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Everything You Didn’t Learn in Kindergarten Will Hurt You

TENNESSEE TRIBUNE — NASHVILLE, TN — DeeAnne Miree loves to come to work in the morning. She is principal of the Cambridge Early Learning Center in Antioch. It was built with a $33 million Department of Education grant and is one of two preschools in the country using Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) practices to study implicit bias in early childhood education. The other preschool is in New Jersey.

Published

7 years ago

October 20, 2018

Peter White

By Peter White

NASHVILLE, TN — DeeAnne Miree loves to come to work in the morning. She is principal of the Cambridge Early Learning Center in Antioch. It was built with a $33 million Department of Education grant and is one of two preschools in the country using Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) practices to study implicit bias in early childhood education. The other preschool is in New Jersey.

DeAnne Miree holds up the SEL pyramid, a model for pre-k and kindergarten Metro classrooms. Miree has not suspended a single student this year.

The SEL model is a pyramid. The base is a trained workforce that uses best practices to nurture relationships with all students. The next level is creating high quality supportive environments. That means good facilities with classrooms designed around small activity centers.

“When children are engaging in problem behavior in the classroom, it’s usually an indication of social and emotional skills and competencies that they need to learn,” said Dr.

Building with blocks

Mary Louise Hemmeter, a researcher at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education. The SEL pyramid Cambridge uses is based on Hemmeter’s work.

In one of Cambridge’s 7 classrooms kids are doing different things but it’s not that noisy. Four kids huddle around a table of laptops practicing their writing and reading skills; another group is playing with blocks. One boy hurts his hand and starts to cry.

Miree calls him over and suggests putting it under some cold water. He shakes his head “No” and goes back to building. A larger group is seated talking about The Rainbow Fish, a

Danielle Norton mixes oobleck.

story about a beautiful fish who finds friendship and happiness when he learns to share.

In another classroom, kids are making oobleck, AKA gloop, a mixture of cornstarch and water. Meanwhile another class is dancing to music. They all eat a family-style lunch served into white bowls from a well-appointed kitchen. The school day ends at 2 pm.

The last two levels of the SEL pyramid target social emotional supports and lastly, individual intervention for kids with persistent challenging behaviors. Just like in K-12 schools, their percentage is small, but those kids can have an outsized negative impact in the classroom.

When kids are aggressive and aren’t gaining social skills to succeed with their peers, they will settle for negative attention instead. SEL is all about giving all kids positive attention to solve problems.

Experimenting with cornstarch, water, and food coloring.

Targeting support and special interventions are at the top of the pyramid for the few who persist with problem behaviors. They are not expelled or punished. They are taught. There were three interventions last year, one so far this year. There are 140 kids at the center. They are all training for the big jump to kindergarten.

“The capacity to develop positive social relationships, to concentrate and persist on challenging tasks, to effectively communicate emotions, and to problem solve are just a few of the competencies young children need to be successful as they transition to school,” said Hemmeter.

Racial Disparities in Preschool Discipline

A national survey of teachers in state-funded pre-kindergarten programs found that preschool children were being expelled at 3 times the rate of K-12 students. And a US Department of Education study found that more than 8,000 children were suspended from public preschool programs in 2011–2012. Black children were the majority of those suspended.

A number of studies have shown that these kids are at risk of failing in school.

Each dot is a student. Each color is a class. Top rows are language skills. Bottom rows are math skills.

One study found that when aggressive and antisocial behavior persists to age 9, intervention has a poor chance of success. The solution is to get kids into good pre-school programs. Metro schools got a $7.7 million grant to expand SEL into 187 pre-K classrooms and about 300 kindergarten classrooms in the next three years. Cambridge’s program will be the model.

“We actually have really good data that show when you coach teachers, and support teachers to do the model, that they do it well and as a result of it, kids’ social skills and problem behavior get better,” said Hemmeter.

SEL strategies have dramatically reduced suspensions at Fall Hamilton Elementary School. Miree reports that Cambridge has had none for its current crop of four-year olds. The same cannot be said of Metro ‘s 168 K-12 schools. (see Cutting the School to Prison Pipeline, Dec. 7-13, 2017)

Between 10-15 percent of two to five-year olds act out some as they grow. If kids don’t learn to control their impulses and solve their problems in pre-school they will have problems when they are older.

