Clayton Wickham of The Texas Monthly described the danger that vouchers pose to rural schools, whose finances were already precarious. In rural areas, these schools are the heart of their communities, as they are in suburbs and used to be in urban districts.

Wickham writes:

The only time I can remember hearing sirens in Marathon (population 271) was for a school send-off. Six weeks into the 2024 academic year, I stood outside our K–12 public school with the student body and my fellow teachers on a dazzling West Texas morning to see our girls volleyball team off to regionals. Sheriff’s deputies, the fire department, and a fleet of pickups and Suburbans all lined up to escort the Lady Mustangs out of town. I was admiring the motorcade when I turned around and realized that my sixth-grade students had fled the school grounds and were sprinting down Avenue E—escaping!—in their Crocs. Panicked, I cried out after them.

“Don’t worry, they’ll come back,” another teacher assured me. They were only circling the block to catch the bus a second time.

Teaching in a small town is unlike teaching anywhere else. In many ways, the local school is the heartbeat of the community. There’s a trust, familiarity, and neighborliness that is hard to find in cities and suburbs. Often the largest employers in rural communities, schools do more than just educate local youth. In Marathon, the school organizes town dinners, hosts intergenerational dances with cumbia and country and western music, and packs the sweltering gymnasium on game night. At a time when school board meetings across the country have devolved into vicious disputes about book bans and “woke ideology,” many rural public schools remain uncontroversial cornerstones of their communities.

“Drive across West Texas or the Panhandle and you’ll see the names of school mascots on the water towers—ours says ‘Spearman Lynx,’ ” Suzanne Bellsnyder, a rural mother and public school advocate, told me. “That alone shows how central the school is to who we are.”

More than a third of Texas students attend rural schools, and despite their communities’ support, many of those schools have been on the brink of financial ruin for years. Not far down the road from Marathon, Alpine Independent School District and Marfa ISD are both running deficits of around $1 million, despite having some of the lowest teacher salaries in the state. Nearby Valentine ISD operates out of an unrenovated 1910 schoolhouse and has recruited six teachers from the Philippines to keep its doors open. The Marathon school is also feeling the pinch. We sometimes teach two classes at once; we rely on online coursework to meet curriculum requirements; two of our fluorescent lights emit a sinister drone the district can’t afford to address; and our track has completely peeled away in places, revealing the layer of concrete underneath.

In 2023, Governor Greg Abbott held public-education funding hostage because a coalition of Texas Democrats and rural Republicans refused to pass his universal voucher program. But this spring the levee finally broke, and lawmakers passed two landmark education bills. One, House Bill 2, offers rural schools a long-awaited lifeline, investing $8.5 billion in public education over the next two years. The second, Senate Bill 2, earmarks billions to fund private school tuition through education savings accounts (ESAs), taxpayer-funded accounts parents can use for private school or homeschooling. Some fear it may mark the beginning of the end for public education in rural Texas.

Alpine Elementary on August 15.
Alpine Elementary on August 15.Photograph by Hannah Gentiles

For decades, rural lawmakers opposed vouchers for a pretty obvious reason: Most rural communities in Texas have few private schools, if any. Take the Trans-Pecos, where I live. The region is roughly the size of South Carolina, but if you leave out the El Paso metropolitan area, it had only two accredited private schools in 2022, according to data compiled by ProPublica.

School choice advocates argue that new private school options will emerge to meet demand. “When we insert capitalism into anything, it increases productivity and decreases cost,” said Republican House Representative Joanne Shofner, of Nacogdoches, this fall as the voucher debate raged. “It’s just good all around.” And if rural communities really love their local schools, said Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank, then rural educators should have nothing to worry about. “Parents want to be able to send their child to the school down the street and have them receive a high-quality, values-aligned education,” Drogin said. “If that’s what the public system is providing, then their children will continue at that school.”

