Original Research by School Decision on Daep
DAEP in Gainesville is an alternative school serving grades six through twelve within Callisburg ISD. It operates as a small, specialized program rather than a conventional comprehensive school, and its role within the district is to serve students whose needs or circumstances place them outside a traditional classroom setting.
Enrollment is very small. The school currently serves a handful of students across its grade span, with representation spread across middle and high school years. The student body is roughly split between white and Hispanic students, with no students identifying as Asian, Black, Native American, Pacific Islander, or multiracial in the reported data. Information about free-or-reduced-price lunch eligibility, students with disabilities, and English learners is not available, which is not uncommon in very small alternative programs where state reporting rules may limit disclosure to protect student privacy.
State assessment data from the available years shows suppressed results, meaning individual student counts are too small for the state to report proficiency rates publicly. A single seventh-grade math result and a single eighth-grade English language arts result are on file from older school years, both with participation rates of one hundred percent, but the underlying performance figures cannot be disclosed. This reflects the school's minimal enrollment rather than any reporting problem. No recent proficiency trends, graduation rate, or chronic absenteeism data are available. For a school of this type and size, state testing data may not be the most relevant lens on student progress anyway; a parent would want to discuss with school staff what outcomes matter most for their student and how the program measures growth.
Gainesville and Cooke County sit in north-central Texas. Housing values in the area are below the state average, and rents are modest relative to local incomes. The local economy includes moderate unemployment, and median household income is stable. The broader Callisburg ISD has recently moved forward on infrastructure. In May 2025, voters approved a bond focused on campus safety, aging facilities, and student programs including agriculture, band, and athletics. Earlier bond attempts in 2021 and 2022 had not passed amid property tax concerns, but the latest measure succeeded. The bond carries a tax-rate impact that the district noted remains among the lowest in the region for districts serving high school grades.
DAEP's home district has eight districts in its county comparison set. Comparison metrics for proficiency, graduation rate, and chronic absenteeism are not applicable for DAEP because the school either does not report these measures or serves a population to which they do not apply in the standard way.
A parent considering DAEP should understand it as a setting for students who need something different from a mainstream program. The school's very small size, alternative structure, and lack of published academic benchmarks suggest it is designed for individualized or flexible instruction rather than a traditional grade-level curriculum. Whether DAEP is the right fit depends on what a student needs: targeted support, a second chance, flexibility around schedule or pacing, or other circumstances where the alternative model serves them better than a conventional school would. Prospective families should speak directly with the school's staff about its curriculum, how students progress, what outcomes look like, and what the daily environment is.
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