At Tomball ISD trustees' June 1 workshop meeting, TISD Director of Special Education Keri Williams presented a report of the district's special education department, highlighting the growth since 2021.
Between the 2021-22 and 2025-26 school years, Williams said the district's special education population had grown by 68%, or from 1,901 special education students to 3,200. Additionally, the percentage of students using special education services has grown to 13.75% in the 2025-26 school year compared to 9.38% in 2021-22.
Breaking it down
Despite the population growth, however, Williams said the district has not seen an increase in special education funding. IDEA-B is a program that helps provide special education funding, a subset of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. TISD receives funding from IDEA-B, but Williams said the slight increases have been steadily falling year by year.
“Over the last three years, the slight increases [in funding] have gone down a little bit every year over the past three years. ... Which definitely is not in correlation with how many students we are adding to special educational services and supports at this time,” Williams said.
Some context
Every TISD special education program is reviewed by the state through the Results Driven Accountability system, which uses a scale of 1-4, with 1 being the highest, Williams said. Among other school districts, TISD received the highest possible score of 1.
Williams also said that TISD’s special education graduates have achieved high rates for the college, career, and military readiness framework. The framework was created by the Texas Education Agency to evaluate how successfully high schools prepare graduating students for their post-education lives. Williams said out of the 109 special education students who qualified, 60 of them met the CCMR standard for the 2024-25 school year.
Also of note
As previously reported, activity centers are set to be built at Tomball Memorial, Tomball and Tomball West high schools as part of the district’s 2025 $429.1 million bond. Architects from PBK Architects presented multiple renderings of the proposed centers at the workshop meeting.
Each facility is set to be built in a similar size and design to the district's campus identity, according to the presentation. The facilities are set to contain an 80-yard artificial turf football field and multiple retractable nets that can be used to separate the facilities to support multiple sports and fine arts.
