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Angela Comfort still can’t explain exactly what went wrong.
Her son, Jordan, an honors student in Garland, Texas, got in trouble with school officials this February for distributing flyers on campus about a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Students all over North Texas were planning a walkout, and the teen was eager to participate.
Instead, administrators suspended him and warned further punishment was possible.
“I didn’t even let him go near the school” the day of the protest, Comfort said. “No new behavior could have been seen to warrant any kind of new discipline.”
Still, that afternoon, an email came from the school: Jordan was being assigned to the district’s Disciplinary Alternative Education Program. An administrator later said Jordan was facing a six-week placement for being disruptive, according to Comfort. If he behaved well and took behavior and anger management classes, he could be out in five weeks, she recalled.
These programs, known as DAEPs, were designed as punishments for serious misbehavior. Over the last three decades, though, they have become a central part of Texas’ school discipline system, with more than 100,000 students attending them each year not only for offenses such as bringing a weapon to campus but also violations like insubordination and failure to follow dress codes.
Before the pandemic, educators were slowly moving away from using DAEPs as a punishment, state data shows, but the number of students sent to them jumped back up again after schools fully reopened. Then last year, with reports of student misbehavior and violence rising, lawmakers passed House Bill 6, allowing more districts to send students to these alternative schools for disruptive behavior.
School districts have a lot of leeway over when students are assigned to DAEPs and how the programs are run. Local educators almost never have to answer to any other entity, including the justice system, and parents often have limited recourse to get placements overturned.
Although the Texas Education Agency has oversight of DAEPs, it only requires that such campuses provide an “academic and self discipline program that leads to graduation” and does limited monitoring. Yet, the TEA acknowledges their shortcomings: As soon as a student enters a DAEP, the agency considers them at risk of dropping out. Indeed, research shows less than half of ninth graders who are placed in one of the programs graduate from high school on time. |
