Texas issues second round of school voucher awards to 53,000 students

Copperas Cove ISD accounted for 171 Texas Education Freedom Accounts award notices, 70 in the first round and 101 more in the second, as Coryell County families continued to push into the state’s new voucher-style program.

Texas officials said more than 53,000 additional students received second-round notices in the week of May 4, bringing first- and second-round awards to more than 95,600 statewide. The Texas Comptroller’s office said the program drew more than 274,000 applications in its first year, far more than the number of awards available, so the lottery and priority system have become the deciding factors for families trying to secure funding.

In Coryell County, 370 TEFA applications were submitted. The local breakdown shows the strongest response in the Copperas Cove ISD region, while no second-round awards were reported for Gatesville, Evant, Jonesboro or Oglesby in the figures provided. Smaller districts may not appear publicly when their totals fall under privacy thresholds, but the countywide total still shows how quickly the program has reached families beyond the state’s biggest metro areas.

The Texas Education Freedom Accounts program is administered by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts after lawmakers set aside $1 billion in 2025. Under the state’s rules, awards are not first-come, first-served. Students are sorted by priority tier and then by lottery sequence, and parents have 30 days to appeal decisions about eligibility, priority tier or funding amount. The first-year funding amount for a participating private-school student was set at $10,474.

For Coryell County, the significance goes beyond the awards themselves. TEFA money follows the student, which could affect public-school enrollment and the per-pupil funding tied to it if families use the accounts to leave their local campuses. The state also notes that district totals do not mean every awarded student is exiting public school, because the system includes students who were enrolled in public school for the entire 2024-25 school year. Even so, 171 notices in the Copperas Cove area and 370 applications countywide give school officials a concrete number to watch as fall budgets, staffing and enrollment projections take shape.