Delia Scott has two dyslexic daughters who need more specialized attention than what she says they were getting at their Katy ISD elementary school. When the state’s voucher program started taking applications in February, Scott seized the chance to send her girls to private school.
“I don’t know why everybody isn’t doing this,” says Scott, who works in compliance for a construction company while her husband is a homemaker. “I told at least 10 people about it, whose kids are friends with my kids. Only one parent applied and she got the grant.”
The reasons vary as to why everybody is not getting in on the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program. Some people applied and got rejected. Some were approved for voucher money but turned down by the private school they picked. One Houston family moved to be closer to a Catholic school they’d selected for their son but still hasn’t heard if they’ll be bumped up from a waitlist.
Meanwhile, more than half of the state’s public school administrators don’t know how many students they’re going to lose to the voucher program because the comptroller’s office is withholding data from districts where fewer than 30 students accepted vouchers.
And the clock is ticking. Houston ISD starts August 10. Fort Bend ISD goes back on August 11. Cypress-Fairbanks and Katy ISDs start August 12, and Spring Branch ISD returns to class on August 13.
Scott says she was thrilled to learn that each of her children would receive $16,000 and were accepted to Texas Christian School, where tuition is $9,800 per student per year. The excess can be used for uniforms and some school supplies, but it stays in a protected fund rather than being deposited in the recipient’s bank account.
Scott’s children didn’t get the $30,000 top award amount offered to students with disabilities, but hardly anyone did. The dollar figures are based on Individualized Education Plans, so the voucher may go toward speech therapy for one student and tutoring for another.
Those who don’t have a child with a disability are eligible for $10,474, and homeschool families can get up to $2,000 per child.
Not all the applicants were as lucky as Scott’s family.
More than 275,000 families across Texas applied for the $1 billion taxpayer-funded program, and less than half were awarded vouchers. Some dropped out, but as of last week, thousands remained on a wait list.
Less than half of the recipients previously attended public school. Critics have steadfastly maintained that the program is a grift by Gov. Greg Abbott intended to dismantle public education and distribute taxpayer money to families that could already afford to send their kids to private schools.
Neither assertion is accurate, says Travis Pillow, a TEFA spokesman who previously worked for a voucher program in Florida. The Texas voucher program simply offers families a choice in where they want to send their kids to school, a choice that low-income families didn’t previously have, he says.
“Part of the goal of this program is that if you’re looking at education options for your child, affordability should not be the barrier,” Pillow says,
Why such a low number of awards for families whose kids were previously enrolled in public schools? Because only 23 percent of those who submitted an application had a child previously enrolled in a public school, Pillow says.
As for TEFA being designed to put money in the pockets of rich people who could already afford private schools, Pillow says “a good chunk” of the applicants have children who are starting pre-K or kindergarten, meaning they weren’t previously enrolled in any school.
Also, he says that just because someone sends their child to private school, that doesn’t mean they have a country club membership.
“They either have a student with a disability who maybe needs additional services or a specialized learning environment, or we’re talking about low-income students where, if they’re already at a private school, there’s some combination of financial aid that’s making that possible and their parents are making significant financial sacrifices in order for them to be there,” he says.
“It’s Already Harming Public Schools”
There are certainly many skeptics of what Governor Abbott’s Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa refers to as the “voucher scam,” which she says drains taxpayer dollars from neighborhood public schools into unaccountable private operators.
Preliminary data from the Texas Comptroller’s Office show that the program is, in fact, prioritizing low-income families and students with disabilities.
But the numbers show that only 1 percent of public school families applied for vouchers with the intent of pulling their kids out of public institutions. Critics say the program is stacked against the poor, many of whom didn’t bother to apply because they believe strongly in public education or they don’t think a $10,000 voucher is going to be enough to cover tuition and associated expenses.
The median tuition for Texas private schools is $9,400 annually but it doesn’t cover transportation, books and uniforms. Additionally, private schools don’t have to follow the same civil rights regulations as public schools and can deny students admission or refuse to accommodate them.
