I did not wait for my start date.
My official first day as director of the Del Valle Independent School District’s Disciplinary Alternative Education Program was July 22, 2015. I walked onto campus weeks before then. I knew that if I waited, we would never be ready for the first day of school.
In Texas, a DAEP is where students go when a school decides they cannot stay. Under Chapter 37 of the Texas Education Code, there are two types of offenses that can result in placement: discretionary and mandatory. A fight that lasts 90 seconds can become a discretionary placement of 45 school days. Here is the irony the system never acknowledges: A 45 day placement at the start of a school year means a child misses the first six weeks of instruction — when relationships are built, routines are set and the foundation for everything that follows is laid. That child returns to a classroom that already has a community. They walk back in as a stranger. And some never fully catch up. Some spend the entire year at a DAEP. Some begin a new school year still serving time from the year before. The offense determines the category. The administrator determines the length. The child absorbs the cost.
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What I found on my first day on campus told me everything I needed to know about what this program had been — and what it was going to have to become.
The lesson plans were not used, instead students completed packets of work. Not lessons adapted for students in crisis. Just copied. Special education students who are some of the most complex learners in the district, had been assigned to a first-year teacher. Referrals were typed into Word documents, printed, handed to the director, then entered manually into the district system one by one. The textbooks were old. The ceiling tiles needed repair. The elective courses in subjects that generally require hands-on learning — computer training, PE, health, Spanish and auto mechanics — were packets.
The clothes closet was lean when I arrived. We beat the bushes for donations to restock it. A couple of years in, I asked for a washer and a dryer. Nobody had ever asked for this before, and I had to answer questions nobody had ever had to answer to get it approved. Because a child who comes to school in dirty clothes is not ready to learn. They are carrying shame. We were not going to let shame win.
The staff I chose were not only certified teachers. Many of them could have been those kids — same neighborhoods, same languages, same history of being told they didn’t belong. I looked for that. I hired for that. When a teacher has lived something close to what a student is living, there is a depth of understanding and patience that no credential can produce. The teachers who had never been close to this world sometimes couldn’t stay. The culture shock was real. Several left. I don’t fault them for it. But I knew what I was looking for, and I kept looking for it.
That is the part no investigation could fully measure. Earlier this year, reporters from the Hechinger Report and the Texas Tribune documented what many educators already knew: Texas DAEPs are, in too many places, holding cells with attendance sheets. I know what that looks like. I inherited it. What the investigation could not fully document — because it barely exists — is what happens when someone decides to do things differently.
Related: Texas’ discipline push sends kids to ‘jail-like’ campuses
Disciplinary schools
The year before I arrived, students came in, went through searches, picked up their breakfast and walked to cubicles where they would sit in silence — separated from each other, separated from instruction, separated from anyone who might learn their name.
We did searches too. Safety is not negotiable. But the spirit with which you do something changes everything. Every morning I was at the front gate with our counselor. Teachers were stationed at different points across the campus so that every student was greeted by a familiar face before they ever reached a classroom. Inside, classrooms were open before the bell. Laptops available, the cubicles removed. A staff member there to help. Kids catching up on work, eating breakfast, getting ready for the day, saying hello. Normal. The kind of normal that happens in most schools in this country every single morning.
Except it had previously been taken away from these kids as punishment. That is not discipline. That is psychological cruelty.
About three years in, our district’s bilingual director secured tens of thousands of dollars for a leveled library — books matched to where our students actually were, not where the state assumed they should be.
We also created safe rooms: three portable structures on campus where a student in crisis could go instead of getting a disciplinary referral. The work followed them there. They could draw, decompress and come back when they were ready. The goal was not to remove them. The goal was to keep them.
I want to tell you about one student — I will not use his name. The year before I arrived, he had assaulted an assistant principal. Badly. The staff knew he was coming back and they were scared. I don’t blame them. He was a young man who had done serious harm, and nobody had ever figured out what to do with him.
He is the same kid you find in juvenile detention centers across Texas. The records call it “seriously emotionally disturbed.” What the records don’t say is that nobody had ever given him what he needed until he landed somewhere that decided to try.
That is restorative discipline. It is not soft. It is the hardest work I have ever done.
Related: How cutting fruit almost landed a 10-year-old in disciplinary school
In the fall of 2015, the district held its annual convocation — a pep rally for every employee, bus drivers to the superintendent in the high school gym. Part of the tradition was a Spirit competition between campuses. My team had been together for weeks. We were the smallest campus. Nobody expected anything from us.
I had a small portable speaker. I got the microphone. I played, “Lean on Me.”
We started slow — arms over each other’s shoulders, swaying. And before long, the entire gym was singing with us. A team that had been strangers in June was leading a gymnasium full of people in a song about what it means to hold each other up.
We won the Spirit Stick that year.
That was when I knew. Not because of a trophy. Because the people I had hired were buying in to something. Building it was still going to take blood, sweat and tears. But the foundation was there.
The data came later and confirmed what we already felt. A 45 percent reduction. The Travis County sheriff’s deputy who used to come to our campus told me: “We used to come here almost every other day. We haven’t been here in months.” And some of our kids — kids who had been sent away, kids the system had written off — told me they didn’t want to go back. They wanted to stay.
I spent 30 years in Texas classrooms but I did not grow up in one place. I grew up on the road — McAllen, Hereford, Orange Cove, Othello, Pullman, back to Othello, back to McAllen, back to Othello, back to Pullman. I earned my GED through a High School Equivalency Program. I earned my bachelor’s degree in 1993 as an adult. I earned my master’s from the University of Texas at Austin, also as an adult. I came to Texas and built a career in the classrooms where other people’s children were being told — in ways spoken and unspoken — that they did not belong. The students I served at Del Valle DAEP were not so different from the child I once was. And that child is still out there. He is in every DAEP in Texas right now, waiting to see what the adults around him are going to decide.
The DAEP work taught me this: The difference between a warehouse and a school is not money. It is not policy. It is whether the adults inside have decided that the children in front of them are worth the fight.
Jorge Meave is a retired bilingual educator and school administrator with 30 years of experience in Austin ISD, Round Rock ISD and Del Valle ISD. He is the founder of Word Works, a literacy platform for ELL students in grades 6 through adult.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about DAEP alternatives was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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