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.
Now, with House Bill 6, passed last year, Texas lawmakers made it easier to send disruptive students to these alternative schools. They said the legislation was prompted by complaints from administrators that more children were misbehaving and struggling with structured school environments after the pandemic.
Before COVID-19, educators were moving away from using DAEPs as a punishment, state data shows. Then the number of students sent to them jumped up again after schools fully reopened.
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 agency 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.
TEA officials did not respond to interview requests or a list of emailed questions, including about the role agency officials play in monitoring DAEPs.
Garland Independent School District spokesperson Typhani Braziel said in an email that district administrators could not comment on Jordan’s situation due to federal privacy laws but that it was “addressing it in accordance with established policies and procedures.”
Critics warn of the many ways in which DAEPs mirror the criminal justice system. They are largely full of Black and Latino students — and mostly boys. Kids in these schools must follow far stricter rules than on regular campuses; a few districts even require them to wear jumpsuits. They can get early release for good behavior.
It’s “jail-like,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, chief legal analyst of the Intercultural Development Research Association, an education policy and legal advocacy group in central Texas. She’s noticed a change this year in how educators are approaching discipline and DAEP placements. It seems like, she said, “school districts feel like House Bill 6 gave them full license to do whatever they want to get rid of kids they don’t want to deal with.”
Texas’ zero-tolerance discipline
When Comfort got pregnant at 18 in 1997, a Garland school administrator tried to send her to the district’s alternative program. She refused, telling them, “I’m not a bad student.”
At the time, DAEPs were brand-new, created as part of zero-tolerance discipline reforms sweeping the nation. The 1995 Texas Safe Schools Act required school districts to remove students who had committed a serious infraction, such as assault or a drug-related offense, and provide them with an alternative setting.
Other states crafted similar laws to remove students deemed to be safety threats from their campuses, often using alternative schools for discipline. In Texas, though, such schools are a particularly integral piece of the system.
Texas lawmakers created a list of behaviors that require a mandatory DAEP placement, which has grown over time. Still, educators must consider factors such as a student’s disciplinary history and disability status when assigning the punishment.
District administrators also can, and do, send students to DAEPs at their discretion.
The number one reason students are placed in alternative schools is for “violation of local code of conduct,” according to state data. Nearly 36,000 DAEP placements were assigned under that catchall in 2024-25, compared to fewer than 12,000 for assault. Just 208 were related to a student possessing a weapon. (That year, about 5.5 million students were enrolled in Texas public schools.)
“DAEPs were designed originally to be for more serious offenses and more serious behaviors,” said Renuka Rege, a senior staff attorney at Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit advocacy group. “But unfortunately, they’ve been expanded.”
Comfort, though, still assumed DAEPs were for only the worst behavior problems. “These are the kids that bring knives to school or the kids that make it impossible for other kids to learn,” she said. “That’s what I thought it was.”
That all changed when Jordan got punished.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had threatened to withhold state funding from school districts whose students participated in ICE protests. Teens across the state, including in Garland, still took part. Comfort said that as far as she knows, no one else at Jordan’s school was subsequently assigned to a DAEP, including friends who helped him with the flyers.
In 2025, Texas Appleseed promoted a bill that would have prohibited DAEP placements for minor infractions, such as attendance violations and rude language. At the same time, a coalition of superintendents urged the legislature to significantly overhaul Texas’s discipline code to give educators more flexibility in how they punished students.
Texas Appleseed didn’t get traction. The superintendents did.
It was the third time in six years that state lawmakers expanded the list of reasons why a student can be sent to alternative schools. In 2019, they’d passed a law requiring DAEP placements for teacher harassment. Four years later, they passed another one requiring that any student caught with an e-cigarette be sent to the alternative program.
House Bill 6, passed last June, allowed districts to send students to DAEPs for being disruptive and mandated they be sent for harassing school employees or disorderly conduct with a firearm. It also eliminated time limits on in-school suspensions and reinstated out-of-school suspensions for young students. However, lawmakers did rollback some mandatory placements for those caught vaping that had sent hundreds of students to the alternative schools.
State Senator Charles Perry, the bill’s co-sponsor, said at a May 2025 hearing that he anticipated students would be deterred from misbehaving if their peers were punished for being disruptive. “I hope there’s not many kids that end up in that situation,” he said, “but at the same time, the benefit of the whole in this area has to be dealt with.”
David Vinson, superintendent of Conroe Independent School District near Houston who was among the educators pushing for the law, said administrators want to make schools safer for teachers and other students.
“There were so many situations where this repetitive behavior wasn’t getting solved,” Vinson said.
“I do not want to put a kid in a DAEP,” he added. “But I’ve got to think about the other 21 kids I have in a class.”
Families often can’t appeal DAEP placement
Laura Wickwire pulled into the parking lot of North East Independent School District’s administrative building in San Antonio in May 2025 armed with documents. Her son, Kevin Jenkins, was facing a 75-day DAEP placement after someone hacked his email account and used it to send threats to educators earlier that month, she said.
Wickwire was hopeful district officials would reconsider. Kevin, 15 at the time, had been the victim of cyberbullying for over a year. He was the subject of dozens of false reports made to school tip lines that alleged he had a weapon or was suicidal, she said. His school email account was hacked repeatedly, including one time when Wickwire and Kevin himself received a death threat from the address.
The district was well aware of the problem. It had given him a new username and reset his account three times. He couldn’t even log in at the time some of the emails in question were sent, Wickwire and Kevin said.
