In my son’s kindergarten class, years ago, one little girl stuffed herself in her coat cubby and cried — all day, every day. I’ve never seen anyone keep it up like that. The staff assured me, uselessly, that they were doing everything they could. After a while neither they nor the rest of the class heard it any more. But I did.

So when that poor child was also assigned to my kid’s first grade class, I pitched a fit. I was too inhibited to say out loud that I plain wanted her gone, but I did ask that they get her help. After much dragging of bureaucratic feet, she was evaluated for special education, which is the only recourse most schools have to deal with peculiar behaviors.

In time, I was assured she had “gotten into special education,” as if she had been accepted to some plum college, but even that was almost two years after she had made painfully obvious how much she needed help.

Last spring I visited the homes of various adolescents involved with Family Court or child welfare services. I was accompanying a community worker, who was responsible for keeping them out of trouble and staying in school. The parents were mostly sick of their kids’ mouthy, uncooperative behavior, and the schools certainly didn’t want them. The community agency provided the only people who didn’t want them gone.

Rich people pay big bucks to tony private schools at least in part to spare their children having to be around distracting kids. But no amount of money can prevent a kid from reacting badly to an ugly divorce or death in the family. As parents, our mammalian brains want to protect our young. As teachers, we want to get on with the business of teaching, instead of managing the distraction of disruptive behavior. Even people unconcerned with kids and schools believe that the “good” kids should be protected — segregated from problematic students.

So everyone gets up in arms demanding more and more alternative schools and programs for problem kids.

If we do manage to put them out — to a special school or residential placement — they’ll be back. They’re ours. They will return to our neighborhoods and communities. There is no alternative universe to which we can banish stories we don’t want to hear, faces we would rather not see, and behavior we consider bad.

Over the course of this summer, I studied a whole range of troubled kids. Instead of seeing them from the outside as the upsetting little pains-in-the-tush they are, I tried to get a glimpse of their lives. I met kids recovering from sexual abuse, neglect, violence, drug involvement, or their parents’ drug involvement. I talked to the community workers who deal with kids whose lives have been torn apart by a parent going to prison or because the state removed them from their families. Distressed kids sit in our own kids’ classrooms all over the state. We can’t just put them all out — or ignore them.

In virtually all cases, those kids would not have been in such wretched shape if someone had intervened on their behalf a whole lot earlier. Their behavior had been speaking volumes for months if not years. Anger, defiance, sadness — these are all red flags trying to tell us that something is wrong with the child that she cannot articulate.

I marvel that schools aren’t always engaged in close partnerships with a family service agency. Family-service workers’ expertise is to resolve problems in the homes. A child persistently crying in her cubby is obviously not learning much, but this learning disability is not an academic problem. It’s a home problem. Community workers have the skills and training to unearth issues that are causing kids’ antisocial behavior. This will calm the disruptions at school by improving how the families function.

An adult is more or less independent. But by definition, a child is still growing and developing in the context of a family and community. Until their brain’s “executive function” is entirely developed, no child can set aside strong feelings just to do as she’s told. Some scientists say that this executive function is not fully complete until age 25, but I’ll settle for 18. If a child is crying in her cubby, turning over desks, or not completing homework, her family needs help. Trying to train, force, threaten or punish the upset girl into compliance will not work.

Focus instead on the family.

Because when we put these kids out of our communities into alternative schools and residential placements, we encourage the root problem to fester and get worse. Alternatives — shelters, group homes, the Training School — provide very expensive, rarified worlds that have nothing to do with a kid’s real life.

Yes, of course, psychiatric hospitals, foster care, and group homes will always be necessary. But we overuse them unconscionably. We have to stop waiting until kids are in a crisis.

Schools have plenty of problems of their own. But when it comes to troubled behavior, the solutions often lie in the homes. If we fix the family’s dysfunction, we fix the context that is producing a kid’s wiggy behavior. And if the family can’t be fixed — addiction is often the reason — terminate parental rights, and search among the child’s relatives for a healthier permanent family.

Only by helping the families can we stem the social chaos streaming through the schoolhouse doors.

And this compassion will be far cheaper than what we’re doing now.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.