The Texas House Public Education committee advanced the proposal for House Bill 3, allocating $10,000 each in public funds for parents to pay for private schools and other approved educational expenses. The program, known as Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) or school choice vouchers, now moves on to the full House for a vote.
In Lubbock, voters opposed to vouchers are still trying to get legislators’ attention.
Each of Lubbock’s legislators have made assurances that an ESA program will see lawmakers’ approval this session, after vouchers’ failure to pass the House in 2023 led Gov. Abbott to open four special sessions, with the passage of vouchers linked to much needed public education funding, meaning neither were advanced.
This year, the Public Education Committee advanced two separate bills: HB 3 to establish the state’s ESA program with $1 billion reserved from the general fund, and HB 2, an $8 billion bill that would increase the per-student allotment in funding and raise teacher pay out of the state’s budgeted public education funds.
Several posts on Facebook from Representative Carl Tepper of district 84 (R - Lubbock), touting the House’s ESA proposal led one local mother and public school teacher to plan a town hall meeting to discuss local voters’ concerns about vouchers, but the event was canceled after a tense phone call from Tepper to the teacher, where he claimed the meeting was a “trap.”
Read part one: In rural Texas, some voters are hesitant about school vouchers. Are their lawmakers listening?
On Tuesday, what started as another town hall meeting became a wide-ranging discussion for around 100 Lubbock community members about the differences between public and private school standards, the use of taxpayer funds to pay private school tuitions, as well as voter turnout and the accountability of state lawmakers.
What is the attitude toward ESAs in Lubbock?
Local nonprofit advocacy group Lubbock Compact organized the meeting and invited all three of Lubbock’s state legislators. According to the group, Dist. 83 representative and House Speaker Dustin Burrows did not respond. Rep. Tepper and Senator Charles Perry declined, but a representative of Perry's office was in the audience.
You can watch the full discussion here. Organizers said the video was also sent to Lubbock’s legislators.
A panel of local advocates and teachers led the discussion, but questions and answers both quickly rose across the room from educators, parents, students and administrators with a variety of backgrounds, experiences and political beliefs.
Some asked about the upcoming bond vote for Lubbock ISD, while others asked about the support of students with special needs in Lubbock’s public and private schools, but the consistent concern was the education of Lubbock children and representation for Lubbock voters.
“The next time elections come around, we need to cross these names off of our ballot because this is awful. This is ridiculous,” one attendee remarked of Lubbock’s legislators, to cheers from the crowd. “If they cared for our children, they would be here listening to us and fighting the same fight that we are trying to fight.”
Public education advocates worry that decreased enrollment and added costs from ESAs could further delay or reduce state support for the public school system at a time when many districts are facing budget deficits.
Clinton Gill, a former teacher who has worked with the Texas State Teachers Association for 15 years, said efforts have been made across the state to bring the attention of lawmakers back to public schools.
“We've invited all the representatives, not only from here but across the state, to come in and see what is actually happening in our public schools,” Gill said. “Rather than only going to private schools and touting the school choice program, come and see what's happening in your public schools, and then maybe they will get an education on the realities of what teachers and students need.”
A young man stood up and said he’s only been teaching for three years, but he’s worried about how school choice could impact the Teacher Retirement System, the state organization that manages pension funds for Texas public school teachers.
Gill responded that it’s a common concern for Texas educators, both with lowering enrollment and increased hiring from private schools.
“For those of you that are young that are yet to make it to TRS, it would definitely have an impact on you, because there's going to be less people putting money into it,” Gill said.
Many asked if the $10,000 per voucher would be enough to cover private school tuitions. One parent, Kristi Giemza, said she’s seen area tuitions between around $10,000-$12,000, but her own experience has been much more expensive, especially for students with special needs.
“We did that with one of our kids in North Carolina; it was a half a school day,” Giemza said. “It was $17,000 for a half a day in elementary school to get the specialized stuff he needed.”
Some at the town hall meeting questioned claims from Gov. Abbott, House Speaker Burrows, Rep. Tepper, and others that most Texas voters support the establishment of a school choice program, particularly in parts of the state like West Texas, where a fraction of the private schools exist compared to the state’s more urban areas like Houston, Dallas and Austin.
To get an answer, Giemza dug into the public responses received by the House Public Education Committee as it discussed HB 3.
“I'm ornery enough to count them, the people from Lubbock, okay?” Giemza said. “We got 274 respondents, seven of them were in support of vouchers.”
Following the voucher money
Weeks earlier, on March 11 and 12, more than 700 advocates, educators, experts and parents appeared before the Texas House Public Education committee to give testimony on HB 3.
Around 68% of those who gave comments spoke against the bill. Among them was Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor of education policy.
