|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Despite a state law banning schools from kicking homeless students off campus for most offenses, hundreds of Texas districts have illegally suspended thousands of unhoused students in recent years, a Abdelraoufsinno investigation revealed.
The suspensions can deny Texas’ most vulnerable students access to the food, shelter and education often found only on campus. More than 95 percent of state legislators backed the 2019 law, which responded to those concerns.
The unlawful practice has continued largely because school districts have failed to follow the rules and state officials haven’t punished districts that break the law.
related to this series
Texas schools illegally suspended thousands of homeless students — and nobody stopped them
by Asher Lehrer-Small / Staff Writer
Below are the top five takeaways from the Landing’s exclusive investigation:
1. School leaders across Texas are violating the law
The 2019 law bans schools from issuing out-of-school suspensions to homeless students, except for when students commit infractions that include violence, weapons or illegal substances. However, the banned suspensions have not stopped, with state data suggesting they’re continuing at roughly two-thirds the rate they did before the law was passed.
Houston ISD, the state’s largest district, has acknowledged breaking the law on hundreds of occasions in its annual reports on school discipline. Several other districts and charter school networks, including YES Prep Public Schools, Beaumont Independent School District and International Leadership of Texas, confirmed to the Landing that they had issued dozens of illegal suspensions.
Some school leaders floated two primary ways for improving compliance with the law: giving more training to campus leaders, and using computer systems to flag when staff members enter illegal suspensions into their student tracking software.
2. State officials haven’t enforced the law
Despite the repeated violations of the 2019 law, the Texas Education Agency has not investigated or sanctioned any districts that broke the rules.
TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky said the agency can only launch investigations into misconduct allegations in response to complaints from the public. State regulations do not require the agency to enforce the suspension law, but they do give the state’s education commissioner — who leads the TEA — broad power to start an investigation when they determine “necessary.”
TEA staff also haven’t taken a leading role in training school employees about the law, largely leaving that job to regional and district administrators. Public records show TEA staffers have held two training sessions for school leaders since the bill’s passage.
3. Key legislator says action is needed
When Texas legislators crafted the 2019 law, they did not give it teeth, such as punishments for school employees or districts that violate it, or dedicate money toward enforcement.
When presented with the Landing’s findings, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, state Rep. Eugene Wu, D-Houston, said the Legislature should change the law during next year’s session. Wu said the Legislature “laid out clear direction in the law” but left out enforcement measures, allowing districts to skirt it without consequences.
“If we need to make revisions to the law to force compliance, we will,” Wu said.
4. Can't prove full extent of problem
A quirk in Texas’ data tracking of homeless students and suspensions makes it impossible to measure the exact number of illegal suspensions and pinpoint which districts are the worst offenders.
Texas classifies a student as homeless if they spent any amount of time during the school year without housing. As a result, it’s possible some students were legally suspended at a time when they had housing, yet their suspensions would appear in the data as illegal if they later became homeless.
It’s also possible that district employees suspended students who were not listed as homeless, yet who lacked stable housing. Those suspensions are still illegal, yet they wouldn’t show up in the state data.
5. The illegal suspensions can be life-changing
abdelraoufsinno conducted in-depth interviews with four young adults in the Houston area who were suspended from school while homeless, asking them to describe how the discipline affected them. They recounted stories of missed opportunities, detailed their feelings of abandonment and lamented the lack of understanding by school officials.
Brandon Williams, 25, said campus administrators issued him roughly 10 suspensions during his senior year at Houston ISD’s Yates High School for talking back to bullies who taunted him for being gay. Williams was living in a homeless shelter at the time.
related to this series
Four Houstonians got suspended from school while homeless. Here’s how it changed their lives.
by Asher Lehrer-Small / Staff Writer
Williams believes the amount of school he missed caused him to lose out on academic opportunities. Now, money is tight, he is once again homeless and has been forced to consider dancing and sex work, he said.
“If I didn’t miss as much school as I did for the simple things, like being bullied, I probably would have graduated with a 3.0 or 4.0,” Williams said. “Ultimately, school wasn’t hard. It wasn’t the math, it wasn’t the science, it wasn’t algebra, it wasn’t geometry. It wasn’t none of that. It was like, literally, the stuff that I was facing mixed with the administration.”
Asher Lehrer-Small covers education for the Landing and would love to hear your tips, questions and story ideas about Houston ISD. Reach him at [email protected].
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
