Secondary Daep

Secondary Daep in Houston, TX, is a small, alternative middle school serving grades 6-8 with just 38 students, nearly all of whom are economically disadvantaged, and it operates within the Houston Independent School District (Isd).

This school is not a typical middle school; it is a specialized disciplinary alternative education program (DAEP) designed for students who have been removed from standard classrooms due to severe academic or behavioral challenges. The most striking feature is its extraordinary investment in each student: it spends over $644,000 per student annually—more than 40 times the spending at nearby Yellowstone College Preparatory—and maintains an incredibly low student-to-teacher ratio of 1.8:1, far lower than any other school in the area. Despite this intensive support, academic proficiency rates are critically low, with only 4.3% of 6th graders proficient in math compared to 41.5% district-wide. However, the school's primary mission is not high test scores but keeping students engaged in education, and it has achieved a perfect 0% dropout rate for five consecutive years—a stark contrast to schools like Key Middle (3.7% dropout) and Fleming Middle (3.9% dropout).

While standard test scores are extremely low, there is a relative bright spot in Algebra I, where 30% of test-takers were proficient in 2025-2026, suggesting the school effectively focuses on credit recovery for high-school-level courses. Reading proficiency has been volatile, dropping from 26.9% to 4.4% in one year before recovering slightly, indicating challenges with a transient student population. Even the lowest-performing nearby schools, such as McReynolds Middle (25th percentile), outperform Secondary Daep (2nd percentile) by a wide margin, underscoring that this program serves a uniquely vulnerable group. For parents, the key takeaway is that Secondary Daep's success is measured by its ability to retain students and provide a structured environment, not by traditional academic benchmarks.