HOUSTON — Texas’ new $1 billion school voucher program triggered a surge in special education evaluations as thousands of families sought to show their children had disabilities that qualify for up to $20,000 in additional state funding for private school.
The influx sent special education departments scrambling and exposed an unintended consequence of the new program: Public schools had to process hundreds more evaluation requests from private school families than in past years, school leaders said.
Because state rules require schools to complete special education evaluations within 45 business days and then give them another 30 days to meet with parents about the results, staff across Houston and the state had to work weekends, shuffle employees and, in some cases, contract out services to meet the deadlines.
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“Public schools are being forced to be the unpaid gatekeepers of these vouchers, and we didn’t want any part of this,” said Brandon Enos, legislative committee chair of the Texas Rural Education Association and superintendent of Gunter ISD, north of Dallas-Fort Worth.
Of the 43,000 applicants statewide who indicated their child had a disability, 80% sought evaluations from public schools as the method of verification, according to data from the Texas Comptroller’s office.
The private school voucher program, known as Texas Education Freedom Accounts, offers extra funding for students with disabilities and gives them priority in the lottery to distribute funds. But to qualify for those extra benefits, students must have an individualized education program or IEP, which can only be completed by public schools.
Hundreds of applicants sought these evaluations from public school districts for the first time this year, according to a review of records from eight Houston-area school districts obtained by the Houston Chronicle and interviews with school leaders.
The state provided limited or contradictory information about how to qualify for the special education dollars until later in the process, which led to many applicants asking for their evaluations all at once in late 2025 or early this year. Families wanted them completed before the March voucher application deadline.
“There was seemingly no foresight that, ‘Oh my gosh, all of a sudden we’re going to have this huge rush on school districts in the spring of 2026. What are we going to do?’” said Steven Aleman, senior policy specialist with Disability Rights Texas.
Andrea Chevalier, director of government relations for Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education, said the delay in information given to districts and families “opened the floodgates” for evaluation requests.
“It’s just this mechanism that the school district has to engage with in order for the parent to be able to access private funds that have nothing to do with the school district,” she said. “There’s some frustration there.”
Travis Pillow, communications director for the Texas Comptroller’s office, said that the program’s shorter timeline created a “logistical challenge” for schools.
“The school district doesn’t always have a lot of resources permitted to perform these evaluations, particularly for students who don’t attend the district schools,” he said.
However, he noted that the problem was representative of a positive aspect of the program, that students with disabilities were prioritized in the lottery and with funding allocations.
“We do have in Texas some more complex paperwork requirements than other states, but that’s all because the legislature wisely decided to prioritize students with disabilities,” he said. “That is a really important improvement on how some of these universal programs have played out in other states.”
Nearly 275,000 people applied and about one third of those applicants, around 96,000 students, received funds, according to data from the Comptroller’s office; notices went out last month. Almost 30,000 of those were awarded extra funds for special education.
By the numbers
School districts across the country have always had to conduct special education evaluations for private and home school students, due to a federal mandate in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires public schools to find and evaluate students with disabilities in their boundaries. But this year, the scale changed, according to records obtained by the Chronicle.
In Cy-Fair ISD, the third largest school system in Texas, requests from outside students tripled this year, jumping from around 360 to 921. Staff had to work Saturdays in order to handle the demand, district leaders said.
Marchelle Peters, assistant superintendent for educational support services, said the surge strained school personnel and forced them to divert time and energy away from their daily work.
“The sheer volume of evaluations for students who do not attend our schools creates a palpable administrative and clinical burden,” Peters said. “The primary concern is the sustainability of maintaining this pace without additional, dedicated state resources.”
In Klein ISD, requests from students who are not enrolled in the district’s schools increased, while requests from its current students dropped by half. Spring Branch ISD experienced a similar trend.
In rural districts north of Dallas and Fort Worth, like Gunter ISD, IEP requests increased by up to 125%, Enos said.
“We’re seeing an increase in them across the rural parts of the state, and we don’t even have the private schools,” Enos said. “It’s taking away from the kids we currently serve.”
Enos’ district had 39 more evaluations this year while Whitesboro ISD had 67 more, and Bells ISD had 42 more. Almost all came from parents whose children do not currently attend public school, he said.
He acknowledged that these numbers may sound small, but unlike larger districts, Gunter ISD has only one evaluator for its 1,100 students, and no room in its budget to hire more staff.
The IEP is critical not just for the voucher applications, but for the overall education of students with disabilities. The legally-binding document outlines a child’s disability, their strengths and the services they will receive in public schools.
“If they ask me, ‘What are two or three things that keep me up late at night?’ This is one of them,” Enos said. “I don’t think that we can continue to do what’s required by federal law at the right level.”
Some districts that responded to data requests from the Chronicle, including Houston, Conroe, Fort Bend and Humble ISDs, said they only track overall requests and do not break them down by enrolled versus unenrolled students. Of those districts, Conroe ISD saw overall increases in IEP requests this year, while Houston, Fort Bend and Humble ISDs saw overall decreases, however those districts could still have seen an increase in requests from unenrolled students.
