The bill would create Education Savings Accounts that would allow Texas families to use public tax dollars to help pay for private school.
TEXAS, USA — School vouchers are one step closer to reality.
State senators passed the first bill of the session, Senate Bill 2 (SB 2). The bill would create Education Savings Accounts (ESA), allowing Texas families to use public tax dollars to help pay for private school.
The bill allocates $1 billion that could fund about 100,000 ESAs. Each student would get $10,000, $11,500 if they have a disability and $2,000 for homeschool children.
If the number of applications for the ESAs don’t exceed capacity, all eligible students will be accepted. But if they do exceed capacity, 80% of the ESAs will be filled by lottery for students with a disability or from low-income households. The remaining 20% will also be filled by lottery by all other Texas students.
The bill now heads to the Texas House of Representatives, where previous versions were blocked, despite the governor calling four special sessions.
“There is a reality this session that is different,” said Rep. Diego Bernal of District 123. “That is last session, there was a coalition of Republican and Democrats that worked together to focus on traditional public schools and not go along with his desire to add vouchers.”
Bernal is against the bill.
“I think it’s a scam, right? They’re taking our taxpayer dollars are supposed to go to our traditional public schools and our charter schools, but then sending them to private schools,” he said.
This legislative session, the Governor Greg Abbott has been vocal about his confidence of Senate Bill 2.
“This session that coalition doesn’t really exist because he [the governor] spent so much time in the off season taking out not us but the other Republicans and replacing them with Republicans that agreed with his position on vouchers,” Rep. Bernal said. “So there’s a lot fewer people in that coalition, as it were before, which means the math is different.”
Representative Wes Virdell of District 53 explains he’d possibly support the bill.
“You know, I ran a campaign saying that I wanted to expand school choice. This has been the governor and President Trump’s top issues and so we’ll see what happens,” Virdell said. “I’ve been very vocal that I would not not support a bad bill. But if we end up with a good, clean bill that that does what it’s supposed to do, then I’m on board with it.”
Virdell believes there may be a House version of the bill that could come out.
“I bet that there’s there’s probably going to be some differences between SB two in the House version,” he said. “And so I’m waiting to see what that looks like.”
A date for when the bill will be heard in the House has not been set yet.