With the Texas Legislature’s 2025 passing of Senate Bill 2 in September, Texas students and their families can now qualify to receive money from the state government to help with private school tuitions or programs. These programs – Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFAs) – can include tutoring, supplies, auxiliary programs, and more; however, money is only accepted at schools that have registered for the voucher program.
Texans at or below 500% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines are entitled to up to $10,000 per student, or up to $30,000 per student based on specialized needs. The program will begin in the 2026-2027 school year. Applications for schools to register for the program closed in January, and applications for citizens to apply for vouchers opened on February 4, 2026, and close in mid-March.
Funds for the program total about $1 billion, which will be pulled from state taxpayer funds, specifically redirected public education dollars. With participants receiving an average of $10,474 (about 85% of average public school funding per child), public schools will have to find a way to fill the gap of the missing students and missing financial support.
Larger private schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have tuitions that range from $25,000 to up to $40,000 according to school websites, while smaller private, parochial school tuitions range from approximately $7000 to $16,000. These can also fluctuate based on grade level. Thus, the vouchers cannot cover the complete cost of tuition. While they may assist families in providing a specialized education for their children, they cannot fully cover most private school tuitions.
Fort Worth Country Day has a few tiers of tuition. Including meal plan and fees, tuition for Junior Kindergarten is $18,050, Kindergarten-4th grade is $29,070, 5th-8th grade is $31,190, and 9th-12th grade is $31,190+.
The School has decided to not participate in the EFA program this year, opting instead to err on the side of caution.
“Our Board felt it best to watch this first round of vouchers from the sidelines and decide whether to get in the game later,” FWCD Head of School Eric Lombardi said.
This decision was driven by skepticism about the impact of the vouchers, including whether the government money would at some point be a way to force the school to change curriculum or policies.
The Board of Trustees spent a lot of time trying to decide whether they were going to register for the voucher program or not, and worked to try to hear perspectives and arguments from both sides. They met and talked about school vouchers multiple times. One of their meetings focused solely on hearing arguments for and against the vouchers, specifically from ISAS head Scott Griggs, who presented information about the voucher program.
“It was one of the most informative and engaged board meetings I have experienced, though, with the great majority of board members sharing their thoughts, asking for clarification, and expressing opinions,” Lombardi said about the board meeting in which the decision about the voucher program was made.
“We opted to not be a part of the voucher program this year, but we will plan to reevaluate what the school stance is next year,” Board of Trustees President William Butler ‘96 said. “A big part of that is it’s a first-time program. It’s very experimental, and there were just a lot of questions about the procedures.”
FWCD’s standing Financial Aid was also a big consideration to the Board in the decision of whether they should opt into the program or not.
“When Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Bass first met to found Country Day, there was a goal to have at least 15% of students on some form of financial aid. And now, because we’ve had 60 plus years of generous donors and we have a strong endowment, there’s 25% of students that are on various forms of financial aid…So that’s something else that we were able to consider,” Butler said.
Lombardi also mentioned that he believed that the school’s nearly 4.5 million dollar financial aid budget was nearly sufficient enough to meet the needs of its families.
“We feel like we are already [able] to service the families with a few significant exceptions, but we are able to do a really good job with meeting socioeconomic needs that come to our door. So [we’re] sort of letting other people who don’t have those kinds of resources use the money on this first go around, and then let’s see,” Lombardi said.
Antitrust laws prohibit private schools from consulting with each other on decisions regarding tuition, so no other schools were consulted regarding this decision by FWCD. In the Fort Worth area, few large private schools have opted in. Schools on this registry who will accept vouchers include Lake Country Christian School, Oakridge, Fort Worth Academy, and Nolan Catholic High School. Most schools on the list are Montessori schools or Christian schools.
Schools in SPC similar to FWCD – like Trinity Valley School, Greenhill, and St. Mark’s – have not registered for the voucher program for the 2026-27 school year.
Lombardi believes in the philosophy that there is no “one size fits all” approach to the vouchers. He said that he has gotten the opportunity to talk with Heads of Schools in other states with voucher programs and gotten a feel for their policies. Therefore, he has gotten to see what has worked, what hasn’t, and what challenges the other schools have faced in accepting and implementing the programs.
“I ultimately don’t think you can just pick up from one school and say we should do exactly like they did, because you have to look at what your state’s version of the law is,” Lombardi said.
The vendor application portal (where schools could sign up to participate or not) opened December 9, 2025. About 595 schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have registered for the program, along with about 2030 total schools across the state.
While some schools have published their decisions, a number of schools are just not registering for the program, which will have to be answer enough for the many families waiting for decisions.
