Texas has awarded roughly 15,000 education savings accounts to families earning between two and five times the federal poverty level, moving the state’s new school choice program into the middle of the income scale for the first time since it began paying out in July.
The awards went entirely to what the program calls Tier 3 — households above 200 percent and at or below 500 percent of the federal poverty guideline, which for a family of four runs from about $64,000 to about $160,000 a year. The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, which administers the program, announced the round Aug. 11. Its accompanying fact sheet puts total awards at 118,441 students as of an Aug. 10 snapshot.
The shift is sharp because of where the program stood ten days earlier. The comptroller’s Annual Demographic Report, dated Aug. 1 and current through July 29, shows that of 85,344 accounts funded in the program’s first payment cycle, fewer than 30 went to Tier 3 students. Tier 1 and Tier 2 — families below 200 percent of poverty, and students with disabilities — took 80 percent of the funded accounts. The report counted 72,644 eligible Tier 3 applicants waiting behind them.
Senate Bill 2, passed by the 89th Legislature in 2025 and funded at $1 billion for the biennium, requires the state to fund the poorest applicants and students with qualifying disabilities before anyone else. The practical result was a program that spent its first month serving almost exclusively low-income families while the largest single block of approved applicants — middle-income households — got nothing. The Aug. 11 round is the point at which the money reached them.
The dollars involved are fixed by statute and by a calculation the Texas Education Agency performs. A student attending an accredited private school receives $10,474 for the 2026-27 year, set at 85 percent of the statewide average of state and local funding per public school student. A student with a disability and an individualized education program on file with the state can receive up to $30,000. Homeschooled students and others outside those categories receive $2,000. Payments arrive in three installments: a quarter on July 1, a quarter on Oct. 1 and the remaining half on Feb. 1, 2027.
Newly awarded families have four weeks from the date of their award to accept and confirm enrollment, according to the comptroller’s announcement, and Odyssey — the private organization the state certified to run the application and payment system — is notifying every remaining waitlisted family of its updated position. More than 45,000 students have come off that waiting list since it was created. The demographic report describes the remaining queue, more than 121,000 students, as “the largest school choice waiting list in the country.”
A student who stays enrolled in a public school is not eligible. The comptroller’s guidance is blunt: “if a participating student appears in a public-school enrollment check, they will be removed from the program and their funding will be returned to the state.”
The program’s reach into public districts is already documented, if imprecisely. The demographic report lists 895 school districts with at least one funded student, led by Houston ISD with 3,327, Dallas ISD with 2,645 and Northside ISD in San Antonio with 2,271. Those figures come from what parents wrote on their applications and describe the district a family lives in, not proof that a child left it. The comptroller and the education agency both caution the numbers will move as applications are verified.
Comptroller Don Huffines, sworn in Aug. 1, framed the demand in an Aug. 3 statement: “Parents from every walk of life are demanding the power to direct their children’s education.” The Dispatch has previously reported on the first funded cohort and the waiting list and on the program’s demographic profile.
Critics of the program have argued from the start that public money would end up subsidizing families who had already chosen private school and could afford it without help. Supporters answer that a household earning $90,000 with three children is not wealthy, and that capping relief at the poverty line simply relocates the squeeze. The Aug. 11 round is the first data point either side can argue from, and it will not be the last: awards continue, the comptroller says, “until all available funding has been allocated.”