Texas schools illegally suspended thousands of homeless students — and nobody stopped them

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.