Trying to reconcile the optimism of school choice evangelists with the dire warnings from public-education advocates can be bewildering. Defenders of public education point to evidence that the ESA program will harm student learning, deprive underfunded Texas schools of vital per-student dollars, subsidize tuition for thousands already enrolled in private schools, and likely distribute hundreds of millions to rich and upper-middle-class families. On the other side, school choice advocates—many of whom have ties to deep-pocketed right-wing donors—present ESAs as a win-win, giving parents agency over the state funding allocated to their children’s educations each year without, in Abbott’s words, taking “a penny from public schools.”

But experience in other states suggests ESAs will constrict public education funding, and the research on their efficacy is disappointing at best. “Catastrophic” is how education researcher Joshua Cowen describes voucher findings from the last decade, citing learning loss comparable to the impacts from COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina for students leaving public school systems. According to the ESA bill’s fiscal note—a nonpartisan document compiled by the Legislative Budget Board that estimates how much a bill will cost to implement—the Texas Education Agency predicts that private school capacity could increase by 10 percent yearly to accommodate the influx from public schools. But in the first year, most of the students receiving ESAs will likely be children already enrolled in private schools. “There’s not going to be a mass exodus of kids in your community to private schools tomorrow,” Cowen said.

Still, Arturo Alferez, interim superintendent of Marfa ISD, says money is so tight that he worries about the financial impact of losing even one student. His district’s enrollment plummeted by 43 percent, from 341 to 194 students, from 2019 to the 2024—25 school year. More than half of Marfa ISD students are economically disadvantaged, but because property values are rising in Marfa—a fine art hub that draws visitors from around the world—the town gives more than $1 million in local revenue to the state each year under Texas’srecapture, or “Robin Hood,” policy. I reached Alferez by phone about thirty minutes after our scheduled interview time; he’d had to fill in for the district’s bus driver. “Our property values are going up, but we’re losing students,” he said, “and that puts the district more and more in a hole.”

Unlike most small towns of its size, Marfa ISD does have a private school competitor. Wonder School Marfa is a small, mixed-age, unaccredited Montessori-style “microschool” for elementary-age students. The school’s director and sole teacher, Emily Steriti, taught in a Montessori program in Marfa ISD for years before striking out on her own and founding Wonder School Marfa in a church basement. For Ariele Gentiles, a mother of three in Marfa, Wonder School was a godsend. Her middle son has autism and did not respond well to the environment at Marfa ISD.

“We took him into the big school under the overhead fluorescent lights with all the kids, and he just screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed, wouldn’t let us leave,” Gentiles said. “We made it about two weeks of maybe getting to school every other day before I was like, ‘Okay, this is not working.’ ” The small, low-key environment of Wonder School Marfa worked better for her son, she said, and Steriti’s Montessori-based classroom allows him to work above grade level while still learning alongside kids his own age.  “If there was no Wonder School where he could be and could thrive,” Gentiles said, “we probably wouldn’t be in Marfa anymore.”

Wonder School’s tuition is modest, but Gentiles said it’s still a sacrifice for her family, whose income depends on her part-time copyediting and her husband’s work as a fabricator. Depending on Wonder School’s eligibility, Gentiles plans to use either a private school or homeschooling ESA to help cover the $400 monthly tuition. ESA participants can generally receive around $10,000 toward private school tuition, with extra funding available for students with disabilities, while homeschoolers can receive up to $2,000 per year. Though she’s looking forward to the extra funds, Gentiles feels conflicted about ESAs in general. “It’s a very knotty thing to untangle as someone who wants to champion public education and sees the total value in it,” she said.