An initial review of 59 voucher-approved schools performed by the Austin-based nonprofit Texas Center for Voucher Transparency shows that many private schools do not publicly post tuition rates, making it difficult for parents to plan ahead for where they want to send their children.
Supporters of the voucher program have frequently cited it as a “lifeline for students in failing schools,” but Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock has said he doesn’t have information about how many voucher recipients are leaving low-performing schools.
Dee Carney, director of the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, says all the unanswered questions make it difficult to determine whether the program is going to perform as it was intended.
“We know they have the data by the school district if they were previously enrolled in the district, but no one is connecting that yet to those D- and F-rated campuses,” she says. “But that is one of our questions, because it was a big promise, right? A big promise to help low-income kids in low-performing schools.”
The data also doesn’t show which private schools received the greatest number of applications and which accreditation organizations approved each of the participating private and online schools, Carney says. Her organization is nonpartisan and she’s not calling the voucher program a scam but she says Texans have a right to be skeptical about a $1 billion program funded by taxpayer dollars.
According to Carney’s research, almost 60 percent of approved private school providers serve only Pre-K through kindergarten students and more than half of Texas counties do not have a private “brick-and-mortar” elementary, middle, or high school accepting vouchers.
Furthermore, the Center’s analysis of the voucher-approved private schools shows that the marketplace is largely composed of faith-based institutions, led primarily by Christian and Catholic schools, while Islamic and Jewish schools represent a much smaller share of approved providers. The comptroller’s list of participating schools also includes a large number of Montessori programs, Prenda microschools, and schools using AI-driven two-hour earning platforms.
Although parents have said the rollout so close to the start of school makes it difficult for them to plan for the school, the timing was by design. Officials from the comptroller’s office have said they are issuing awards in multiple waves based on a lottery system with priority tiers, a waitlist and continuous backfilling to ensure the state uses as much of the appropriated funding as possible.
Another reason that awards are still being distributed is that the deadline to apply for vouchers was extended after four Muslim parents and four Islamic private schools successfully sued state officials, including Hancock, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath, saying the exclusion of Islamic schools from the program amounts to religious discrimination.
At the time, Hancock said he blocked Islamic schools from participating in the program, claiming that some are associated with foreign terrorist organizations.
Other concerns about the voucher program have been raised through the Center for Voucher Transparency’s watchdog portal. Some families have complained that voucher holders are being charged higher tuition than non-voucher holders, which, if true, would be a violation of Senate Bill 2 that created the program, Carney says.
“We’re not an investigative agency but we can collect the stories and experiences,” she says. “We’re looking for trends and patterns in those stories and experiences. People are saying they got the voucher but the school won’t accept them or the school came back and said [tuition] was going to be more than they were originally told. Families are frustrated.”
Carney says that the first year of the voucher program “should not be measured only by the number of applications submitted or awards granted; the voucher program should also be measured by whether it is meeting the promises made to Texas families and taxpayers.”
TEFA is already harming public schools, Carney added, as they face declining enrollment and massive budget deficits, forcing them to shutter campuses. “Fort Bend ISD is building in $8 million in lost revenue due to vouchers,” she says. “Part of that, not all of it, but part of it, in addition to enrollment declines, is one reason they’ve closed seven campuses.”
Scott, the mother of two dyslexic daughters, says she understands the concerns that money is being taken away from public schools to boost enrollment at private, primarily Christian and Catholic schools. However, she says, the public schools aren’t the same as they were when her two older sons — one now a senior at Texas State University and one a sophomore at Lamar University — graduated from Katy ISD.
“It was a completely different experience, like we were on another planet back then,” she says. “We’ve been fortunate to have some amazing teachers, and the special ed team has been fantastic. There’s just a problem with the leadership and how the schools run. They’re just teaching the STAAR test and my kids aren’t really learning any transferable skills for those eight hours. They’re not learning critical thinking. They’re learning how to navigate a device.”
However, Carney points out that Texas public schools already serve more than 843,000 students with learning disabilities but some private schools may not be equipped to handle students with special needs.
