Texas Prison School District to Set Its Budget and Legislative Ask Aug. 27

The board that runs Texas’s prison school district will meet Aug. 27 in Bryan to set the district’s 2027 operating budget and decide what to ask the Legislature for in 2028 and 2029. The district taught 50,186 people last school year, all of them in state prison.

Windham School District has no attendance zone and no school buses. It runs literacy classes, high school equivalency and diploma programs, life skills courses and more than 40 career and technical programs on 100 campuses inside Texas Department of Criminal Justice facilities. Its money does not come through the prison agency. It comes through the Texas Education Agency’s Foundation School Fund, paid out on a formula that counts student contact hours for the best 180 of 210 school days each year — which means the district’s revenue rises and falls with how many people actually show up to class.

That appropriation went up sharply in 2025. The district’s own annual report puts its general revenue allocation at $133.3 million for the 2024-25 biennium and $156.2 million for 2026-27. In fiscal 2025 Windham spent $86.2 million in all and reported a cost of $1,517.22 per participant in state money. The request the board approves Aug. 27 is the first one written since that increase, and it sets the ceiling on what the district can argue for when lawmakers return in January 2027. Of the 50,611 people who left Texas prisons last year, the district counted 35,048 as having taken part in its programs.

The rest of the agenda is shorter. Trustees take up contracts over $500,000, revisions to two district policies — one on hiring, one on administrative leave — and a consent list that names the appraisers who will evaluate teachers this school year. The meeting opens with a closed session on the superintendent’s job, employee complaints, network security and pending litigation; the notice describes none of them. Public comment comes at the end.

Watch what the 2028-29 request asks for, and whether the trustees adopt it as staff presents it. The same nine people meet the next morning as the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, which sets its own budget and legislative request Aug. 28.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Eric Nichols — chairman; Butler Snow partner, former state deputy attorney general.
• Faith Johnson — senior judge, 363rd District Court; former Dallas County district attorney.
• Rodney Burrow, M.D. — Mount Pleasant physician and pharmacist, Titus Regional Medical Center.
• Bill Welch — retired Air Force brigadier general and Austin-area businessman.
• Sydney Zuiker — Safe Community Institute director, Crime Stoppers of Houston.
• Tom Fordyce — chief of special projects, Mighty Oaks Foundation; former parole commissioner.
• Martin Garza — Mission; retired police chief and city manager, appointed February 2026.
• Sichan Siv — former United States ambassador to the United Nations; author.
• Nate Sprinkle — senior pastor, Calvary Baptist Church, Rosenberg.

Membership from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s board members page, read August 20, 2026. The district’s own 2024-25 annual report lists a slightly older slate, including a member who has since left the board, so the agency page is used here. The district publishes a separate officer slate for its school-board role that is not reprinted above; only the chairman is carried across. Meeting contact: Jill Durst, (512) 463-5372.