most of the applicants are students who already attend private schools<\/a>. Texas Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock confirmed that over 70% of applicants already attended a private school or were homeschooled during the 2024-2025 school year.<\/p>\nNow that the application period has concluded, preliminary data has been released on the over 274,000 Texans who applied. ABC13 is breaking down the numbers.<\/p>\n
Where are most of the applicants from?<\/p>\n
Most applicants live in the area served by HISD, which makes sense since HISD is the largest district in Texas.<\/p>\n
Fort Bend, Cy-Fair, and Katy are also among the top eight areas for applications.<\/p>\n
How much money is being given out?<\/p>\n
Hancock said that accepted students will receive about $10,500 per year to attend approved private schools, thousands more than the homeschoolers, who can expect to receive up to $2,000 each year.<\/p>\n
Children with disabilities may qualify for up to $30,000, based on the estimated cost of educating them in a public school.<\/p>\n
The Comptroller said that 36% of voucher applications are from low-income families, defined as families of four earning $64,000 or less per year.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, 27% of all applications are from families of four making more than $160,000.<\/p>\n
For comparison, data from the Texas Education Agency shows that about 60% of public school students are considered economically disadvantaged.<\/p>\n
How do the applicants differ from public school students?<\/p>\n
According to the Texas Comptroller’s Office, 45% of applicants are white, 23% are Hispanic, and 12% are Black.<\/p>\n
The breakdown of students in Texas public schools differs from the application pool.<\/p>\n
TEA data shows that 54% are Hispanic, 24% are white, and 13% are Black.<\/p>\n
What are the next steps?<\/p>\n
Families will find out later this month if they have been accepted into the program.<\/p>\n
After that, they are scheduled to receive the money in July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The application period for Texas’ controversial school voucher program, formally known as Texas Education Freedom Accounts, is now…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[90548,90549,5621,47964,30636,5189,27,5622,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-234367","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-application-period","9":"tag-comptroller39s-office","10":"tag-kelly-hancock","11":"tag-private-schools","12":"tag-public-school","13":"tag-school-voucher-program","14":"tag-texas","15":"tag-texas-comptroller","16":"tag-texas-headlines","17":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}