Most students prefer to stay out of trouble. Not all of them do.
Over the past few years, more Texas students have been removed from their classrooms and sent to district-run disciplinary programs, where they sometimes stay for weeks or months, state discipline data shows.
The sudden rise in kids sent to a Disciplinary Alternative Education Program, or DAEP, follows the passage of a new state law meant to curb vaping, as well as increased student behavioral issues post-pandemic. While most districts saw an increase, not all of them are experiencing the trend equally.
In Texas, school districts can only suspend misbehaving students for up to three consecutive days. If a student continues to disrupt class or make other students feel unsafe, they may get sent to a DAEP to complete their education.
In those cases, students typically leave their home campuses and cannot return until the district allows, sometimes spending several weeks or even months away. The effectiveness of such programs is debated among educators, with some critics arguing they hinder students’ long-term growth.
A statewide look
The number of Texas students sent to DAEPs held relatively steady in the late 2010s, dropped during the pandemic, then spiked over the past two years. Last school year, 121,245 Texas students were sent to a DAEP, compared to 103,655 the year before.
The increase could be part of a national rise in student behavioral problems post-COVID. A 2022 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics found slightly more than 50 percent of U.S. public schools reported higher instances of student misconduct compared to 2019, while roughly 30 percent said misconduct was roughly the same and 5 percent said it was worse pre-COVID. (A small fraction of school leaders said they didn’t know or didn’t respond to the question.)
Some of that increase, however, also can be attributed to a state law that went into effect September 2023 requiring that students automatically be sent to a DAEP if they’re caught using e-cigarettes on campus or at a school-related activity. Previously, school districts could discipline students for vaping at their own discretion.
The idea behind the law is to push students away from the addictive nicotine products. According to a 2021 survey by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, more than one in 10 Texas high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past 30 days.
Data by district
School districts’ disciplinary practices have varied since the law went into effect. Some districts, including Pasadena and Spring ISDs, saw the rate of students sent to DAEPs more than double since the 2022-2023 school year. In Alief and Aldine ISDs, on the other hand, the percentage of students sent to DAEPs decreased slightly.
Change doesn’t tell the whole story, however. Although Spring saw the biggest year-over-year increase in DAEP removals last year among the largest Houston-area districts, Spring previously had the lowest rate of DAEP removals in the region at just 1 per 100 students. Inversely, Aldine and Alief had two of the highest rates of DAEP removals in 2022, but now sit closer to the regional average.
Of the sampled Houston-area districts, Klein had the highest rate of DAEP removals, with 1,600 out of roughly 57,000 students sent to an alternative education program last year.
Find your district
To get a better sense of how school districts’ disciplinary practices have changed since the 2023 state law, check out our searchable database of DAEP removal rates by Texas school district. The statewide average is 2.5 DAEP removals per 100 students.
A small percentage of districts are not following the law after making it part of their District of Innovation plan, which allows districts to exempt themselves from parts of Texas education law.
Why it matters
Even though the state and local school boards must monitor the programs to ensure students receive a comparable education to their home school, the interruptions may hurt students’ academic performance down the line.
A 2021 University of Texas at Austin study found that students sent to a DAEP once in ninth grade had a graduation rate of 44 percent, compared to 84 percent of students who were never disciplined. For students sent to a DAEP multiple times, just one in four graduated within four years. (The study did not evaluate to what extent a DAEP placement caused a change in likelihood of graduation.)
Texas DHHS has not yet released data on whether e-cigarette use among teens has gone down after the state law went into effect. In 2024, the CDC reported that roughly 6 percent of middle and high school students nationwide reported using e-cigarettes, down from 10 percent in 2023.
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