Zero-Tolerance Suspensions For Pre-K Are Racially -- WHAT? THEY SUSPEND PRE-K KIDS??!!11!

Guten Morgen, meine Wonkadamen und Wonkaherren! Feeling cheerful about your sportsball brackets so far? Or even more cheerful because you do not follow sportsball? Well, we are here to stop that good feeling, and make you so broody that you crush out your vape pen into your half-finished, tepid mochaccino, because we are srs blog.

Today's wrist-slitting Big Story from the Associated Press tells us that our nation's educators are starting the school-to-prison pipeline even earlier than we thought, as SIX PERCENT of pre-schools report suspending at least one pre-school child. Naturally, as the Education Department's civil rights division will report today, black children are disproportionately suspended. African-American children make up 18 percent of preschool students, but about half of the suspensions.

Wait, did we say "naturally?" No, not naturally, you stupid pre-school administrators, THAT IS NOT NATURAL AT ALL, STOP IT!

The Feds don't seem to have asked these school systems WHY they suspend pre-school kids. Presumably it is because they are chewing Pop-tarts into gun shapes . Usually, suspensions are a response to violence or threats, and while any sensible person is in favor of not allowing children to beat each other up, maybe pre-K would be an appropriate place to teach kids about Not Hitting?

This mommy blog is not A Expert about early childhood education, but some of us do remember The Sixties, when hyperactive naughty children were just beaten by teachers on a daily basis, which surprisingly did not improve their behavior. Suspensions really started coming into favor about then , like the War on Drugs (that was a Nixon thing long before Nancy Reagan glommed on), and did not work any better than felony time for pot possession.

Then in the 1990s, as mass school shootings became a Thing, zero tolerance policies became a fad , like parachute pants. Unfortunately, zero-tolerance suspensions STAYED popular, because they are WAY cheap and easy compared to actually doing something productive.

It costs time and money to form little pre-K student courts, or divert kids into Don't Hit classes, so some systems figure, why not just send them home? When a problem gets so bad that Yr Wonket agrees with Sally "Gays Equal AIDS Terrorists" Kern about it, that is a strong reason why not.

OK, now that you are good and miserable, brace yourselves for a string of Facebook posts from your high school "friends," blaming this disparity on the Real Racism of 4- and 5-year-old "thugs." We will be curled in a fetal position around this vodka bottle, drinking and saying bad swears for the rest of the day.

[ Associated Press ]