San Antonio-area schools issued hundreds of suspensions to homeless students — likely breaking state law

Hundreds of students experiencing homelessness across the San Antonio region have been suspended from school in recent years for scuffling, persistent misbehavior and other minor infractions.

Many of those suspensions were likely in violation of a 2019 law that banned school administrators from doling out punishments that kick homeless students off campus for most offenses — a practice that has continued across hundreds of Texas districts with minimal response from state officials, a San Antonio Report investigation in collaboration with the Houston Landing shows.

The San Antonio Independent School District acknowledged breaking the law in a statement to the San Antonio Report and in data released showing hundreds of such incidents through open records requests.

“We have found examples where students who were experiencing homelessness should have received alternative disciplinary actions for infractions such as fighting and persistent misbehavior,” district spokeswoman Laura Short said. 

“We are strengthening our procedures to ensure we are in full compliance with the law,” Short added, “and this includes re-training our principals and hearing officers [this summer].”

Northside Independent School District, the largest district in the region and fourth-largest in the state, wouldn’t confirm a specific number of illegal suspensions of homeless students, but told the Report suspension is sometimes necessary — regardless of the law.

“If a campus feels as though that suspension is warranted because it’s going to lead to greater safety and security and order on that campus, then I think that’s a decision that they have to make,” NISD spokesman Barry Perez said. “Does that mean that that’s 100% foolproof? That there won’t be a situation where a campus uses a discretionary suspension when perhaps an alternative could have been used? No, that’s not a guarantee.”

Training to ensure compliance with the law is ongoing, Perez said. 

Other San Antonio-area districts also said they are reexamining their training practices and how they categorize infractions. 

Officials with Harlandale Independent School District, which serves around 12,000 students, said the district has worked to train staff to comply with the law since it was enacted, but a number of instances occurred despite those efforts. 

The Texas Education Agency, which regulates Texas schools, is “conducting a thorough review” of the suspension data for homeless students in response to issues highlighted in previous reporting by the Landing, spokesperson Jake Kobersky said, which may prompt further state oversight of districts that are not compliant.

When asked whether district officials can make their own exceptions to the law, Kobersky said “the TEA expects school systems to follow all applicable laws and statutes.”

While there may be limited emergencies where expulsion or removal — not suspension — is allowed, the Texas Education Code “is clear under which circumstances a homeless student may be placed in out-of-school suspension.”

Discretionary suspensions

Across Texas, TEA data shows thousands of students have been given illegal suspensions over the past five years, denying them access to the food, shelter and education often found only on campus.

However, a wrinkle in Texas’ data tracking makes it nearly impossible to pinpoint which districts are the worst offenders. 

A student is marked as “homeless” in the data if they spend any amount of time during the school year without housing.

That designation does not have a time element bound to it, so it is possible some suspensions would appear illegal if the student was suspended when they had housing but later became homeless. (For this reason, the Report and Landing are highlighting broad, state-level data, rather than exact numbers for individual districts — except when provided by the districts themselves.) 

Still, in interviews, about a dozen advocates and formerly homeless students argued that the illegal practice endangers Texas’ most vulnerable children. They fear homeless students are more likely to commit crimes and get exploited by adults if they’re not in school.

Suspensions are required for students committing dangerous crimes, using drugs and alcohol or bringing certain weapons to schools. Other suspensions are applied at the discretion of campus and district officials, such as those for violations of the student code of conduct.

When Texas legislators crafted the bipartisan 2019 law banning schools from issuing out-of-school suspensions to homeless students except for required infractions, they did not dedicate any money toward enforcement or provide any consequences for school employees or districts that violate it.

Meanwhile, the TEA, which investigates potential cases of misconduct across the state’s 1,200 school districts, has not taken an active role in enforcing the law or training districts on how to apply it, arguing it doesn’t have the legal authority to investigate and punish districts.

One of the bill’s co-sponsors, state Rep. Eugene Wu, D-Houston, said when lawmakers return to session in 2025, they should act “to force compliance.”

“Unfortunately, this type of thing happens all the time where the Legislature has laid out clear direction in the law, but school districts either unintentionally fail to understand how to apply the law, or sometimes they intentionally don’t understand,” Wu said.

The first step to solving the issue, he said, is figuring out why school districts aren’t following the law.

“Was this an issue of the schools didn’t know, was it an issue of schools didn’t have a choice? Was it an issue of the schools didn’t have funding for it?” Wu said Friday at an event in San Antonio.

He also foreshadowed the difficulty of doing that at the same time legislators gear up for a fight over vouchers, or public tax dollars being used for private schooling — a key legislative priority of Gov. Greg Abbott and some conservatives.