Cowen has researched school choice movements in the United States since the early 2000s. From a young research assistant to leading his own voucher studies, Cowen said his thoughts on the subject have changed, especially after witnessing “pretty devastating results” for kids and families in the last 10 years.
“I kind of moved from – over the last three years, especially – from trying to talk about these things in a fairly neutral way, to really explaining to people with an increasing urgency what's at stake and what we know about the results,” Cowen told KTTZ.
Cowen has seen the bill proposing education savings accounts in Texas. Despite lawmakers' claims that this bill prioritizes low-income families, he’s not confident that the program will actually benefit them. One problem, Cowen said, is in admissions.
When it comes to available desks, Cowen said the best-quality private schools often have no incentive to accept students with vouchers, and the schools that do tend to accept vouchers are usually “financially distressed, often under-enrolled.”
In the past, Cowen said ESA bills would require private schools to enact open admissions if they accept public revenue.
“The Texas bill emphatically protects the rights of private schools to do their own choosing,” Cowen said. “It's the school's choice. It's not school choice for kids and families.”
Ohio required private schools to accept the vouchers from low-income students as full tuition, and still, almost 90% of participants are not low-income, something officials have attributed to a lack of eligible private schools in rural and low-income areas.
According to Cowen’s studies, minority and low-income families may express interest in vouchers, but when the grades come out, those students who do end up making the transition from public to private schools see a marked academic decline.
“The question is, why?” Cowen said. “The other side will tell you, well, the state just over-regulated the program, and the open admissions policies there forced the good schools to stay out of the program.”
Leaders of higher-quality private schools told researchers they didn’t like the open admissions aspect of other programs, but without a requirement or incentive to admit students based on the criteria list of the bill, Cowen said the results have been consistent.
“What's going to happen – and this has happened in every other state – is that those special needs kids at the top of the eligibility criteria in HB 3, those lower-income kids at the top of the eligibility list, they will get distributed vouchers first, per the law, but they will not be able to use those dollars at effective schools or schools that even admit them whatsoever,” Cowen said. “And then the dollars move down the eligibility list to the wealthier families.”
That’s been the case for Arizona, but it didn’t start that way.
Christopher Conover is the news director for Arizona Public Media in Tucson, and he’s been covering politics in the state for almost 20 years. In 2011, Arizona launched the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which allowed qualifying families to obtain the equivalent of 90% of per-student public funding in an ESA.
“It's been such a long road for Arizona,” Conover said. “Arizona started with what we refer to as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, what everybody else calls vouchers, but the official name is empowerment scholarships, or ESA.”
ESAs started small. In the first year of the ESA program, 114 students received a total of $1.6 million in state dollars.
“It then expanded a little bit, and it went to children of the military, veterans and active military,” Conover said. “Over time, it has been this slow expansion every couple of years, another category would get dropped in who was eligible until it recently became universal.”
In 2022, Arizona lawmakers opened the program to all students and the number of students participating in the ESA program increased by more than 400%. More than 71% of participating students were not coming from a public school, meaning an added cost to the state.
In 2024, 17% of participating students were students with a disability, according to the Arizona Dept. of Education.
The definition of what constitutes a valid purchase for a child’s education with the vouchers in Arizona expanded quickly too.
“Very expensive LEGO sets was one of the ones in Arizona that we heard a lot about,” Conover said. “I admit, even as an adult, I was a little jealous of that one.”
Conover recalled when computers began to show up in classrooms and how they expanded the opportunity for education, and said families who make the choice to educate their child outside of public school can also benefit from new funds for educational technologies.
“Things like that, it makes perfect sense. You can see the argument for it,” Conover said. “Unfortunately, again, we get some bad actors out there who are buying, you know, skis, and things like that. And it kind of goes downhill from there.”
Doug Ducey, the former governor of Arizona who signed the legislation expanding the state’s ESA program to a universal one during his last year in office, appeared alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and house speaker Dustin Burrows to promote Texas’ school choice bills.
“Arizona took all of eight years to pass this in our state, we were the first state to get it done,” Ducey said. “13 other states have since followed suit, but no state even close to as big, as impactful and as consequential as Texas has passed it yet.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been behind Arizona’s ESA program from political action groups like the American Federation for Children, previously led by Trump’s former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and now receiving donations from billionaire Jeff Yass.
Like Ducey, those political action groups have been looking at Texas too, helping Gov. Abbott remove anti-voucher Republicans who were often representing rural parts of Texas.
Rural schools are shown to be the most directly impacted by ESA programs. These districts already see less money from local taxes than urban school districts, making them more dependent on state funding.
One study on last year’s proposed ESA program in Kentucky found most rural counties would see public school budgets reduced between 17-20%. It’s estimated that one in five students in the U.S. attend a rural school, but only 34% of rural families live close enough to access a private school, compared to more than 90% of urban families.
Over 65% of voters — from every county — in largely rural Arizona rejected a proposed expansion of ESAs in 2018.
