Juan Lozada’s grandson missed almost all of fifth grade at his bilingual elementary school in San Antonio, Texas. All thanks to a child-friendly knife, marketed as safe for children 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 the Texas system of Disciplinary Alternative Education Programs, or DAEP, as they are more commonly known. These schools were created in the mid-1990s to punish students who committed serious offenses. Students spend weeks or even months there. Today, more than 100,000 students are assigned to DAEPs each year, sometimes for offenses as minor as violating a dress code or using profanity.
When I moved to Texas in 2021, I had been a national education reporter for more than a decade, but I had never encountered a state that relied so much on strict alternative schools to discipline students and separate them from their peers.
These programs stayed in my head, even after I left. Then my colleague Meredith Kolodner returned from an unrelated reporting trip to Northwest Texas with stories of students wearing coveralls at a DAEP. I knew we had to dig.
My reporting first took me to Lozada, whose grandson was referred to a DAEP for 25 days because of the fruit cutting incident. Lozada is an attorney and attended the boy’s placement hearing. He was shocked at how one-sided it seemed.
“This is not a real hearing, it never happened and it was never planned,” he told me. “When you don’t have that, there are no guardrails.”
Lozada filed a lawsuit against the district. In his arguments, the San Antonio School District’s attorney argued that district courts do not have jurisdiction to review a DAEP placement. (District spokesperson Laura Short said in an email that it does not allow any kind of knife on campus and that officials follow the student code of conduct.)
Conversations with other families followed. I spoke to parents who didn’t have Lozada’s legal expertise but were just as desperate to keep their children out of DAEPs, as well as some who felt their teens were worse off if they attended them.
Some clear themes emerged. At almost every step of the DAEP placement process, the odds are stacked against families. Schools have enormous discretion in when they send students to these internships and do not need to allow appeals. DAEPs themselves are rigid environments in which parents and advocates say little learning occurs.
Lozada obtained a temporary injunction against the punishment and continued the district’s appeal process. The family withdrew him from his public school during this time. In May, the San Antonio Independent School District board reversed DAEP’s initial placement, a reversal that experts say is rare.
But the damage is already done for her grandson, Lozada said. The boy now finds it difficult to socialize and fears that other children will see him differently.
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Contact Investigations Editor Sarah Butrymowicz at butrymowicz@hechingerreport.org or on Signal: @sbutry.04.
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The article How Cutting Fruit Nearly Landed a 10-Year-Old in Disciplinary School appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
