Gov. Greg Abbott speaks about a school voucher plan during a rally Tuesday March 21, 2023, at Cypress Christian School in Houston. Abbott and his allies say the voucher effort is about school choice. Critics say they are private school vouchers that allow people to take money out of the public school system to benefit private schools.
Jon Shapley/Staff photographer
School districts across the Houston region may lose as much as $68 million this school year from students leaving for private or homeschool because of state-funded vouchers. Statewide, the financial loss is more than $220 million.
A new report, shared exclusively with the Houston Chronicle, shows that of the 80 school districts in the Houston-Galveston region, nearly half lost students who previously attended public school before taking vouchers, totaling 8,100 students. An additional 19 districts lost between 1 and 29 students each, but the Texas Comptroller’s office masked the exact number for privacy reasons.
The total dollar amount per district varies, according to the report produced by anti-voucher groups Every Texan and the Texas Center for School Voucher Transparency. But a conservative estimate shows that at least 17 districts in the region — including Houston, Cy-Fair and Katy ISDs — can expect to lose more than $1 million each this school year because of enrollment losses caused by the voucher program, called the Texas Education Freedom Accounts.
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“There is a perception that ‘Oh, this money isn’t coming out of public school funding,'” said Erin Baumgartner, director of the Houston Education Research Consortium housed at Rice University. “(But) we are directly pulling resources, or potential resources, from school districts.”
ALSO READ: Texas’ school voucher lottery left most Houston families waiting. Here’s where they landed.
The report offers an early estimate of the acute financial impacts Texas school districts are facing from the voucher program in its first year. The data comes as some Republican lawmakers consider whether to expand the program in the 2027 legislative session.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and one of the authors of the school voucher bill, said that the program is working as intended: it is giving choices to students who are in special education or from low-income families.
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But he also noted that the program was going to have some impact on school budgets, since the bill gave no indemnity to school districts to account for the exodus of students.
“Once that came out of the bill, I don’t think anybody could responsibly say it wasn’t going to cost (districts),” Bettencourt said. “But at the same time, you have to realize it can make a difference in educational attainment.”
To calculate the dollars lost per student to the program, the two organizations used data from the comptroller’s office, which runs the program. That data detailed the number of students per district who were in public school in the 2024-25 school year but had accepted vouchers as of Aug. 10. The groups used the average per-student funding from the state last year, around $8,200, to calculate the losses.
Dee Carney, director of the Texas Center for Voucher Transparency, said data from the Houston area includes “large, headline-grabbing numbers.”
“(It) could mean fewer teachers, fewer programs, cutting student services, limiting extracurricular activities,” she said.
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These figures are estimates, though. As the program continues, some data could change. For example, more students on the voucher waitlist have received awards since Aug. 10, and some students have a higher per-student funding than $8,200, likely making this a low estimate of the program’s financial impact. Also, parents reported the data on voucher participants, so there could be some discrepancies.
“8,000 students across the entire Houston region can feel like a small number of students,” Baumgartner said. “But those are pretty dramatic dollars that are not coming to the Houston region anymore as it relates to public education.”
READ MORE: Voucher program could swell to $4.4B next biennium, Texas comptroller says
The districts that lost the most students, and therefore the most funding, are also the largest in the region — Houston, Fort Bend, Cy-Fair, Katy and Conroe ISDs — which experts said was expected.
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But some districts had a higher share of their student bodies leave due to vouchers, making the effects uneven across the region.
Some large districts, like Fort Bend ISD and Lamar CISD, are losing students at higher rates than other large districts like Houston, Cy-Fair and Katy ISDs. These districts are among the 15 Houston-area district with more than 30,000 students that may lose $52 million combined.
In Houston ISD, that means more than 1,200 students and $9.9 million. For Cy-Fair ISD, the second largest district in the state, it’s 680 students and $5.6 million. In Katy ISD, 640 students and $5.3 million.
DATA MAP EMBED HERE
Cy-Fair ISD’s Chief Communications Officer Joel Weckerly said that is a substantial amount of money for the district, which is holding a voter-approved tax rate election in November to bridge an $80 million budget deficit.
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BACKGROUND: Hundreds of Texas school districts don’t know how many students they’re about to lose to vouchers
“We do not view $5.6 million as a minor figure. In public education, that represents significant funding for classroom teachers, campus security and instructional materials,” Weckerly said. “When student departures are scattered across 96 campuses and 13 grade levels, the district loses full state revenue instantly, but fixed operating costs, like heating and cooling buildings, running bus routes and maintaining baseline teacher ratios, remain unchanged.”
