Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday held a rally in a San Antonio private school to urge parents to support public subsidies for privately schooled Texans.
“We will pass school choice in the state of Texas,” Abbott said in the auditorium of the San Antonio Christian School as part of the school’s “Parent Empowerment Night,” according to KSAT News.
Senate Bill 2 is the flagship bill to make such a subsidy program a reality. The $1 billion bill would use public money to establish $10,000 education savings accounts for students who can go to public school but choose to attend private school. The money could be used on tuition, books, uniforms and tutoring, among other uses.
Students with special needs would get an extra $1,500 in their savings accounts under SB 2, while homeschooled students only would be eligible for $2,000 accounts.
The Senate passed SB 2 earlier this month. It now heads to the House for consideration.
House Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, joined Abbott at the rally to support vouchers. State Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Killeen, the new chair of the House Public Education Committee, also attended, along with other Republicans including San Antonio Reps. Marc LaHood and John Lujan, according to the San Antonio Report.
“I’m proud to say the votes are there to do this in the Texas House,” Speaker Burrows said about the bill, KSAT News reported.
Across the street from the rally, parents and activists gathered with signs to protest the voucher program, shouting “Public dollars for public schools!” and “Vouchers are a scam!,” according to the Report.
Abbott on Monday also pledged to increase funding for public schools.
“We’re going to provide more funding and when this session ends we will provide more funding than ever in the history of our state for our public schools,” Abbott said, as quoted in the Report.
Teachers and school districts for years have been begging for more funding from the state to help maintain competitive pay, fix a statewide teacher shortage and avoid shuttering schools.
Though Abbott has argued that the state can fund both vouchers and more public education money, his maneuvering to pass vouchers last session came at the expense of more permanent education funding, drawing outrage from school advocates.
In 2023, Democrats and rural Republicans in the House joined forces to successfully block several private school voucher bills that had the governor’s support. Anti-voucher Republicans have opposed the program because many rural school districts do not have private schools.
Republicans responded by adding vouchers onto a public school funding bill. Both measures eventually failed, forcing many districts last year to adopt deficit budgets and close schools, including three schools in San Antonio’s North East Independent School District that are set to close this week: Driscoll Middle School, Wilshire Elementary School and Clear Spring Elementary School.
In an October op-ed, Burrows suggested that school districts were discussing school closures “to stoke outrage” ahead of the 2024 election, a piece for which Abbott later praised him.
Meanwhile, his voucher agenda defeated, Abbott raised vast sums of money to follow through on his threats to those rural Republicans to oust them in the primaries for opposing vouchers.
One of his biggest donations came from multibillionaire Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, who wrote a $6 million check to Abbott in December of 2023, which the governor said was the largest single donation in Texas history. Yass, who lives in Pennsylvania and is one of the country’s biggest advocates for private school subsidies, followed that with another $4 million donation five months later. Forbes estimates that Yass has a net worth of $29 billion.
Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, slammed Abbott for the rally in a press release Monday.
“Governor Abbott is hosting a rally at an expensive private school in San Antonio while families in that very community mourn the closure of three neighborhood public schools,”Talarico said in a prepared statement. “Those schools are closing because Greg Abbott deliberately starved them of funding to pressure lawmakers into passing his billionaire-backed voucher scam.”
Talarico and San Antonio Democratic Rep. Steve Lopez both argued that the vouchers would hurt public education funding, KSAT reported, something that Abbott historically has denied but last week confirmed in a social media post.
Though funding for a voucher program would come from the state General Fund, not the Permanent School Fund, which pays for public education — meaning that it wouldn’t directly use money for public schools — Abbott conceded that as public school students transfer to private schools with vouchers, public school enrollment would drop, which would lower the amount of money districts get from the state.
“Greg Abbott’s voucher scam would continue to drain taxpayer dollars from underfunded public schools like Driscoll, Wilshire and Clear Spring — the three North East ISD campuses that were set to close this week — and give them to unaccountable private schools like San Antonio Christian School,” Talarico said in a prepared statement. “The Governor isn’t working for the nearly 6 million Texas public school students — he’s working for the billionaires writing $6 million checks.”
Talarico’s press release did not mention Burrows.
