I’m ba-ack!!! I hope that you had a wonderful holiday. I am so stuffed. I had to stop in (before the tryptophan kicked in) to tell y’all what is going on here at EPiC.

So… what had happened was… EPiC held a community forum about discipline disparity in schools. I know, we have done this before but until Black and Brown children stop being suspended at high rates, then we have to keep talking and responding. However, with an engaging presentation differently than the Kitchen Table Talks, we are moving from talking to acting.

It started before pre-k. Can you believe that pre-k babies are getting suspended or expelled from preschool? Every time I hear it, I feel shocked and appalled (pearl clutching in 5, 4, 3, 2…). We were given a scenario from the NC Department of Instruction about a preschooler who didn’t nap. For this scenario, we had to tell how we would respond differently as parents and as a teacher. This part was fun, apparently we had a few educators in the room that took a minute to take off that hat (hahaha). I mean they went right into teacher mode (shout out to our educators!!). We got a lot of valuable feedback. As a parent, one person said “I’d ask why other steps were not taken to keep him in the classroom.” This was interesting when another person’s response as a teacher was “I’d find a quick activity for him to do while the others slept, then communicate with the parent for other solutions.” Very different responses from a scenario that was deemed as an in-school suspension. Yup, the baby got sent to the principal’s office for the rest of the day, the rest..of..the..day. In pre-k that’s considered an in-school suspension, y’all my pearls are about to break.

Then we moved on to K-12. The K-12 part of the talk was about the discipline spikes after COVID for Durham Public Schools (DPS) students and Priority 2 of the DPS Strategic Plan. OMG, when we talked about COVID, a lot bubbled up to the surface. Most of it was around trauma, mental health, and stress (both students and teachers). Y’all we didn’t even have to dig into the studies that have been done since COVID. It only drove home the thought that seeing the whole child, not just their bad day is important. It also cemented that listening to students when they express their mental health needs is imperative that we continue to do.

We wrapped it up with Priority 2 from the DPS Strategic Plan. So for those of you that don’t know (and a refresher for others), Priority 2 is where DPS vows to provide a safe and healthy school that supports the whole child. Priority 2 is where we talked about helping DPS to achieve their goals. It comes back to accountability (yup, remember back in September, tough love). Not only is DPS accountable, but we are, as families and community members. This is a different way of advocating for changes in discipline. It was everyone in the room having collective hope of unlearning what we are currently doing, to rethink new practices. It also leads us to critical action.

Critical action?? Yea, critical action, you know, taking everything that we talked about and working actively towards making change. You may think that it’s hard. Well, it will be a long uphill battle if you are doing it alone, but if you had a group of people behind you… you know what they say about strength in numbers. Based on that, EPiC has a few community collectives (we going back to our roots y’all). We currently have an active Early Childhood Education (ECE) Collective and an Exceptional Child (EC) Collective.

Discipline has always been a high concern for EPiC so we started collaborations to end suspension, so we are starting a K-5 Suspension Collective (that is open to everyone, pre-k – 12). I don’t want to spill all the tea, but look out for the invite in January (I’m serious, I need you at this critical moment to disrupt the system).

Well, the tryptophan has officially kicked in *yawn* (sorry). I need to wrap this up ‘cause I’m fading fast. So until next year (dang, next year!), be well and be excel…zzzz…