Houston ISD’s communications office did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Katy ISD’s communications office declined comment.
However, small districts were not spared.
Tarkington ISD lost 41 of its 1,800 students to vouchers — which is three times the rate of the regional average and makes it the most disproportionately affected district in the region. The district, which sits to the northeast of New Caney, has only one brick-and-mortar private school approved for vouchers in its boundaries, Hope Academy.
Another district that lost a higher share of enrollment was Montgomery ISD, which is west of Conroe with 9,700 students. Just over 100 students left to take vouchers, according to data analyzed by the Chronicle.
ALSO READ: School district size can change a student’s special education voucher by thousands of dollars
Montgomery ISD Superintendent Dr. Mark Ruffin chats with media about his first 100 days on the job, Friday, April 19, 2024.
Kirk Sides/Staff photographer
The fast-growing district expects to lose around $800,000 in funding this year because of the enrollment losses — the equivalent of 10 to 12 teachers, said Mark Ruffin, superintendent of Montgomery ISD.
“Every dollar that is allocated towards an educational program that’s not public ed is $1 that we didn’t receive,” Ruffin said. “Then the TEFA program was approved, the statement was that ‘This isn’t coming from the public education dollars. This is coming from elsewhere.’ But if there’s money available to allocate that’s not being allocated to public ed, then that’s challenging.”
But the district could lose more funding. Ruffin said Montgomery ISD has received a fast-growth stipend from the state, worth half a million dollars for the past few years. However, if more students choose private options and that growth slows, that funding could be cut in half next year.
“It’s not like we can cut $800,000 of copy paper out of our budget,” Ruffin said. “When districts are faced with deficit budgets, the only way to right size is by reducing staff, which reduces the people that are making the impact on our kids.”
Fort Bend ISD also lost students at a higher rate, standing to lose $7.6 million in this year’s budget, per the report.
The 78,000-student district saw over 900 students leave — almost twice the rate of its neighbors to the north, Katy and Cy-Fair ISDs. This is despite the district having a similar number of voucher-approved private schools in its boundaries as those districts.
Fort Bend ISD administrators and the board president declined to comment on the report’s findings.
PROJECT: Follow our reporting on eight Texas families who applied for the first year of school vouchers
Experts warned that the dollars lost could impact the bottom-line of public schools which are already struggling with funding. Five Houston-area districts are asking voters to approve tax-rate increases this fall to stabilize budgets.
Budget reductions often lead to programming and staffing cuts, which could impact students who remain in public schools, said Bob Sanborn, the chief executive officer of the advocacy and research group Children At Risk.
“The reality is that there wasn’t enough money for our public schools to begin with,” Sanborn said. “When you take away $68 million, if that’s the number, that has a negative impact.”
It can also make planning for the future more difficult. Ruffin said Montgomery ISD and other districts have to submit demographic projections to the Texas Education Agency in December for the next two years, which helps inform future budgets. But the voucher program is creating a new variable, especially if the program were to expand.
ENROLLMENT: School districts across Houston are seeing enrollment declines. Here’s where they are the largest.
Some districts, especially larger ones, factored potential enrollment losses from the voucher program into demographic projections this year. Lamar CISD, which is poised to lose around 430 students and $3.6 million to the program, said the district wouldn’t have to make any budget changes because they already planned for these enrollment declines.
Handling the changes
Most Houston-area districts who commented about the findings said they were focusing on what they can control, such as improving programs and making sure their students and families know what is going right in their district.
But many districts don’t know why these specific students left to take vouchers, because they don’t know who these students are. Ruffin said when students unenroll, the withdrawal paperwork often doesn’t share enough context to offer real conclusions.
Some are trying to understand the trend more. Klein ISD reviewed voucher-approved schools in their district and noticed most of the options were for pre-K and early childhood centers not available in the public system, said Holly Mason, the district’s chief communications officer.
NEWS: Texas voucher program fuels surge in special education evaluations, straining public schools
Other districts, especially in areas with fewer private schools, only have anecdotal evidence that students are leaving for homeschool or virtual school, even if it’s a public virtual school in another district. Some have already launched their own virtual schools, like Cy-Fair and Klein ISDs, to capture more enrollment. Some districts have even signed on to be vendors in the TEFA program to try and recoup some of the funding they are losing.
“We’re in a different landscape of public education than we’ve ever been,” Ruffin said. “On top of educating, now we’ve got to be salesmen.”
Texas education reporter Lawrence Mower and data reporter Phoebe Quinton contributed to this report.