This story has been updated with projected number of available seats in the North Texas area.
Peyton Salters loves his teachers at his South Dallas school. At 4 years old, he’s already learning to read.
But his mom, Keishana Salters, worries that Dallas ISD could one day shut it down because of poor test scores. She wants Peyton in a stable school that pushes him.
Nearby charter schools have waiting lists. And private schools? The costs make them unimaginable, unattainable.
Another big problem: There isn’t one nearby.
How much choice families really have still depends largely on where they live, a Dallas Morning News analysis found.
“I want him to go to a private school, but it has to be a school in our area,” said Salters, 30. “Something close by. I know I’m not the only parent who doesn’t have transportation.”
Top Texas lawmakers say they have a plan that gets more kids like Peyton into private schools, including religious ones, using taxpayer dollars.
Senate Bill 3 aims to level the education playing field by giving families up to about $9,000 a year toward private or online schools, home schooling and other options beyond traditional public and charter campuses. Lawmakers have filed three other similar bills.
“We are providing choice for students trapped in failing schools that have been failing forever," Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said last month in introducing the bill.
Dallas County has more than 30,000 children attending about 100 accredited private schools. The majority are clustered in wealthier areas of North and East Dallas, The News' analysis of education and demographic data shows.
Meanwhile, entire swaths of southern Dallas County lack a single private school. These poorer neighborhoods have lots of low-rated public schools — the very schools that voucher supporters say they want to help kids escape.
In these private-school deserts, areas like Pleasant Grove and southeast Oak Cliff, families would need to travel several miles to the nearest private campuses. And that’s only if the schools have spots and would accept those kids.
“The assumption is if you build a bridge, everyone can cross it. You have to address the fact that some people won’t even be able to make it to the bridge,” said Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College. The private college is in southeast Dallas, where there are seven Dallas ISD schools and two charter schools (one for juvenile offenders, and one for kids at risk of dropping out). There’s not one private school.
Salters said an education savings account or tax credit scholarship, both of which Senate Bill 3 includes, would cover the annual $6,000 in tuition and fees at the private school she’s been eyeing, Fellowship Christian Academy.
But it’s in South Oak Cliff about 13 miles away. Salter said her car isn’t always reliable. There’s a public bus, but that’s a 90-minute trip each way.
So for now, Salters hopes Peyton’s school, Dunbar Learning Center — where nearly all 600 students are poor, and which received the state’s lowest academic rating for three of the past four years — gets better.
The Senate is expected to debate these voucher-like bills next week. While still a longshot, this year is the best chance they’ve ever had in Texas.
A recent survey of private schools done by EdChoice, the Texas Catholic Conference and the Texas Private Schools Association estimated that the state has about 127,000 open seats in such schools. They project about 30,000 of those are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The groups declined to say which schools have the most openings.
The Texas Private Schools Association and the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops haven’t come out explicitly in support of SB3. Instead, both groups support bills that focus only on tax credits for low-income and disabled students.
The primary sponsor of SB3 is Sen. Larry Taylor, R-Friendswood, the chairman of the Senate Education Committee. His office declined to comment for this story.
The Catholic Diocese of Dallas, which has 36 schools, also declined to comment, saying the new bishop needs time to review the issue.
Even if the Lone Star State approved some form of public support for private education, most don’t expect too much to change.
“No one thing in any of the bills is going to mean that thousands and thousands of kids will flee public schools,” said Laura Colangelo, executive director of the Texas Private Schools Association. “That’s not what we want either. There are spots here and there but not a lot where there are whole classrooms that need to be filled.”
Too many unknowns
St. Philip’s School and Community Center is a beacon of pride in South Dallas.
The modest campus of about 220 students is known for its deep reach into the nearby struggling community with a food pantry, health clinic and after-school programs that are open to the neighborhood.
It’s one of only a handful of private schools south of Interstate 30 that could accept the proposed education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarships. If passed by lawmakers, such programs would be available only to the roughly 200 schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that are recognized by the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission.
Headmaster Terry Flowers is obviously torn when discussions turn toward vouchers. He argues both for and against them.
Just this month he ran into a former student now struggling in a Dallas public school for getting into trouble with friends. Flowers says he knows the difference continued private school education would have had. Maybe an education savings account or tax-credit scholarship would have helped his family.
