The Texas Comptroller’s Office has cleared two North Texas Islamic private schools to join the state’s taxpayer-funded school choice program, one day after a Houston federal judge ordered officials to review their applications and extend the deadline for families to apply for the school voucher program to March 31.
Records from the office that runs the Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) program list Excellence Academy in McKinney as an approved participant, and it now appears on the state’s official website of participating schools.
Ehsan Sayed, a board member and graduate of Brighter Horizons Academy in Garland, said Wednesday afternoon that his school had also won approval. As of Thursday morning, however, the school was not yet listed on the TEFA website.
“It’s a big relief,” Sayed said, CBS News Texas reported. “We were excited about the vouchers program when it was first even mentioned, years ago, by the governor, because it would really give our parents and families an opportunity to help with their private education.”
Sayed said his school opened in 1989 and enrolls 1,200 students in its K-12 program. “It’s a typical private school with all the subjects, all the wonderful recreational and after-school activities, with the addition of the religious curriculum and classes. And so, as you mentioned, we’ve been around for over 30 years, graduated hundreds. I want to say almost 800 alumni from the school to date. Just normal and everyday Texans.”
Sayed and other schools and parents sued the comptroller’s office, alleging the state had blocked as many as 30 Islamic schools from even applying — a step their lawyer called a violation of the Constitution and religious freedom.
“We believe it was on the basis of the Islamic faith that the school teaches,” attorney Maha Ghyas told CBS News.
State officials had said schools with links to the Chinese Communist Party or the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — which Gov. Greg Abbott has labeled a foreign terrorist organization — would be barred, as The Dallas Express reported at the time.
“That did come up in the hearing, and the state’s attorney confirmed there was no evidence that the comptroller had that either Brighter Horizons or Little Horizons was in any way affiliated with any organization that could be problematic here,” Ghyas said. “And so that did come up in the hearing, and the state did concede that that was not an issue with either Brighter Horizons or Little Horizons.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has rejected the terrorist label and sued the state over it. The comptroller’s office offered no comment on the claim that the schools were initially turned away because of their faith.
Sayed said he expects U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett’s order extending the parent application deadline to March 31 to draw more families to the program.
“I think it will clear up a lot of confusion we were getting from parents, so we will have a lot more parents applying.”
In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock said, “This two-week extension will give families an additional opportunity to apply for the first year of school choice in Texas. We look forward to building on the record-setting demand for educational options that we have seen over the first six weeks.”
A spokesman for the comptroller’s office reported that nearly 900 additional students have applied since the judge’s Tuesday ruling, lifting the statewide total to about 230,000.
