Juan Lozada’s grand son missed out on almost his entire fifth-grade year at his double language primary school in San Antonio, Texas. All due to the fact that of a child-friendly knife, marketed as safe for ages 3 and up, that the kid gave school in September 2025 to cut fruit for his lunch.
Lozado was one of the first individuals I spoke to when I began researching Texas’ system of disciplinary alternative education programs, or DAEPs, as they are more frequently understood. The schools were produced in the mid-1990s as a punishment for trainees who committed serious infractions. Trainees invest weeks or even months in them. Today, more than 100,000 students a year are designated to DAEPs, often for offenses as small as breaching a gown code or using profanity.
By the time I moved to Texas in 2021, I ‘d been a national education reporter for over a years, however I had never come across a state that relied so heavily on rigorous 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 trainees using one-piece suits at a DAEP. I understood we had to dig in.
My reporting brought me first to Lozada, whose grandson was described a DAEP for 25 days because of the fruit-cutting event. Lozada is a legal representative and participated in the kid’s positioning hearing. He was stunned at how one-sided it seemed.
“It’s not a genuine hearing, it never ever was, and it was never ever planned to be,” he informed me. “When you don’t have that, there are no guardrails.”
Lozada filed a claim against the district. In arguments, the San Antonio school district’s attorney made the case that district courts do not have the jurisdiction to review a DAEP placement. (District representative Laura Short stated in an e-mail that it does not allow knives of any kind on campuses and that officials followed the student code of conduct.)
Discussions with more households followed. I spoke to parents who lacked Lozada’s legal expertise however were similarly desperate to keep their kids out of DAEPs, along with some who felt their teenagers were even worse off for attending them.
Some clear themes emerged. At almost every point in the DAEP positioning process, the odds are stacked against families. Schools have enormous discretion over when they send out trainees to these placements and do not need to enable appeals. The DAEPs themselves are rigid environments where parents and advocates state little knowing happens.
Lozada was approved a temporary injunction versus the punishment and continued through the district appeals process. The household pulled him out of his public school throughout that time. In May, the San Antonio Independent School District Board of Trustees overturned the preliminary DAEP positioning, a reversal that specialists told me is rare.
However damage to his grand son has already been done, Lozada said. The kid now has trouble interacting socially and worries that other kids will see him differently.
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Contact examinations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.
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