Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday evening rallied private school parents behind a private school subsidy program that is one of his biggest legislative priorities this session.
Abbott hosted the event at San Antonio Christian School, a 52-year-old private school that teaches kids from preschool through high school. It advertises small class sizes, a plethora of sports and “one of the most secure environments” among San Antonio private schools.
But with K-12 tuition starting at just over $11,000, the school also is emblematic of a common criticism of the flagship voucher bill in the Legislature right now: that it doesn’t go far enough to make private schools accessible for poor families.
Senate Bill 2, the main voucher proposal being considered this session, would set aside $1 billion from the state’s General Fund to create $10,000 state-managed education savings accounts that students could use for private school tuition, books, uniforms, transportation and tutoring. Students with special needs would be eligible for an extra $1,500 in their accounts. Homeschooled students instead would have access to $2,000 accounts for homeschooling materials.
Proponents of the bill have argued that it is both targeted at poor and special needs families, and that it is a universal program that would be open to all Texans, including the privately schooled families to whom Abbott spoke on Monday. Both are true, depending on how many students enroll in the program.
If the state has enough money to fund all applicants, the subsidies would be open to everybody, including private school students whose parents already can afford tuition.
If more families apply for the education savings accounts than the state can cover, 80% of the money will be set aside for poor or special needs students, while the remainder would be open for any applicant.
But the way the bill defines poor students — “low-income households” — would include most Texans. A family of four would qualify as “low-income” if they make less than $165,000 per year, which is more than twice the median household income in Texas of about $76,000.
Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, is the primary author of SB 2 and the chair of the Senate Education Committee, cosponsoring it with the other Republican members of the committee. During a meeting of the panel on Jan. 28, he explained that he chose $10,000 accounts in order to be above the median annual tuition for private school in Texas of just over $9,000.
That’s still a step up from one of the most prominent proposals last year of $8,000 per student, which Creighton also wrote.
But at San Antonio Christian School, tuition ranges from about $11,000 to about $17,000 per year. Even with help from the state, families still would need to spend upwards of a thousand dollars of their own money just to cover tuition there. For many poor families in Texas, that cost would be too great to enroll.
Longtime Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised that critique during discussion of SB 2 in the Senate Education Committee last month.
“The $10,000, … in many schools, it’ll cover, possibly tuition, but it may not cover uniforms, transportation, lunch, books — in some schools, they have to buy books. And so, … if the parents can have this $10,000, but they can’t afford to make up the difference, then … are they really eligible?” West said. “It’s almost like a bridge that’s three-quarters of the way built. It’s not really good enough for them.”
West asked the committee to consider revising its poverty definition to target actually poor families for the aid. It declined to do so.
And at a protest against vouchers that unfolded across the street from Abbott’s rally on Monday, activists repeated that argument.
“We know that low-income kids aren’t going to be able to afford the private schools anyway,” protest organizer Tricia Gronnevik told KSAT News. “It’s completely disingenuous.”