The 'disconnect' between lawmakers and voters
Rural voters around the country seem to be confident where ESAs will go. A similar ratio of voters in rural Kentucky voted against the idea in Nov. 2024. The question on the ballot was direct, and Josh Cowen said the answer was clear.
“It just said, ‘do you support using public dollars for private school tuition?’ 65% of voters said no,” Cowen said. “65% of voters voted for Donald J. Trump on election day in Kentucky.”
On that same election day, voters in Nebraska repealed a publicly funded scholarship for private schools that had passed in the state’s legislature earlier that year. In Colorado, voters rejected an amendment writing school choice into the state constitution.
Cowen emphasized that many of the people he talks to are Republicans because Republican-led states are advancing the ESA measures, but the question of school choice among rural voters has remained nonpartisan.
“These are real conservatives – real rural voters, in Kentucky's case – that oppose this stuff for lots of complicated reasons, but I think the most simple is that there's no private schools in a lot of these places,” Cowen said. “If you put the facts together: the fact that this is mostly a subsidy, a subsidy for existing private school students, why would a rural voter vote for this stuff?”
In Texas, there is no direct way for citizens to propose ballot initiatives. Issues must go through the legislators, and some who support ESAs have said that because they were elected, the voters must also support ESAs. But Cowen said voters will always have a lot to think about when Election Day comes.
“When you ask voters what their priority is, it's jobs, it's the economy, it's health care, it's the border,” Cowen said. “Vouchers is not even in the top 10. It's just that it's the top one for a select group of legislators who come in on this issue, and I think that's where you're seeing this disconnect.”
Since 2023, Gov. Abbott has successfully pushed several anti-voucher Republicans out of the Texas House. Funds from billionaire political activists like DeVos and Yass were put into making flyers and advertisements that ended incumbency for five Republican former congressmen and forced four others into runoffs, including former House Speaker Dade Phelan.
The pressure and money around Texas voucher programs have forced Lubbock’s Republican legislators to think more politically.
Rep. Dustin Burrows, who promised to pass vouchers in his run to replace Phelan as speaker, compared public education lobbyist groups to “gangs” in an October op-ed with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Senator Charles Perry voted against vouchers in 2023, but this year voted in favor of the Senate’s voucher bill.
Rep. Carl Tepper described his re-election last year as evidence that West Texas voters want vouchers to pass.
Republican John Frullo represented Lubbock’s Dist. 84 in the Texas House of Representatives for 12 years before education savings accounts were a consideration for many West Texas voters. Frullo won his last general election in 2020 with 61% approval, just over 35,000 votes.
Tepper took the seat in 2022 with no Democratic opponents. He won the general election for his second term in November 2024 with 64% approval, more than 37,000 votes.
While the public funds for HB 3 will not come directly out of public school funding, Cowen said many Texas families are trying to balance their own budgets right now, and they can do the math.
“Whether it's coming from inside the school aid fund or whether it's creating pressure from outside the school aid fund,” Cowen said. “It's still coming from the same source of revenue.”
‘What can we do?’
After nearly two hours, Lubbock citizens at the recent town hall discussion wrapped up with questions about what they can do to address issues in the quality and funding of public education. Suggestions were offered for volunteer organizations and nonprofits that serve public school students and their families, particularly in minority and low-income communities, such as the Communities in Schools organization and the North and East Lubbock coalition.
A table was set up at the back of the room to help voters make sure they’re registered to vote. One attendee asked if they will ever get to see the question of school choice on a ballot.
While current legislators in Austin say they are prepared to send a proposed voucher program to the governor before the session ends in June, conversation between citizens kept returning to the empty chairs reserved for Lubbock’s lawmakers.
Nanette Weems is a local public school teacher. She said it’s unfortunate that Lubbock’s legislators didn’t come to the meeting when what brought all of the attendees to the town hall was a nonpartisan concern for making sure local education is supported.
“If we voted based on that, we could get some candidates in office that actually cared about all the other things that we cared about too, but really made sure that we cared about public education,” Weems said.
Alongside conversation about education, Lubbock’s traditionally low voter turnout became a topic of the meeting. Last year’s city and county races saw the highest showing in more than 20 years: 19% of registered voters cast a ballot. Some Lubbockites, encouraged by what they saw at the town hall, think more can be done.
Lauren Smith, a certified teacher and president of the Lubbock Educators Association, said many of her fellow teachers at the meeting were tired after guiding kids through STAAR testing, but they came to the town hall anyway, and the same can be done with new candidates and voters.
“Your vote matters, and we need to continue showing up like it matters,” Smith said. “Because our kids in Lubbock deserve the best, and that's what I'm here to say.”
This story is part two of a two-part series on voters' reactions to the possibility of private school vouchers in Texas. You can read part one here.