Tammy Spencer, a former Houston ISD teacher, says she started the Dyslexia School of Houston during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 precisely because students were asking for help with reading that they weren’t getting in public schools. She recently became accredited for a microschool on Bissonnet that is accepting vouchers, and she’s also on the TEFA-approved vendor list to offer dyslexia tutoring services.
“I spent almost 30 years in the public school system,” Spencer says. “I’m pro-public ed. My frustration is that I don’t believe parents should have to pay for their children to be literate in America. We’re trained, we’re skilled, to meet the needs of children with very specific learning styles in very small groups, and that doesn’t meet the criteria for public education. The public schools won’t let us do what we need to do.”
“The public schools aren’t helping our children, and the parents have to pay for help,” she added. “We’re having to fix the public school’s problems after school. I’m going to help these kids with or without the TEFA dollars. The TEFA dollars just allow me to help the ones who can’t afford our services.”
Pillow argues the voucher program forces public schools to do better.
“There have been several rigorous studies done by researchers that have looked at the impact of a school choice program on public school performance, and what they found was that the more students are signing up for a school choice program in a given area, the more the public schools in that area step up their game and improve their results,” he says. “It can actually spur measurable improvements in public school performance, and so the idea is that it’s kind of a zero-sum game.”
“This Is What We Owe Her”
Those who didn’t apply for vouchers this year or did apply and were denied are going to have a hard time entering the program next year unless more funding is allotted by the Legislature. Unused voucher money rolls over for this year’s recipients. Additionally, the program is heavily stacked with younger children, meaning very few high school seniors are voucher-holders and will graduate in 2027 to make room for more recipients.
“If [the Legislature] keeps things at a flat $1 billion, we wouldn’t be able to accept very many more new students,” Pillow says. “A lot of students tend to move back into the public school system if they were in private K-8. Putting all that aside, I would say that if we do our job well, parents will be satisfied, and they’re going to stay.”
Christine Nuñez’s 6-year-old daughter Gianna was attending an HISD pre-K when her parents observed that the child was having difficulties with speech and language processing.
They put her in private education for kindergarten but the school simply didn’t have the tools to help her, Nuñez says. Gianna was classified as special education but only because of the speech challenges. If she were in a public school, she’d be in general education with “pullouts” for speech therapy and expensive after-school tutoring, her mother says. “She’s typical but she’ll fall through the cracks,” Nuñez says.
Frustrated with the lack of options, Nuñez spoke to a pediatrician, friends at the Christian family ministry where she works and education professionals. Finally, someone recommended she speak to Spencer at the Dyslexia School of Houston.
“I called her and she said, ‘How am I going to help your baby girl?’ I just burst into tears,” Nuñez says. “Her vision for the microschool model was exactly what my baby needed to be in.”
Gianna was the first student to enroll in Spencer’s new microschool and will enter the first grade there in less than a month. Although Nuñez and her husband are both employed, they qualified in the low-income bracket and received a voucher for $11,300, a fraction of the $35,000 tuition at the Dyslexia School.
“We are a dual-income household and we’re making less than a family with one lawyer parent,” Nuñez says. “We are putting our all into our one child and our one shot at her first, second and third grade years. We will never get this time again. In a lot of ways we’re very blessed that we didn’t get to the third grade before we figured this out. If we don’t get this right, right now, she’s going to suffer. This is what we owe her.”
Nuñez says they plan to only use the voucher for the time it takes to address their child’s learning difficulties.
“My husband and I would send her to public school, and will, when she can,” she says. “This is not a forever thing. Dad and I have watched her in public [school] and we see how she functions with a class of 25 to 30 kids. Then Dad and I put her in a class with 14 kids and we’re still facing some problems. Now we’re going even smaller. It would be foolish to go bigger at this rate. We need to go really micro to hone in on those issues to eventually get to where she can choose her own educational future.”
Colleen Dippel, founder and CEO of Families Empowered, says she supports the voucher program because it means that at least some children with disabilities can get an education in an environment that their parents are confident will meet their needs. Dippel’s Houston-based nonprofit has been around for almost 17 years and provides bilingual school navigation services primarily for low-income families.
