home to convince parents that the behavior was a serious concern.

I don't think every person doing this is sitting around looking for a loophole. Sometimes a program has reached the edge of what it can support with the people and resources it has.

But the child is still the one to leave.

And there you have it: expulsion that isn't official but also isn't an option.

So where is the line between a program reaching its limit and a system that keeps letting programs reach that limit without getting enough help in time?

How many times can we send a child somewhere else because somewhere else might have the resources this place doesn't?

How many times can we tell a child there's a place for them while every decision points them toward the next door?

Which reveals an even bigger question.

What are we actually willing to provide?

Vermont is fucking covered in values. Black Lives Matter signs. Love is love signs. Drive around long enough, and you get a pretty clear picture of how people here understand themselves and the kind of community they believe they are creating.

We all carry around beliefs about who we are.

Eventually, life tests whether those beliefs can withstand another person's actual needs. Inclusion sounds uncomplicated until the child screams through circle time, hits another kid, needs another adult, or communicates in a way the room was not built to understand.

Then the value stops being a sign in the yard and starts becoming an obligation.

And I don't think Vermont's whiteness is separate from any of this.

Race and disability are not the same thing. But I think overwhelmingly white communities can make it particularly easy for white people to understand themselves as inclusive without having that understanding tested very often.

We can support inclusion as an idea. We can put the signs in our yards and mean every word on them.

Eventually, those beliefs have to show up in what we fund and make available: enough staff, specialized training, lower ratios when they're needed, consultation that actually reaches the classroom.

A program can sincerely want to include a child and still not have what it needs to do it.

So how inclusive are we if keeping that child in the room depends on whether one individual program can cobble together enough support in time?

What I see is a system that keeps pushing responsibility to the next place. One program hits its limit, and the family starts looking again. Maybe public school later. Maybe another program. Maybe more funding, another staff person, or someone, somewhere, with the resources and support to keep your kid in the room.

At that point, "somewhere else" starts doing a lot of fucking work for a place that has no real location.

There is evidence that capacity is not fixed. Vermont reports that UPK sites implementing its Early MTSS/Pyramid Model had 93% lower suspension and expulsion rates than non-implementation sites between fall 2024 and spring 2025. That comparison does not prove the model caused the difference. But it does make one thing harder to deny: what a program can handle changes when its training, consultation, systems, and support change.

After enough rounds of this, I start wondering where the line actually is.

When does "we can't support this child" become exclusion?

How many places get to say "somewhere else" before "somewhere else" stops being a place?

Because to me, it looks like this:

You kids have a place, just not with us.