Passing H.B. 692

Texas lawmakers stressed the need for the 2019 bill, H.B. 692, in part by highlighting the perils faced by the state’s tens of thousands of homeless children, who historically have made up roughly 1.5 percent of all K-12 students.

Lawmakers heard testimony from former Indiana and Austin-area student Lyric Wardlow, who was in and out of shelters for much of her young life, and received more than 30 suspensions throughout her schooling — for attendance violations, talking back, talking too much, being tardy and giving her teachers too much “attitude.”

In an interview with the San Antonio Report, Wardlow said her behavior wasn’t just to act out — when she was struggling in school, she was also experiencing instability at home. 

“I wasn’t really a bad kid necessarily,” she said. “But I did have a lot of stuff going on, considering the fact that I was living in a shelter.”

When she was ejected from school, Wardlow didn’t have many options — and school staff didn’t help her find a place to go. 

“It was either trying to get back into the shelter if they allowed that or trying to find my mom, if she wasn’t allowed in the shelter, getting transportation to wherever she was,” she said. “And we didn’t have a car either. So I was taking public transportation trying to navigate things.” 

The experiences of students like Wardlow inspired both progressive and conservative groups to support the bill. In the end, it passed the Texas Legislature with near-unanimous support before being signed by the governor.

McKinney-Vento specialists

Even before the law was passed, district and state leaders were working to provide services and protections for homeless students to comply with the McKinney-Vento Act, federal legislation passed in 1987 that requires schools to provide transportation and enrollment services to those students.

Under the act, homelessness includes students “doubling up” with friends, living out of motels or living in “subpar” living conditions, according to interviews with campus officials. 

Districts and campuses now employ McKinney-Vento liaisons, which advocate for students experiencing homelessness and connect families with resources like shelters and social services. 

When the 2019 law passed, these employees were thrust between administrators working to implement the law and vulnerable students who were afforded the new protections. 

Among them was Norma Mercado, who served in the role for Austin-area Bastrop ISD. Having experienced homelessness herself, she was passionate about advocating for, and protecting the vulnerable students.

When liaisons explained the law to central office and campus staff, everyone was on board at first. But it wasn’t long before students started acting up, and administrators came looking for ways to mete out discipline, she said. 

“Before, the solution was, ‘I’m just going to suspend you,’ and the problem was solved for the day,” she said. “Well, they couldn’t do that anymore.” 

That meant finding resources, funding and staff the district didn’t have, Mercado said, contributing to burnout for liaisons and leading eventually to her decision to leave her job nine months ago.

Bastrop ISD didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment Wednesday.

Laura Baker, the director of student services for the district, emailed TEA officials in 2019, asking for advice on how to stop administrators from continuing to issue illegal suspensions, according to documents obtained through an open records request.

“If I find out in a timely manner, I contact the administrator and have them attempt to get the student back on campus,” Baker asked. “Is there anything else we should be doing, other than providing ongoing training, as a district?”

TEA Student Discipline Specialist Mary Scott responded by suggesting Baker refer administrators who issue the illegal suspensions to her “not as a reprimand but as a resource to come up with a solution for this problem,” according to the documents. Scott did not suggest structural changes to the districts’ internal discipline tracking systems.

San Antonio districts’ compliance

Since the law’s passage, available TEA data shows out-of-school suspensions issued to homeless students for minor offenses now occur across the state at about two-thirds the rate they did previously — falling well short of eliminating the practice, as lawmakers intended.

Katherine Peña, the pupil personnel administrator and hearing officer for Harlandale ISD, said the district reviews data annually and updates training to explain requirements to staffers on the campus level. 

It’s a constant effort to ensure communication and understanding of the ins and outs of the various regulations coming down from the state, she added. 

Despite being trained on what constitutes a discretionary suspension, including offenses like bringing a look-alike weapon to school, data shared by Harlandale ISD still showed such suspensions on occasion. 

School officials need to have some level of discretion, Peña said. Sometimes an initial reaction by an authority figure, when investigated, should not have led to a suspension.

“It’s a very difficult call to make sometimes. [Campus administrators] have to weigh the seriousness of the offense, who was impacted by the offense, the level of disruption on the campus, the level of concern, and act in the best interest,” she said. 

But Brett Merfish, who helped push for the 2019 bill as director of youth justice for the Austin-based nonprofit Texas Appleseed, said districts don’t have that freedom.

“That’s not their call to make at this point,” she said “The law is pretty clear about what is an exception and what isn’t.”

