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This article first appeared on Houston Landing and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. Channelview High School senior Danielle Stephen trudged out of the assistant principal’s office, defeated and desperate . In the fall of 2021, an administrator at the east Harris County campus had just suspended Stephen, sending her home for breaking a rule requiring students to carry backpacks made of see-through material.

But Stephen, who had lived on the streets for much of the past three years, didn’t have a home to go to. The 100-liter camouflage hiking backpack that got her kicked off campus held all her possessions. And she would now miss lunch at school, the place she relied on for hot meals.



“That was my way of showering,” Stephen said. “That was my way of eating.” Stephen was one of thousands of homeless students banned from school despite the passage of a 2019 state law that made it illegal for school administrators to kick Texas’ most vulnerable children off campus for most offenses, a Houston Landing investigation shows.

School employees in hundreds of districts have illegally suspended students over the past five years, according to data obtained from the Texas Education Agency, denying students access to the food, shelter and education often found only on campus. Texas lawmakers took those concerns into account when they crafted the bipartisan 2019 law, which bans schools from issuing out-of-school suspensions to homeless students, except for w.

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