Two recent articles in the Baltimore Sun caught my attention. One focused on the suspension and expulsion of preschool children; the other on the lack of psychiatric care for mentally ill adults. As the director of a nonprofit program that provides early childhood behavioral health, I have repeatedly seen the expulsion of very young children from early childhood programs for a variety of disruptive behaviors. As the adoptive parent of a child with developmental disabilities and mental illness, I know firsthand the dearth of adequate psychiatric care for children and adults. The link between these two seemingly different issues is essential to understand.

As reported in the joint U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services Policy Statement on Expulsion and Suspension Policies in Early Childhood Settings, “young students who are expelled or suspended are as much as 10 times more likely to drop out of high school, experience academic failure and grade retention, hold negative school attitudes and face incarceration than those who are not.” Our failure to invest appropriate resources in early childhood leads to large expenditures by taxpayers to incarcerate adults with mental illness. The Maryland State Department of Education invests dollars in the Early Childhood Mental Health program. This statewide program, funded each fiscal year, supports an early childhood consultation model to assist those who have concerns about a child's social and emotional development, and where the child is at risk of suspension or expulsion.

The program has been flat funded since it's inception and is vastly inadequate. In Baltimore County for example, the demand for ECMH services annually exceeds the funded capacity. When this occurs, children are placed on a wait list for services. Of those children placed on a wait list, 60 percent will be expelled from their early childhood program. During the past nine years, 97 percent of children receiving timely services have remained in their program. This year, funding in Baltimore County was expended in March. There are no alternatives for families who have children at risk of suspension and expulsion. For many families, their child's behavioral challenges result in parental unemployment when the child is expelled from care and the mom or dad needs to stay home with the child.

The young children we see in preschools, Head Start classrooms, child care centers and family child care homes exhibit behaviors that range from inattention to throwing chairs, running from the classroom and attacking peers and staff. Many of these children are struggling with undiagnosed speech or language delays, developmental disabilities, exposure to trauma or early onset mental health concerns. The challenges these children face are sometimes the result of family circumstances, but more often the families are struggling to understand and support a child they love but cannot help.

My adopted son arrived in my home at almost 7 years of age without any early intervention. Our experience in the past six years with the public mental health system and the public school system has been difficult and often traumatic for my son and our family, despite my professional experience and knowledge. Like many parents raising a child with mental illness, I have sat in an emergency room on a hard plastic chair for over 24 hours with a child needing psychiatric hospitalization with no beds available. I have been called to a public elementary school where the principal thought an appropriate response to a young traumatized child with a mental illness was to call 911 and have him handcuffed. As my son approaches the teen years, I fear potential interactions with law enforcement and incarceration instead of the intensive psychiatric care he needs and which is often unavailable.

Would early childhood intervention have made a difference for my son? I do not know, but I do know that it makes a significant difference for many, many young children and their families who have been a part of our early childhood behavioral heath services over the past nine years. What will Maryland do to resolve the crisis in our psychiatric systems and the lack of adequate behavioral supports for our preschoolers? Will Gov. Larry Hogan, our legislature and our public agencies recognize the link between these two significant policy concerns? Or will we continue on, business as usual, consigning our troubled youngest citizens to systems that from preschool on are inadequate at best and often detrimental. Time will tell, but for the many preschoolers in need of help now, time is already running out.

Sharon Huffman is director of Project ACT (All Children Together) within the nonprofit Abilities Network. Her email is shuffman@abilitiesnetwork.org.