Every Cambridge classroom has a flip booklet of pictures called solution cards that prompt kids to resolve their own conflicts. Is somebody playing with a toy you want to play with? One photo shows kids trading toys. Another shows them sharing it.

Every classroom has an oversized hourglass. If trading doesn’t work, a kid turns over the hourglass and waits for the sand to fall through. Then he or she gets to play with the toy. No fighting, no kicking, no biting. Bothered by somebody being mean? Another picture shows a little girl ignoring her tormenter.

Miree was initially a SEL skeptic. “Let’s see how that is going to work with this child that’s defiant that I’ve seen in an elementary setting,” she once thought.

“I was blown away when I came here to see the teachers once they were all trained watching it in action,” Miree said. Learning to share is not genetic. Those kinds of things have to be taught.

Mendy Coe is one of two classroom leaders at Cambridge who coaches four other teachers. Vanderbilt researchers assessed what teachers were doing in the classroom and they looked at students’ academic performance at the beginning and end of the school year.

“They took all that data and we looked at the areas where we needed the most improvement. What came out of all that was that our students seemed to be lower in math and in writing and spelling,” said Coe. Now she is tracking students’ progress with a computer program.

“We selected very specific objectives. We are looking at letters and sounds and numerals and quantities. We could assess that. That’s very measurable,” she said.

Each child gets a construction paper identifier and the school population is tracked on a board as their performance meets expected outcomes. By year’s end, the kids should move from the left to the right side of a display board.

Most of the kids at Cambridge were more than halfway across the board last week.

This article originally appeared in The Tennessee Tribune.

Peter White

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LIVE from the NMA Convention Raheem DeVaughn Says The Time Is Now: Let’s End HIV in Our Communities #2

Set against the backdrop of the NMA conference, Executive Officers from the National Medical Association, Grammy Award Winning Artist and Advocate Raheem DeVaughn, and Gilead Sciences experts, are holding today an important conversation on HIV prevention and health equity. Black women continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV despite advances in prevention options. Today’s event […]

Published

7 days ago

February 3, 2026

Oakland Post

Black women continue to be disproportionately impacted by HIV despite advances in prevention options. Today’s event is designed to uplift voices, explore barriers to access, and increase awareness and key updates about PrEP, a proven prevention method that remains underutilized among Black women. This timely gathering will feature voices from across health, media, and advocacy as we break stigma and center equity in HIV prevention.

Additional stats and information to know:

● Black women continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV, with Black women representing more than 50% of new HIV diagnoses among women in the U.S. in 2022, despite comprising just 13% of women in the U.S.

● Women made up only 8% of PrEP users despite representing 19% of all new HIV diagnoses in 2022.

● Gilead Sciences is increasing awareness and addressing stigma by encouraging regular HIV testing and having judgment-free conversations with your healthcare provider about prevention options, including oral PrEP and long-acting injectable PrEP options.

● PrEP is an HIV prevention medication that has been available since 2012.

● Only 1 in 3 people in the U.S. who could benefit from PrEP were prescribed a form of PrEP in 2022.

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TRUMP: “Washington, D.C. is Safe”

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — President Trump, who typically travels with a full contingent of high-level protection, insinuated that he finally felt safe enough to go to dinner in the District of Columbia. “My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years,” said the nation’s 47th president.

Published

7 days ago

February 3, 2026

Oakland Post

By Apriil Ryan
BlackPressUSA Washington Bureau Chief and White House Correspondent

“Washington, D.C. is safe,” President Trump declared from the Oval Office today. Those words came while Trump was hosting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During the question-and-answer session, which primarily focused on a peace deal in the Russian-Ukrainian war, Trump explained, “You did that in four days.” He was speaking of how fast the National Guard quelled the violence in what was once called Chocolate City.

The President deployed the National Guard to D.C. a week ago, to a city with reduced crime rates over the previous year. Violent crime dropped by 26%, marking the lowest level in 30 years. Homicides also fell by 11%.