In the end, none of the materials Wickwire prepared mattered to the single district employee to whom the family made their case. The staffer stressed that she could only consider the May threats. “I literally was so mad,” Kevin said. “She was like, ‘I don’t care.’”
North East ISD spokesperson Aubrey Chancellor said in an email that the district uses impartial hearing officers, who consider mitigating factors including a student’s intent and disciplinary history. “All allegations of bullying are taken seriously and investigated,” she said. “Decisions made by the Hearing Officer are determined by evaluating the evidence provided against a preponderance of the evidence standard.”
No more than 90 minutes into Kevin’s hearing, Wickwire said, the official issued her decision: The 75-day placement was upheld.
“She made her decision before we even entered that building,” Wickwire said. The family had no option to appeal — North East’s policy is that a hearing officer’s decision is final.
State law does not require that school districts offer families the chance to appeal most DAEP placements. Texas also doesn’t lay out how such a process should work if offered nor how families should be informed of the option. Nor does the state track the outcomes of meetings about DAEP placements, but advocates say it’s uncommon for punishments to be changed at any point.
For parents who have the resources to find other options, it’s common to withdraw a student facing a DAEP placement and instead enroll them in private school. Students assigned to DAEPs typically cannot enroll in a different public school before completing the punishment.
Comfort pulled her son out of the Garland district to homeschool him with a virtual program for the rest of the year. She’s still figuring out where he will go for his senior year. Wickwire also pulled Kevin out of school and started paying for him to attend an online private school.
No fresh starts as punishments follow students
Sharenda Claros thought she was giving her son, Brandyn, a fresh start when she moved her family from San Antonio an hour away to Seguin in the summer of 2025.
For two weeks, he attended the regular middle school. He started making friends and planned on joining the soccer and basketball teams. But then, the records from his old charter school arrived. (Officials from that school declined to comment, citing privacy laws.)
Seguin assigned him to a DAEP for a year as a result of an accusation that he had physically threatened students at his old school, something he denies. Police investigated and the district attorney declined to pursue charges — information that was shared with Seguin officials, Claros said.
It didn’t matter. Almost every day of this past school year, Brandyn’s eighth grade year, he dressed in the required all-black clothing and took a bus from his subdivision into the heart of town. At 8 a.m. sharp, when his school opened, he entered and stood still as a guard waved a metal detector wand over his body.
He spent almost all of the next seven hours in silence, clicking through computer programs in most of his classes. He said there were only a couple teachers he felt comfortable asking for help if he got stuck; most just redirected him to the videos on his screen.
Brandyn learned little, Claros says, and became completely disinterested in school.
“It’s like setting him up for failure,” she said. “I feel like they know that.”
Seguin officials said they could not comment on specific students and referred all questions about how their DAEP operates to the district’s Student Code of Conduct.
Brandyn’s experience in Seguin is not unusual. Statewide, students at DAEPs most often work individually, generally on computer programs, and have to follow strict rules. Typically, students are forbidden from speaking in class, unless granted permission, according to an analysis of handbooks from 75 districts.
The students often must walk single file, with their hands behind their back. Dress codes ban facial hair, jewelry, even sandals or hair dye, according to the analysis. If students don’t follow the rules, extra days can be added to placements.
For example, in the White Settlement school district near Fort Worth, the handbook notes students spend their first week of DAEP doing school work while sitting on stools in a cubicle facing a wall. Only if students behave well enough during those five days are they allowed the right to sit on a chair.
In the far west Texas district of Andrews, jumpsuit-clad students who misbehave may be forced to do “physical conditioning.” And in the Commerce school district about 70 miles northeast of Dallas, students must even eat lunch in cubicles in silence.
Andrews did not respond to requests for comment. Commerce spokesperson Heather Kilgore said the district’s DAEP was a “structured disciplinary setting.”
White Settlement DAEP principal Charlie Etheridge said the stool and cubicles are designed “to provide safety and limit student interaction” and that students who behave well gradually see a lessening of restrictions.
On the Texas Education Agency’s website regarding discipline, officials note that “state regulations are intended to ensure that all students are treated with dignity and respect, as well as educated in a safe environment. Behavior management techniques or discipline management practices must be implemented in such a way as to protect the health and safety of the students and others.”
In Seguin, district officials worked with Claros to reduce Brandyn’s placement. If he had 30 consecutive days in which he did all his work and broke no rules, he could return to his regular campus.
Between the number of rules he had to follow and a disruptive mood disorder and ADHD diagnosis that can make it hard for him to sit still, there was little chance of that happening, Claros said.
“It’s kind of annoying, because they see me as somebody I’m not,” Brandyn said. “I feel like they see me as a dangerous person, and I’m not a dangerous person.”
Students with disabilities are more likely to end up in DAEPs, and when they do they are unlikely to get the services and accommodations they are owed under federal law, advocates said.
“They’re placed more often. A lot of times we find that they struggle more, and we find that they stay longer,” said Colleen Potts of Disability Rights Texas, a nonprofit legal group. “Not every kid learns the same, and the DAEP does not have the ability to be individualized like the main campus would.”
Claros worries constantly about what messages her son is internalizing about himself in these crucial years and how he’ll handle it when he goes from such a restrictive environment to a regular high school next year.
“This is the stage I believe is a make-or-break stage,” Claros said. “He may think this is okay in the future. He may feel like, ‘Oh, I have to be locked up.’”
This story about DAEPs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
