A four-year-old boy has been hurling chairs in a preschool classroom in northern Virginia. Not in a symbolic sense. real chairs. Redirecting, absorbing, and hoping the phase passes is how his teacher, who is underpaid and overworked in a classroom of fifteen, has been handling it mostly on her own. Usually, it doesn’t. And in far too many instances across the nation, the next step is a suspension or something similar: a phone call requesting that a parent pick up the child early, repeatedly, until the child simply stops returning.
Virginia made an alternative attempt. The state Department of Education provided funding for a pilot program that integrated mental health consultants into early childhood classrooms beginning in the 2021–2022 academic year. not to assess the kids. not to label them or get the paperwork ready for a referral to a specialist. With the specific objective of keeping students in their seats and in their programs, the consultants collaborated with teachers by coaching, advising, and observing. The early results were significant enough across 45 preschool classrooms and 30 programs that the question changed from whether it worked to a more difficult one: how do you do this everywhere?
Anyone who has seen social programs grow will almost immediately recognize this tension between what is feasible in a controlled pilot and what survives contact with reality at scale. The Virginia model had real benefits: it was free for participants, created with feedback from families and educators, and purposefully avoided the pitfall that so many well-meaning interventions fall into. Consultants were instructed not to approach students in classrooms as issues that needed to be resolved. That framing is more important than it may seem.
When adults in educational settings operate from a deficit model, which assumes that a struggling child is just broken and needs to be fixed, they cause a specific kind of harm. This was taken seriously by Virginia’s pilot, which occasionally led to conflict. When a teacher referred a particular child for consultation, the natural tendency was to concentrate solely on the behavior of that child. However, it is fairly evident from the research that children’s social and emotional development takes place in relationships with peers, adults, and environments that are influenced by funding, policy, and a teacher’s own degree of fatigue. Ignoring all of that and trying to fix a child is, at best, insufficient.
The focus groups showed that even the best-designed interventions are subtly undermined by the structural conditions of early childhood education. Twenty participants, including educators, directors, and families, spoke with surprising candor. Teachers who earn wages that necessitate working two jobs lack the mental capacity to learn new strategies during naps, which are frequently the only opportunities for professional growth. Programs that lack planning time are unable to develop the kind of reflective practice that is essential to consultation. Even if a program is flawless, it might still struggle with a system that wasn’t designed to support it.
It is impossible to isolate this work’s racial component from the rest of it. Black boys are suspended from preschool at a rate that defies behavioral explanations. This is what the research has been saying for years, and the differences still exist. In an effort to break a pattern before it solidifies into a trajectory, Virginia’s pilot was partially a direct reaction to that reality. It is still genuinely unclear if the consultation model can maintain that goal while expanding throughout a state with significant differences in institutional will, community context, and resources.
As I watch this happen, I get the impression that the pilot was able to succeed in part because it was small enough to be cautious. The consultants were familiar with the programs. The consultants were familiar to the programs. The way trust truly functions is that it was developed gradually. The question that still needs to be answered, and it’s not an easy one, is whether the thing that made it work is the same thing that can’t thrive on a large scale.