“This is going to be a big game-changer,” Dippel says. “I would be floored if there were not thousands of families for whom this created an opportunity that they could not have otherwise afforded.”
Lottery System, Funding and Oversight
Pillow told the Houston Press in a July 17 interview that the state first prioritized low- and middle-income families with disabilities (Tier 1), followed by low- and middle-income families without regard to disability status (Tier 2).
“We’re not done awarding yet, so there are some low-income people who are on the wait list, and I would say the odds are very strong that if they are below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, they will be awarded in the next group,” he said.
Once the Tier 1 families were funded, the other applicants were put into a lottery system. “We didn’t have ping pong balls or anything like that, but we used a computer program to assign a random number to all the students, and then we put the students in order based on their random number but also within those priority tiers.”
Vouchers are opening up daily because about 10 percent of the families who were awarded turned them down. Pillow says that could be because their preferred school didn’t work out for them, an alternative came up that better suited their needs — such as being taken off a wait list at a charter school — or they “got lost in the paperwork” of submitting tax returns and IEPs and didn’t complete the requirements by deadline.
The comptroller’s office is surveying the 15,000 people who got vouchers and declined them to determine how they can make the program more user-friendly, Pillow says.
“I’ve worked on similar programs going back to 2014. I pretty much had white knuckles when we were getting ready to launch this thing,” Pillow says. “As far as launching a brand new program at this scale with this level of complexity, I’ve been really excited by the reception from schools and families, and just how smoothly the rollout has gone so far. We like to say this is our first draft, and we’re going to continue to improve and look for ways to make the program better, stronger, more accessible.”
On July 15, Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Speaker of the House Dustin Burrows issued a directive on Legislative Appropriations Requests for the 2028-29 biennium, requiring state agencies to reduce base budget requests by 3 percent.
The directive claims that a priority in the next legislative session, which begins in January, is to protect education funding, including the Foundation School Program — the primary method of state funding for public school districts and open-enrollment charter schools — and the TEFA, from any base budget reductions.
Carney says that signals a plan to keep the voucher program going strong at $1 billion or more for years to come. It also means the state doesn’t appear to want to reduce its per-student funding for public schools, but although most voucher recipients weren’t previously enrolled in public schools, critics say that even a small drop in enrollment could make a huge difference in the state’s budget for public education.
Florida’s voucher program, which Pillow worked on until January 2026, has increased to more than $4 billion since it was implemented in 2023, taking up nearly a quarter of the state’s public school fund. Arizona reported in 2024 that its voucher program contributed to a $1.4 billion budget shortfall.
And there are questions about the office that oversees it all. The comptroller functions as the state’s chief financial officer and administers the voucher program. Hancock recently resigned the post and Abbott appointed Don Huffines, who ousted Hancock in the March 2026 primary.
The decision drew outrage from the Texas Senate Democratic Caucus not so much because of the timing of administering the voucher program but because Huffines is a candidate on the November ballot, facing Democrat Sarah Eckhart in November. Huffines’ interim term begins August 1.
While uncertainty remains, Scott says she’s hopeful the private school she chose will be a better fit for her kids’ learning needs than public school. She attempted to enroll at other private schools but either the applications had closed, tuition was upwards of $30,000 a year or she’d have to separate her kids at two different campuses.
“Every step of the way, I thought, if we get a yes, we should just move forward and try,” Scott says. “My faith is huge to me. I believe that God doesn’t bring you this far just to leave you. But, you know, effort and obedience have to meet, and that’s where your miracle hits.”
The private school has opportunities for youth volleyball and basketball that Scott’s kids didn’t have at Katy ISD, the school is much smaller, and the kids probably won’t have to deal with the “behavioral issues” that were rampant at their public school, Scott says. But they’ll no longer be getting free lunches and they’ll have to pay for books and uniforms.
“I was so optimistic, and I still am,” she says. “I think this is going to be great for my family. We talked to our girls about this, and it could just be for a season. It could be for a year or two or just to get through this middle school hump. We really don’t know, but we’ve been blessed to have the opportunity, and after getting a lot of no’s, I just said, let’s do it. I want to really encourage parents just to try. Try something different.”
