Texas aims to avoid other states\u2019 mistakes in new voucher system<\/a><\/p>\nBennett added that the ruling does not resolve claims from schools and families who alleged the state discriminated against them. The judge said he expects both sides to have arguments prepared for the April 24 hearing.<\/p>\n
Eric Hudson, the lead attorney in the lawsuit, said he was disappointed by the ruling but that his team looks forward to presenting arguments about \u201cthe ongoing harm associated with the way that this program is being administered.\u201d<\/p>\n
Muslim families, Islamic schools ask the judge to extend voucher deadline<\/p>\n
The families and schools requested that Bennett move the deadline from March 31 to April 14. They also asked that the court not allow the state to begin the process of determining who can receive voucher funds until the April 24 hearing.<\/p>\n
Even though Hancock, the comptroller, has approved some Islamic schools, the attorneys argue that the late approval has deterred Muslim families from applying and has skewed the makeup of the applicant pool. When schools receive approval to join the program, lawyers said, families need time to find out and react.<\/p>\n
The lawyers also called the state\u2019s acceptance of some Islamic schools \u201clate, partial, and unstable.\u201d They cited a recent letter from Hancock to Attorney General Ken Paxton that called on the state\u2019s top lawyer to sue Houston Quran Academy to block the school from operating in Texas. The comptroller\u2019s office recently accepted the school, attended by one of the suing families, into the voucher program. Hancock has accused the school of having ties to terrorism, though state leaders have provided no evidence to the court substantiating that claim.<\/p>\n
Hancock\u2019s letter to Paxton, the lawyers argue, shows that accepting schools now does not prevent the comptroller from excluding them later.<\/p>\n
The suing families and schools, meanwhile, want the judge to approve a request that would apply any court orders to all Muslim parents and Islamic private schools seeking access to vouchers, now or in the future.<\/p>\n
Texas has allowed some non-suing Islamic schools to participate<\/p>\n
After the recent court order required Hancock\u2019s office to review the plaintiffs\u2019 request to join the voucher program, the comptroller approved five Islamic schools cited in the lawsuit. But in recent days, the office has also quietly added some Islamic schools that did not sue.<\/p>\n
The lawyers representing Muslim families counted at least a dozen non-suing Islamic schools approved by the comptroller since March 23, though not all of them appear in Texas\u2019 voucher school database.<\/p>\n
The comptroller\u2019s office declined to comment on the additions, only noting that if a school appears in the database, it has been accepted.<\/p>\n
Why Muslim families, Islamic schools sued<\/p>\n
Mehdi Cherkaoui, a Muslim father of two children and lawyer representing himself, filed the first lawsuit, arguing that state leaders \u201csystematically targeted Islamic schools for exclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Islamic schools blocked from joining meet the voucher program\u2019s eligibility requirements and \u201chave no actual connection to terrorism or unlawful activity,\u201d the lawsuit states, including Houston Quran Academy Spring, a private school attended by Cherkaoui\u2019s two children.<\/p>\n
Cherkaoui pays almost $18,000 per year in tuition for his children and wants to apply for the nearly $10,500 per child in voucher funding to offset those costs, according to the lawsuit. But with Islamic schools blocked from the program, the suit says, Cherkaoui could not complete the application.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe exclusion is not based on individualized findings of unlawful conduct by any specific school, but rather on categorical presumptions that Islamic schools are suspect and potentially linked to terrorism by virtue of their religious identity and community associations,\u201d the lawsuit states.<\/p>\n
Before the voucher program\u2019s original March 17 deadline for family applications, the lawsuit asked that the court require the state to accept all Islamic schools that meet program requirements. It also asked the judge to prohibit the state from delaying or denying approval based on schools\u2019 religious identity, alleged “Islamic ties,” or \u201cgeneralized associations with Islamic civil-rights or community organizations absent individualized, adjudicated findings of unlawful conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n
A second lawsuit, filed March 11, made similar requests. The suit was filed by Bayaan Academy, the Islamic Services Foundation (Little Horizons Academy and Brighter Horizons Academy), and The Eagle Institute (Excellence Academy), which operate private schools in Galveston, Dallas and Collin counties, respectively. Three parents who joined the lawsuit \u2014 Layla Daoudi, Muna Hamadah and Farhana Querishi \u2014 have children enrolled in private schools that are part of the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
