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Voucher Program Could Top $4.6 Billion if Enrollment Grows

The Senate’s flagship bill to subsidize private school and homeschooling for Texas families would be the largest program of its kind in the United States, serving about 100,000 students and costing Texas about $1 billion to implement for one fiscal year. At least, in theory. 

In truth, a number of factors make it difficult to predict actual enrollment in the program and how much it would cost the state to keep up with demand.

The 100,000 student figure derives from a simple division problem: Take the total amount budgeted for Senate Bill 2, and divide it by the amount each enrolled student would receive to go toward private school tuition, transportation and materials.

What that figure ignores is the different sizes of education savings accounts that the program makes available, depending on the applicant. Though any student applying to a private school would receive the $10,000 if enrolled in the program, students with special needs applying to private schools would get $11,500 each, only enough for about 86,000 students.

For homeschooled students, the state would allocate $2,000 in those accounts, enough for Texas to accept half a million applicants.

Another factor is the number of open spots at private schools. Even if 100,000 students apply for the $10,000 private school vouchers, there’s no guarantee that there would be 100,000 openings at Texas’s private schools for those applicants to fill.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, during Tuesday’s Senate Education Committee hearing suggested that the number of private school openings was about 70,000, but did not elaborate. A spokesperson for Bettencourt did not respond to a request for comment by press time Wednesday.

Jennifer Carr Allmon, the executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops, estimated during witness testimony that private Catholic schools will have capacity to add 25,000 students to their rolls in the 2026-27 school year, when SB 2 would take effect.

Another limit on the program’s enrollment: Some of the $1 billion would need to be spent on staffing, administering and enforcing the bill. Up to 3% of the money for the program could go toward its infrastructure, as specified in its language.

State budget analysis staff with the Legislative Budget Board estimated that SB 2 would add 36 full-time employees to the state payroll and cost Texas $6 million in the 2026 fiscal year, dropping down to $4.8 million by the end of the decade.

For their fiscal analysis of the bill’s overall cost, LBB staff assumed that the Legislature will boost funding for the program to match demand from families. To start, it expected that half of Texas’s 560,000 homeschooled students and half of its 175,000 private school students would apply for the program in its second year, and projected those figures growing by 5% in each of the following three years. It also assumed 24,500 public school students would leave for private schools in that year and that more would do so over time, up to 98,000 in the 2030 fiscal year, with a similar trend for public school students with special needs.

If the Legislature increased funding to the program — it’s set at the discretion of lawmakers, not by language in the bill itself — in the 2030 fiscal year Texas would be spending a net $4.6 billion on the program. That’s including the $805.5 million that the state wouldn’t be spending on public school students that transferred under the program.

Bettencourt called the initial 50% estimate “a pretty aggressive assumption” during witness testimony from LBB Manager Avery Saxe on Tuesday. He said that the Texas Education Agency estimated that only 30 to 35% of students would apply to the program in its second year. (The TEA did not respond to a request to verify those figures by press time Wednesday).

“The 50% is an assumption that our office has used historically for several biennia,” Saxe explained.

Regardless of the initial estimate, both agreed that the program, if adopted, would grow in popularity.  

Sam Stockbridge
Sam Stockbridge
Sam Stockbridge is an award-winning reporter covering politics and the legislature. When he isn’t wonking out at the Capitol, you can find him birding or cycling around Austin.

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