More than 60 percent of students at St. Philip's receive significant financial aid to attend. None pays the nearly $14,000 that would be the fair market value of tuition.
But as it is now, Flowers just can’t support what Texas is debating because too much is unknown. It’s a moral issue.
He doesn’t see enough safeguards to ensure kids will get to transfer into only quality private schools. There’s little holding them accountable for teaching children most in need of help or preventing fraudulent use, he said.
“The education of kids is not a dress rehearsal,” Flowers said.
And he isn’t convinced that kids in the public schools that struggle the most would really benefit.
St. Philip’s accepts many families struggling financially, but it has little room to expand. He worries those families won’t have many options anyway as some private schools won’t want to deal with “certain kinds” of students from different cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds.
$28,000 a year
Across town along the Farmers Branch city limits sits the sprawling Parish Episcopal School.
About 1,130 students from the 3-year-old pre-K class to high school seniors are spread across two campuses. The upper school, once an ExxonMobil office complex, was designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei.
The school sits in a private school hot spot — the North Dallas area.
David Monaco, head of school, doesn’t see yet how the proposed legislation could make his school significantly more accessible. Already Parish Episcopal runs buses to pick up students from other parts of town, but very few come from southern Dallas.
“They might make it more accessible for middle- and upper middle-class families — who are stretching for this kind of educational experience for their kids — to close the gap, perhaps,” he said. “But I just don’t see it being a groundswell or huge difference maker for our industry as independent schools.”
The cost to attend Parish Episcopal tops about $28,000 each year. The proposed state aid probably wouldn’t even cover half of that.
Monaco says the school does what it can to help families, offering $2.5 million annually in financial aid. Still, that’s only enough for 13 percent of its students.
Then there are space limitations.
Parish Episcopal rarely has more than a few open seats after the first new class of 3-year-old pre-K students begins. Many private schools usually have room only for new families in entering transition years, such as in pre-K or the ninth grade.
Monaco doesn’t want to significantly bump up enrollment anyway because that would take away from the intimacy of the school, and it would be costly to add more space.
The majority of his students come from North Dallas up to Frisco. Monaco worries about inequities facing families in poorer parts of the area.
He is a board member of KIPP-DFW, which has five charter schools south of I-30. He’d rather see more state funding for those public campuses than voucher-like efforts.
“I do believe ZIP codes shouldn’t determine destiny,” Monaco said.
'What's the harm in trying?'
Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep is an oasis in the private school desert of Pleasant Grove. It’s the only private school in ZIP code 75217, where the typical household earns $33,000 a year. Most of the surrounding ZIP codes don’t have any private schools.
That’s exactly why Cristo Rey opened there in 2015, president Kelby Woodard said.
“That’s where there’s very little choice,” Woodard said. “There are a few charter elementary schools, but that’s really it.”
Families pay about $800 a year. Cristo Rey can keep tuition that low because students earn about 70 percent of the cost — they work five full days a month at area companies (including The News).
The school looks for students with grit and motivation, Woodard said.
Cristo Rey has about 250 students now, with plans to expand to 575.
Woodard is convinced there’s a need for more schools like Cristo Rey — it receives three applications for every spot. And if low-income families received education savings accounts or tax-credit scholarships, he said, more private schools would open.
“Even if that theory is wrong, which I don’t think it is, what’s the harm in trying?” said Woodard, who previously served as Minnesota state representative. He had pushed a bill to give tax-credit scholarships to low-income families.
The Minnesota governor vetoed it.
“To say that there’s a universal choice is not true today — but it could be,” Woodard said.
How we did our analysis
We mapped accredited private schools in Collin, Dallas, Denton, Rockwall and Tarrant counties, using data from the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission. We included only schools that go beyond kindergarten.
Private school enrollment is based on 2013-14 data for kindergarten through 12th grade from the U.S. Education Department’s Private School Universe Survey. A few schools did not report enrollment, so where possible we used other sources (greatschools.org, advanc-ed.org and school websites).
Median household income is based on the 2015 American Community Survey (5-year estimates) by ZIP Code Tabulation Areas.
Public schools (including charters) shown received an “F” for student achievement in 2015-16 under a preliminary letter grade system from the Texas Education Agency. Student enrollment is for that same year.