The court combined the two lawsuits into one case. The lawyers added Zubair Ulhaq, a parent seeking vouchers for his two children, to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n
How the state responded in court<\/p>\n
Paxton’s office \u2014 which represented the comptroller \u2014 said the comptroller’s office has not \u201cdenied\u201d any private schools and argued that because families who apply for vouchers do not have to select a school until July 15, they are not harmed by the exclusion of Islamic schools.<\/p>\n
The lawyers also told the judge they did not know of any Islamic schools that had engaged in terrorism or broken state laws.<\/p>\n
The Islamic schools suing the state are accredited by Cognia. Cognia-accredited schools require independent review, the state argued, due to the company \u201cerroneously\u201d listing schools as accredited without completing required steps.<\/p>\n
Islamic schools cannot be harmed, Paxton said, until the comptroller denies their applications or does not determine their eligibility by July 15. The state also argued \u201cit would be fundamentally unfair\u201d to extend the application deadline and \u201cdisrupt\u201d the educational plans of hundreds of thousands of parents.<\/p>\n
Since those arguments, Paxton has withdrawn his office\u2019s lawyers from the case after Hancock publicly criticized their legal defense strategy and made terrorism allegations against an Islamic school without submitting evidence to the court.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour public letter made brand-new and incendiary claims without providing any confidence that diligent investigation supported them,\u201d Paxton said to Hancock. \u201cYour public letter reduces these newfound claims \u2014 that may have a material effect on your legal defenses in these cases \u2014 to a political charade that makes effective legal representation impossible.”<\/p>\n
What is the voucher program?<\/p>\n
Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 2 into law in 2025, authorizing the creation of a statewide program that allows families to use public funds to pay for their children\u2019s private school or home-school education.<\/p>\n
Between Feb. 4 and March 31, virtually any family with school-age children in Texas could have applied to participate. A lottery will determine who can receive the funds, pending their acceptance to a private school. Private schools interested in joining the program can apply on a rolling basis, as long as they have existed for at least two years and received accreditation.<\/p>\n
More than 274,000 students applied, while more than 2,400 private schools have been accepted.<\/p>\n
Hancock in late 2025 requested an opinion from Paxton, asking if he could exclude schools from the voucher program based on their connections to groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations or foreign adversaries.<\/p>\n
Hancock said schools accredited by Cognia had hosted events organized by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group that Abbott recently designated a terrorist organization. CAIR has sued Abbott over the label, calling it defamatory and false. The U.S. State Department has not designated CAIR as a terrorist group.<\/p>\n
Texas Republicans have made anti-Muslim rhetoric a focal point during primary election season. Hancock, appointed by the governor on an interim basis, ran to serve a full term as comptroller before losing his race.<\/p>\n
Hancock shut hundreds of Cognia-accredited schools out of the voucher program, including those that primarily serve Muslim students, Christian students and children with disabilities, which the Houston Chronicle first reported.<\/p>\n
Paxton released an opinion in January stating his belief that Hancock can block certain schools from participating if they are \u201cillegally tied to terrorists or foreign adversaries.\u201d Before the lawsuit, no Islamic schools were known to have been accepted into the state voucher program while the state had approved other faith-based schools. Some Islamic schools had shown up on the approved list before that, but Hancock later removed them.<\/p>\n
The comptroller\u2019s office said it began inviting Cognia schools that it considers in compliance with the law to participate, though details of that review are unclear.<\/p>\n
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Governor Greg Abbott announced Thursday the first round of Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) funding, which is being…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-262786","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-texas","9":"tag-texas-headlines","10":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262786","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=262786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}