DAEP Compliance in Texas:
The Hidden Gap

For years, DAEP placement rates in Texas held relatively steady, then dropped during the pandemic. What has followed is a sharp reversal. According to PEIMS discipline data reported by Houston Landing in December 2024, 121,245 Texas students were placed in a DAEP during the 2023–24 school year — up from 103,655 the year before, an increase of more than 17 percent in a single year.¹

Two forces are driving the spike. First, a 2023 state law (HB 114) made DAEP placement mandatory for any student caught vaping or using e-cigarettes on campus or at a school-related activity, converting what had been a discretionary call into a mandatory referral for thousands of students annually. Second, post-pandemic behavioral disruption has elevated disciplinary activity statewide, consistent with a national pattern documented by the National Center for Education Statistics.²

Approximately 13 percent of Texas public school students receive special education services under IDEA. Research consistently shows that students with disabilities are disciplined at rates significantly exceeding their share of enrollment. TEA's own discipline data validation program tracks disproportionality as a compliance indicator — flagging districts whose discretionary DAEP placement rate for specific student groups is more than twice the all-student rate.³

The legal risk is not merely elevated for this population — it is categorically different. For a general education student, a missed documentation step is an administrative error. For a SPED or 504 student, the same missed step may constitute a violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act — both of which carry federal enforcement mechanisms including OCR complaints, TEA corrective action orders, and, in extreme cases, loss of federal funding.

Under IDEA §300.536, if a SPED student accrues 10 or more cumulative school days of removal in a year, a Manifestation Determination Review (MDR) is legally required before any additional disciplinary placement can proceed. This 10-day clock begins on the first day of any removal — including suspensions — and runs cumulatively across placement types. Many districts tracking placements in spreadsheets have no reliable mechanism to catch this threshold in real time.

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) received nearly 19,000 discrimination complaints in 2022 — the highest number ever recorded. While not all complaints involve discipline, disability-based discrimination in school discipline is among the most active enforcement areas. As of November 2024, there were at least 461 open OCR investigations at elementary and secondary schools nationally involving Title VI discipline claims alone — with separate tracks for disability-based complaints under IDEA and Section 504.⁴

Texas districts file complaints with the Dallas Regional OCR office. The OCR enforcement process, once initiated, is not discretionary — investigators are required to determine whether a violation occurred, and if it did, to mandate corrective action regardless of whether the district considers the process resolved.

Critically, an OCR complaint can be filed at any time — without first going through any local or state resolution process. A parent does not need to have filed a TEA complaint first. The bar for filing is low: a written allegation and a description of the basis for the discrimination claim. An OCR investigation that finds a violation will require a corrective action agreement — which must be completed and verified by the agency before the case is closed.

When Texas districts discuss DAEP compliance risk, the conversation typically focuses on the possibility of a monitoring visit or a data validation flag. The actual cost of a compliance failure — particularly one that triggers an OCR complaint or TEA corrective action — is substantially higher than most administrators estimate.

Beyond direct legal costs, a corrective action process imposes significant indirect costs: staff time diverted to documentation and auditor communication, the SPED coordinator hours spent reconstructing records, and the reputational impact of a monitoring finding that appears in TEA's public data. TEA's corrective action process can require the district to conduct new ARD meetings, provide compensatory services, revise policies, and submit to periodic monitoring — all of which generate ongoing staff burden and cost.⁵

There is no publicly available census of Texas district DAEP software adoption. However, the structural evidence is clear. TEA's own PEIMS data system records discipline events but does not enforce compliance workflows. Texas SIS platforms (Skyward, PowerSchool, Infinite Campus) manage student enrollment data but are not designed to track MDR completion, compliance holds, or transition plan review cycles. No purpose-built DAEP compliance platform with Texas-specific workflow enforcement existed in the Texas market before 2026.

This means the default operating condition for the overwhelming majority of Texas districts is: DAEP compliance managed through some combination of spreadsheets, paper checklists, email threads, and individual staff memory. TEA's discipline data validation reports confirm the predictable result — compliance gaps are common, disproportionality flags are frequent, and data anomalies in PEIMS discipline submissions are a persistent source of district-level review.

TEA's SRDU unit is explicitly required to evaluate DAEP data for anomalies and identify districts at high risk of having inaccurate data or failing to comply with DAEP program requirements — and to trigger on-site monitoring for districts flagged in this process.⁶ The PEIMS data that generates these flags is submitted annually, but the compliance failures that generate the anomalies occur throughout the school year, in real time, one placement at a time.

The 2023 Texas legislative session introduced changes that directly affect DAEP compliance obligations and increase the documentation burden for student services administrators:

The net effect is that districts entering the 2024–25 school year face a higher volume of DAEP placements, more specific monitoring criteria from TEA, and new statutory layers that must be documented correctly in PEIMS. For districts still managing this process manually, the regulatory environment has materially increased the risk that any given placement contains a documentable compliance gap.

The compliance failures that generate OCR complaints, TEA corrective actions, and legal liability in Texas districts are almost never the result of administrators who don't care about the law. They are the predictable outcome of a structural mismatch: a federally mandated compliance process of significant complexity running on workflows that were never designed for it.

TEA requires districts to report every disciplinary removal in PEIMS. IDEA requires Manifestation Determination Reviews, 10-day tracking, and transition planning for every SPED student in DAEP. Section 504 requires parallel protections on a different legal track. Texas Education Code Chapter 37 requires transition plans with 30/60/90-day reviews. None of these systems talk to each other. No Texas SIS enforces them. No spreadsheet catches the 10th cumulative day in real time.

This is the hidden gap. It does not announce itself until a parent files a complaint or an auditor arrives. By then, the documentation either exists or it doesn't.