Both Chevalier and Aleman said districts should track whether IEP requests come from enrolled or unenrolled students, especially now that the TEFA program is online.
“(It) does surprise me that some of those school districts seem not to be more attuned to how many non-enrolled students are appearing at their door asking for special education testing,” Aleman said.
Part of the reason is the cost. Evaluations are time intensive, and require observing students, reviewing data about their academic performance and meeting with parents. While most districts surveyed by the Chronicle said they did not have a way to estimate how much each evaluation for unenrolled students costs, leaders said that they can be expensive.
Cy-Fair ISD spent $275,000 more this year than last year to perform evaluations of unenrolled students, which Peters said came out of a budget that is already underfunded. Last year, the district had to close a $58 million gap between state funding for special education and the actual cost of providing services.
Texas districts will receive a new $1,000 reimbursement per evaluation from the state after lawmakers approved changes intended to ease the financial strain of providing special education services last year. But many district leaders said that a lump sum doesn’t cover the full cost of the evaluations because they can vary from $500 to $5,000 depending on the student’s needs.
Enos called it a “thimble of water in a house fire.”
Third-party evaluations?
Cary Mollinedo, director of the private school Texas Autism Academy, said she had 32 of her families request special education evaluations this year to apply for the state’s voucher program.
Mollinedo, who previously worked in the public system, approached Magnolia ISD last August to see how they could work together.
The district sent a team of 12 evaluators to the Texas Autism Academy’s campus to perform the necessary testing and write the IEPs for students.
Mollinedo said the plan worked well and that the staff who came to the school were great, but she felt “apologetic” for having to request so many evaluations during a time when the district was already overloaded.
The leader also said it would be easier for families to use third-party evaluations, which some students at her school already have, rather than overburdening public schools.
“They were very stressed out, like I said, they were wonderful to us. A lot of them were very complimentary of our school and our students, but overall, we sympathize with them,” Mollinedo said. “We knew what they were having to go through.”
Pillow said allowing third party evaluations was an aspect that legislators and state leaders had considered, but that it might not be fair to allocate funding based on evaluations that differ from what’s involved in the creation of an IEP.
“We’re basically looking at what would that student have received if they were receiving special education services in a public school, and that’s what we base the funding on, and so that is going to be based on an IEP,” he said.
Efforts to reduce strain
The Texas Education Agency issued guidance in November to help manage the workload on school districts, saying evaluators could write abbreviated IEPs for voucher applications to determine funding levels. But the proposal didn’t live up to expectations, Chevalier said.
“We’ve had major issues with the concept of having this abbreviated IEP, because it asks you to write certain elements of an IEP, but you wouldn’t be able to get to those without doing all of the other work,” she said.
The Comptroller’s office also tried to increase flexibility for families so that they could upload a disability certification form instead of an IEP to still be prioritized, although that would not allow them more than the base funding amount. Families that submit an IEP after the March 31 deadline won’t qualify for the extra funds in the upcoming school year, Pillow said.
Still, he said that the office wants to work with school districts, special education providers in public and private settings and families to try and make this process less burdensome going forward. He said they will be looking at how to provide “relief” or additional capacity for school districts.
“We’ll want to collaborate with districts, with the Legislature and continue to deal with the different possibilities in terms of making the process as simple as possible for parents to navigate, as well as acknowledging the administrative burden on school districts,” he said.
Frustration on all sides
The process was just as confusing, and at times stressful, for parents who requested evaluations so their children could apply for a voucher.
Valerie Brown, who has two children at the British International School, said she requested IEPs for the first time this year from their zoned schools in Katy ISD. Katy ISD did not provide responsive data or comment in time for publication.
Brown, who had been tracking the voucher program closely, said she didn’t know she needed an IEP from a public school to be eligible for the higher voucher amount until Thanksgiving, when the program sent out more details about the application. Her children had already received evaluations by private providers, and she thought those would be enough.
After she requested evaluations from Katy ISD in November, Brown initially was told by the district that they would not be completed in time for the March 17 deadline. So she had to contact doctors to fill out the disability certification forms and hope that her children would still be prioritized in the state’s lottery, even if they wouldn’t receive extra voucher funds.
She said it was frustrating to realize all this around the holidays, because her family had a lot riding on the stipend. She planned to quit her job, which she said she kept only to afford private school.
“We can’t keep sustaining—I mean, it’s so expensive, we can’t keep going into debt,” she said.
Brown said the Katy ISD evaluators were thorough but that the process itself was “discombobulated.”
The IEP for Brown’s son ended up being completed one day before the initial deadline, and when that deadline was extended by two weeks, her daughter’s IEP was completed in time as well.
But Brown couldn’t celebrate. She had just learned that her family’s income — at 550% of the poverty level for a family of four — bumped her children out of the highest priority level.
“I was excited at first about the possibilities, and knowing that we’ve struggled for the past 10 years to have our son in school, and now my daughter as well, and how expensive it is, we finally felt like we could get some relief,” she said. “It was very disappointing when at the end, we realized that we just didn’t make the cut.”
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