Similar to Harlandale, Perez from Northside ISD said, “campus administrators will always gauge the severity of the offense and work to ensure the safety of students and staff on a campus.”

The district will “continue to provide relevant training” to ensure compliance with the law, he said. 

When asked what that training looks like, NISD provided a PowerPoint presentation that reviews the overall suspension process, including slides warning against excessive use of suspensions and expulsions. The training is given to all principals and other staffers that oversee discipline every three years, as well as when someone moves into an administrative role.

But the presentation did not include any references to the 2019 law. 

Perez said by email the law’s new provisions were discussed and addressed in the training “though not specifically written in the [PowerPoint].” 

Other San Antonio-area districts provided more robust training, including explicit references and copies of the law.

Officials with North East Independent School District, the second largest district in the region, said they have seen success by implementing “significant checks and balances to ensure compliance,” including a 43-slide PowerPoint that includes specifics of the 2019 law.

Tyler Shoesmith, the executive director of the NEISD Office of Pupil Personnel Services pointed to the wrinkle in the state’s data as a “consistent issue,” sharing internal data that showed only a handful of improper suspensions. 

“In these rare instances, depending upon the circumstance, a coding error on behalf of the administrator occurred or they inadvertently bypassed the safeguard in the student information system,” Shoesmith said.

Not all districts failed to comply with the law.

East Central ISD, another San Antonio district, virtually eliminated the practice in the years after the law was passed, despite suspending homeless students in the years before.  

Brandon Oliver, a spokesperson for the district, said in an email that the district achieved this through comprehensive training and ongoing support. 

“Our campus administrators actively review individual cases and collaborate closely with Student Services,” he said. “This allows us to tailor our responses to each student’s unique circumstances, avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions, particularly in disciplinary matters.”

Lacking state support

Despite repeated violations, the TEA has not yet sanctioned any districts, according to the agency. 

While the 2019 law does not outline potential punishment of violators, Texas law allows the TEA commissioner to launch investigations as they “otherwise determine necessary.” Broadly, the commissioner can issue multiple types of punishment, including appointing a monitor or conservator to oversee changes following those probes.

The agency currently focuses on enforcing federal statutes like McKinney-Vento and other laws which lawmakers specifically tasked to the TEA. Any complaints about violations would be handled through the general complaints process, Kobersky said. 

“H.B. 692 and the resulting statute did not give TEA the authority to collect the data that would be required to monitor compliance with this statute,” he said.

He also pushed back on the idea that the TEA has provided inadequate education around the law’s provisions.

TEA officials have largely left responsibility for training to regional and district officials.

Since 2019, the TEA has held only two, statewide webinar training sessions that inform K-12 staff of the law’s provisions, with a more than three-year gap between the bill’s passage and the first session held by the state. 

Schools’ McKinney-Vento liaisons have access to “robust” training from the state, but the agency does not have the legal authority to require K-12 staff to participate in the sessions, Kobersky said. Regional officials have also held separate training opportunities for districts’ homeless liaisons.

Looking ahead

Many local school district leaders, advocates and elected officials interviewed for this story seemed unaware of the law violations until reporters brought them forward.

Though her organization was initially unaware of the issue, Nikisha Baker, the president and CEO of SAMMinistries in San Antonio, which provides transitional housing and other services for families and students experiencing homelessness, said the revelation shows community partners need to step in and do more. 

“It’s an opportunity for nonprofit organizations, not just SAMMinistries, but others in the education space … to identify areas where we can plug in and help fill these gaps because we’re talking about the workforce for tomorrow,” she said, “and what our community will look like in 2040 and 2050.”

Advocates, including Merfish, hope that with renewed scrutiny and support, districts can do more to protect the homeless students they serve. 

She believes the Covid-19 pandemic, which struck less than a year after the law was enacted, overwhelmed districts and distracted from the law’s rollout. School leaders need more guidance on how to respond to homeless students who act out in class, she said.

“My gut isn’t that people don’t want to do this,” Merfish said. “I just think they probably don’t know what else to do sometimes.”

SAISD Trustee Sarah Sorensen, who learned of the violations from the district shortly after the San Antonio Report reached out for comment, said her initial reaction was disappointment. 

“As a board member, it is important to me that we are serving all of our students well and that we are recognizing the challenges that students face and being responsive to them,” she said. “And certainly I would hope that we are complying with state law.” 

Out-of-school suspensions should be decreased for all students, but especially the most vulnerable, Sorensen said. 

“We need to be following up to see that folks are actually doing what they are supposed to be doing,” she said. 

Houston Landing education reporter Asher Lehrer-Small and San Antonio Report government reporter Andrea Drusch contributed to this report.