Juan Lozada’s grandson missed out on almost his entire fifth-grade year at his dual language elementary school in San Antonio, Texas. All because of a child-friendly knife, marketed as safe for ages 3 and up, that the boy brought to school in September 2025 to cut fruit for his lunch.
Lozado was one of the first people I spoke with when I began researching Texas’ system of disciplinary alternative education programs, or DAEPs, as they are more commonly known. The schools were created in the mid-1990s as a punishment for students who committed serious infractions. Students spend weeks or even months in them. Today, more than 100,000 students a year are assigned to DAEPs, sometimes for offenses as minor as violating a dress code or using profanity.
By the time I moved to Texas in 2021, I’d been a national education reporter for over a decade, but I had never come across a state that relied so heavily on strict alternative schools to discipline students and separate them from their peers.
These programs stuck in my head, even after I moved away. Then, my colleague Meredith Kolodner returned from an unrelated reporting trip to northwest Texas with stories of students wearing jumpsuits at a DAEP. I knew we had to dig in.
My reporting brought me first to Lozada, whose grandson was referred to a DAEP for 25 days because of the fruit-cutting incident. Lozada is a lawyer and attended the boy’s placement hearing. He was shocked at how one-sided it seemed.
“It’s not a real hearing, it never was, and it was never intended to be,” he told me. “When you don’t have that, there are no guardrails.”
Lozada filed a lawsuit against the district. In arguments, the San Antonio school district’s lawyer made the case that district courts do not have the jurisdiction to review a DAEP placement. (District spokesperson Laura Short said in an email that it does not allow knives of any kind on campuses and that officials followed the student code of conduct.)
Conversations with more families followed. I talked to parents who lacked Lozada’s legal expertise but were similarly desperate to keep their children out of DAEPs, as well as some who felt their teens were worse off for attending them.
Some clear themes emerged. At almost every point in the DAEP placement process, the odds are stacked against families. Schools have enormous discretion over when they send students to these placements and do not need to allow appeals. The DAEPs themselves are rigid environments where parents and advocates say little learning happens.
Lozada was granted a temporary injunction against the punishment and continued through the district appeals process. The family pulled him out of his public school during that time. In May, the San Antonio Independent School District Board of Trustees overturned the initial DAEP placement, a reversal that experts told me is rare.
But damage to his grandson has already been done, Lozada said. The boy now has trouble socializing and worries that other kids will see him differently.
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Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at butrymowicz@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @sbutry.04.
This story about disciplinary schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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