There is only one private high school option within a hundred miles of Marathon (or Marfa, for that matter). Alpine Christian School, a small K–12 school with a shooting range and a horse arena, offers a classical education “based on a biblical worldview.” Board member Rudi Wallace said school leadership has spoken with families hoping to switch over from the public system using ESAs. He added, however, that “not every student or family would fit” at Alpine Christian. The statement of faith laid out in the school’s handbook professes a belief in “the biblical and biological definition of two genders and of God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman.” When asked if the Alpine Christian would turn away children of gay parents or from different faith backgrounds, Wallace said that admission decisions are made on a “case-by-case basis.” According to the handbook, Alpine Christian looks for “families who share beliefs and goals similar to those identified in the school’s statement of faith and philosophy of education” and may decline admission due to “incompatibilities” in one or more of those areas. 

Rural public schools will inevitably lose students to ESAs, but legal scholar and education-policy expert Derek Black says the existential threat to rural schools isn’t private competition. It’s how the state’s new, rapidly expanding entitlement program may constrict public school funding over the next decade. The fiscal note for Senate Bill 2 predicts that Texas will spend around $11 billion on ESAs in the next five years, and that money has to come from somewhere.

Sustainability is also a concern for state representatives. Gary VanDeaver was one of the two Republicans to vote no on vouchers, even when it was clear Senate Bill 2 was a done deal. VanDeaver, whose district, in northeast Texas, is almost entirely rural, is rooting for vouchers to succeed, but he remains concerned about the long-term budgetary impact of funding parallel education systems. “The day will come when we are not going to have the surpluses that we have, that we’ve enjoyed for several sessions in the state,” he said. “When that day comes and we see a downturn or even a leveling off in the economy, how are we going to fund everything that we made promises to fund?”

All Texas public schools have to worry about revenue loss from vouchers, but rural districts are plagued by unique challenges. Because of their typically small property tax bases, they rely more on state funding to keep the lights on. Unlike large urban and suburban districts, small rural districts cannot capitalize on economies of scale to cover fixed costs like salaries and electric bills. “It costs as much to pay a teacher to teach five kids as it does to teach thirty,” Debbie Engle, who recently retired as superintendent of Valentine ISD, told me. “But we don’t get the funding for thirty, so we’re trying to do more with less.”

The job of a rural superintendent is not for the faint of heart. Engle has chased javelinas off her school’s playground and smashed a rattlesnake’s head in with a brick. In small districts, superintendents often double as principals, coaches, teachers, substitutes, or even maintenance staffers. My former boss, Ivonne Durant, had already come out of retirement three times before retiring again this spring, at the age of 78. (“I guess I’m just a glutton for punishment,” she joked.) Before moving to Marathon, Durant faced all kinds of challenges during her decades in Dallas ISD—carjackings, slashed tires, racist incidents in the workplace—but the administrative workload at a small district took her by surprise. “Here, for the first time, I found the true meaning of ‘from the boardroom to the classroom,’ ” Durant told me. “If I was going to bring a big idea to the board, I had to make sure that I could carry it out myself. I don’t care how many times I heard people say, ‘Well, why don’t you delegate more?’ How do you delegate to teachers who already have too much on their plates?”

This May, after six years of stagnation, the passage of House Bill 2 offered rural superintendents some long-awaited breathing room. While it provides far less than the $19.6 billion Raise Your Hand Texas—an education-advocacy nonprofit—estimated schools needed to maintain their 2019 purchasing power, the bill’s $8.5 billion funding package remains the state’s single largest investment in public education in recent history. The bill included a considerable salary boost for experienced teachers in small and midsized districts. But the Texas Senate only raised annual per-student funding, known as the basic allotment—the most flexible revenue stream for public schools—by less than a percent. Instead, the bill requires targeted investments in areas like school safety, special education, and district operating costs, growing the list of underfunded mandates and limiting administrators’ ability to move funds around according to their schools’ needs. “The House passed a good bill, but the Senate desecrated it,” said Engle, referencing the low per-student funding.

“Our legislators love to write bills about education and all the things that they think we should be doing, and they leave out that local elected official,” said Randy Willis, executive director of the Texas Association of Rural Schools. “Texas doesn’t like Washington telling us what to do, but they don’t mind telling school boards how to run their districts—so we’re left trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”

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