Houston-area public school districts have recently become inundated with requests for Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs.
Gwen Coffey, an assistant superintendent of special education for a large suburban district in the Houston area, said her office saw requests for IEPs from private school families roughly triple this year. They've even had to make the move this year to refuse evaluations for some families that did not meet the requirements for special education assessments, something they generally don't do.
The hike in demand for IEPs is linked to Texas' new $1 billion school voucher program, which will give students roughly $10,500 per year to spend on private school tuition and other educational expenses. Students with disabilities can receive as much as $30,000 depending on their special education needs.
More than 176,000 families across the state have applied to the voucher program, which is being implemented for the 2026-27 school year. Of those applicants, 13.5% identified as having students with disabilities.
"One of the things that we would ask parents during the process is, ‘When did you first suspect a disability?' " Coffey said. "And parents will say, ‘We don't suspect a disability. We just know that we'll get more money.' "
She said her office has also seen hundreds of requests for IEPs to be uploaded to online applications. The application window for the voucher program, officially calledTexas Education Freedom Accounts, opened Feb. 4 and closes Tuesday, March 17.
Low-income families and children with disabilities are being prioritized. Because the voucher program has had so much interest, it will utilize a lottery system to award the money.
In order to qualify for the additional funds available for students with disabilities, families need to submit an IEP that outlines their child's needs. It must be from the 2023-24 school year or more recent.
The Texas comptroller's office, which is administering the program, will also accept atwo-page form signed by a physicianaffirming the student has a disability. The form can be completed without the full assessment of an IEP and by the student's family doctor. The application will also accept an out-of-date IEP and an IEP from another state as confirmation of a disability.
But, critically for the families that are applying, none of those alternative options will come with additional voucher funds beyond the $10,500 baseline.
More than 5,000 families have opted to file a disability certification form or other alternative disability identification rather than undergo a full IEP assessment.
The application window is open for a total of 29 school days, and most districts in the Houston area are off this week for spring break.
"The runway was too short," Coffey said.
By law, districts have 45 school days to complete an assessment and craft an IEP. Coffey said her district already reviews between 4,100 and 4,400 special education evaluations on average per year.
The Texas Tribunereported that the requirement for IEPs, coupled with the tight application timeline, could prevent families in need from accessing the special education funding that was billed as a key aspect of the voucher program.
Travis Pillow, a spokesperson with the comptroller's office, said they considered the needs of public school districts, private schools and families when designing the timeline.
"If we allow those decisions to drag out too deep into the spring and summer, it can create a challenging timeline for all the different stakeholders who need to know," Pillow said. "What is enrollment going to look like next year? What is my budget going to look like next year? Hire the teachers and do all the things they need to do to prepare."
Coffey says parents have asked her district to prioritize their child's evaluations in order to meet the voucher program's tight deadline, adding that she's heard of several “fairly nasty" interactions by phone and email between families seeking IEPs and district employees. They've tried to educate families new to the system who have tried to pressure district diagnosticians to complete the evaluation by the deadline, Coffey said.
"They just honestly don't care," she said. "It's about them and their money. The state has kind of created that by having such a small window."
Houston Public Mediaspoke to several employees in other local public school districts who also reported an uptick in IEP applications and learned onedistrict in Houston is now paying school psychologists, diagnosticians and other qualified positions to work overtime on Saturdays in order to keep up with rise in demand for IEPs.
A school psychologist in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the district, said they personally saw a rise in IEP evaluation requests from home-schooled students or students already attending private schools. Home-school students can receive up to $2,000 per year as part of the voucher program.
"I want to say in the past, like, four years, I’ve gotten, like, one home-school request," the psychologist said. "This year it’s been about four or five, but that’s just in my high school. So that’s not counting, like, any of the other hundreds of schools [in] Cy-Fair."
The other school employees, including Coffey, were not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of their districts. And spokespeople for Cy-Fair ISD and the other districts, some of which are on spring break this week, either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
Public schools lose out
House Bill 2, also passed into legislation last summer along with the school voucher bill, allocated $8.5 billion in funding for public education, including hundreds of millions specifically for special education.