President Trump, who typically travels with a full contingent of high-level protection, insinuated that he finally felt safe enough to go to dinner in the District of Columbia. “My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years,” said the nation’s 47th president.

Trump reinforced his claim about the newly acquired safety in D.C. by relaying that a friend’s son is attending dinner in D.C., something he would not have done last year.

After the president finished his comments, a reporter/commentator in the room with close connections to Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped into the high-level conversation to affirm the president’s comments, saying, “I walked around yesterday with MTG. If you can walk around D.C. with MTG and not be attacked, this city is safe.”

That reporter was the same person who chastised President Zelenskyy months ago during his first Oval Office meeting with Trump for not wearing a business suit. Zelenskyy, a wartime President, has been clad in less formal attire to reflect the country’s current war stance against Russia.

Without any sourcing, President Trump also said, “People that haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner, and the restaurants the last two days have been busier than they’ve been in a long time.”

The increase in policing in Washington, D.C. is because a 19-year-old former Doge employee was carjacked in the early hours of the morning recently.

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Rising Energy Costs Weigh Heaviest on Black Households

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — For many African American families, the cost of keeping the lights on and homes heated or cooled is not just a monthly bill — it’s a crushing financial burden.

Published

7 days ago

February 3, 2026

Stacy M. Brown

By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent

For many African American families, the cost of keeping the lights on and homes heated or cooled is not just a monthly bill — it’s a crushing financial burden.

A new national study from Binghamton University and California State University, San Bernardino, finds that Black households spend a far larger share of their income on energy compared to white households, even when income levels are the same. “We often say that African Americans suffer more, but we often blame it just on income. And the reality is, there is something more there,” study author George Homsy, associate professor at Binghamton University, wrote. “It’s not just because they tend to be poor. There is something that’s putting them at a disadvantage. I think what happened is it happens to be where they live.” The study, published in Energy Research & Social Science, analyzed 65,000 census tracts across the United States. It found that while the average American household spends about 3.2% of income on energy bills, households in the majority African American census tracts spend an average of 5.1%.

Homsy and researcher Ki Eun Kang point to the age and condition of housing stock, along with lower homeownership rates, as key drivers. Their research concludes that “energy burden is not simply a matter of income or energy cost but also race, which might be driven by place.” Older, less energy-efficient housing and high rental rates in Black communities mean residents often cannot make upgrades like improved insulation or new appliances, locking families into higher bills.

Tradeoffs and Health Risks

The consequences go beyond money. Families forced to spend 10% or more of their income on energy — what experts classify as “unmanageable” — may cut back on food, medicine, or other essentials. More than 12 million U.S. households report leaving their homes at unsafe temperatures to reduce costs, while millions more fall behind on utility bills. The health effects are severe. High energy burdens increase risks of asthma, depression, poor sleep, pneumonia, and even premature death. The issue is especially acute for African Americans, who are disproportionately exposed to housing and environmental conditions that amplify these risks.

Washington, D.C.: A Case Study

In Washington, D.C., the problem is particularly stark. A recent analysis by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) shows that SNAP-eligible households spend more than 20% of their income on energy bills. Across the metro area, nearly two-thirds of low-income households devote over 6% of their income to energy, and 40% face what researchers call a “severe financial strain,” paying more than 10%. Pepco, the District’s primary electricity provider, has implemented three consecutive annual rate hikes, pushing the average household bill to $114 per month as of January 2025. Shutoffs have followed — nearly 12,000 customers lost service in 2024, with disconnections doubling after a summer rate hike. Washington Gas has also sought a 12% rate increase and pushed a controversial $215 million pipeline replacement project, rebranded as “District SAFE.” The plan could ultimately cost D.C. households an additional $45,000 each over several decades, or nearly $1,000 annually added to bills.

Historical Roots

Researchers argue that these inequities are not accidental but rooted in history. The ScienceDirect study reveals that African American communities living in formerly redlined neighborhoods continue to face disadvantages today — from poor housing quality to higher climate risks. Homsy says policymakers must make targeted efforts. “It is harder to get to rental units where a lot of poor people live,” he noted. “We need to work harder to get into these communities of color.”