Tucked into the bill is a provision that allows districts to receive $1,000 for each "initial" IEP assessment. It does not specify if reevaluations will be covered, which would be necessary for many families hoping to get additional voucher funds to cover special education needs.
Andrea Chevalier, the director of government relations with the Texas Council of Administrators of Special Education, which represents 1,400 special education leaders in Texas public schools, says the district IEP evaluations are costly and time-consuming. She estimated on average an IEP assessment could cost $3,000.
"It's called a full evaluation because you're supposed to evaluate all areas of disability," Chevalier said. "It can't just be, ‘Well my doctor said it's just speech.' We have to look at all of the things. It's not as simple as it sounds. It requires a lot of different professionals and a lot of time as well."The assessment covers a lot of ground by a team of as many as five, including but not limited to a diagnostician, a school psychologist, speech language pathologist and occupational and physical therapists.
And the time spent by each professional on an evaluation can vary widely.
"Some complicated evaluations in total can take me almost up to 20 hours, including writing time for the report, just to make sure I'm doing the student and family due diligence," another Houston-area school psychologist said.
Sabrina Gonzalez Saucedo, director of public policy and advocacy for the Arc of Texas, a nonprofit that helps Texans with intellectual and developmental disabilities, says the districts already operate with few resources and the voucher program will just exacerbate the issue.
"I think that there is a frustration for so many advocates of parents of children who are currently receiving special education services in the public school system, because this is a system that has been strained for quite a bit now and so we are aware that the establishment of a private school voucher program was going to cause further strain on this already delicate system," Saucedo said.
Chevalier says she warned lawmakers there would likely be an uptick in evaluation requests due to the voucher program. She said unlinking IEPs from additional voucher funding could help ease the pressure.
"When you tie a private benefit to the IEP you are now creating an incentive that wasn't there before," Chevalier said. "Now we are using this process for somebody to then have money in an account to use elsewhere, where none of the things in the IEP are necessarily being used."
Unlike public schools, private schools are not under legal obligation to accommodate a student's IEP, though Pillow said the comptroller's office would be investigating complaints from families who feel they aren't getting the services to which they are entitled.
"Our role is making sure taxpayer dollars are used appropriately," Pillow said. "We work with [the Texas Education Agency] to make sure that every student receives funding in accordance with their IEP under the state special education formula, and making sure that dollars are used and spent appropriately, and that every child gets the right amount of resources to get the education they deserve."
Pillow did not share details about how that would be verified or if the private schools would have to submit invoices showing proof of use of funds. At a webinar hosted by the comptroller's office todiscuss the program and address concerns and questions regarding how students with disabilities would be ensured accommodations by private schools, an official with the program said an auditing checklist for private schools was “being determined.” She added that she didn’t believe every private school would be audited every year, while noting they do have to “submit documents.”
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All qualifying students have the right under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also referred to as IDEA, to access public school special education services through the proportionate share provision. Districts must spend a "proportionate share" of their federal special education funding to provide services to private school children with disabilities.
In practice, this means a child with an IEP who attends private school can go to a public school district for a weekly afternoon session that focuses on their needs. The services are not guaranteed, though, and are only available until that funding runs out.
Chevalier warns that under the voucher program, more Texas students will be accessing alternative settings, so more may fall into the proportionate share category.
"Folks that are hurt the most are students with disabilities that are staying in their locally zoned district," Saucedo said. "Teachers and local districts that are required to provide special education services are already put at such a position of pressure across all kind of angles, and ultimately, they’re the ones that have to remain in a system where funds are being diverted from for a private school voucher program."
Coffey agreed that special education departments have historically operated with few resources, and now they're battling budget deficits and a shrinking pipeline of educators willing to enter the field.
"It’s just rough to be in public [education] right now," Coffey said. "And all we want to do is help kids."
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