Gov. Greg Abbott highlighted support for school choice and parental rights at a Texas Pastor Council briefing in Austin. The state also has launched an investigation into a Houston-area school over claims it attempted to transition a child without parental consent, he said, highlighting it as an example for the need to pass a school choice bill.

Speaking before a room full of pastors and church leaders Thursday, Abbott discussed his multi-year effort to bring school choice to Texas. After raising money and endorsing and campaigning for Republicans who were elected to the Texas House, the House has the votes to pass a bill he has long championed, he said.

Both the Texas Senate and House budgets allocated $1 billion for the state’s first Education Savings Account program, The Center Square reported. It would allow 100,000 primarily low-income students to have access to $10,000 ESAs to use for a range of educational opportunities, including private school tuition.

“The rightness and power of a parent is going to prevail,” Abbott said. “Education began long before the creation of school districts. Education began long before the creation of the state of Texas. Education began when God created man and woman, and when children were first born, the design was to have parents in charge of educating their children. A parent is a child's first teacher.

“That design has never changed over the eons of the time that humans have been alive on this earth. It has not changed just because school districts now exist in the state of Texas.”

Those making the argument that government and not parents are in charge of their children’s education are “wrong because we know parents are in charge of their kids, not the government, not the state of Texas,” Abbott said.

Problems in public school systems exist, he said, including policies that are “contrary to the values, to the beliefs and to the wishes of those parents,” he said.

He also cited reasons why parents may want to remove their child from the public school to which they are zoned if they can’t move to enroll them in a different school district.

Examples include parents with children with special needs who live in a district that can’t accommodate them but a private school could but they can’t afford it.

“A parent with a child with unique needs that are not being met by a local public school, they deserve” taxpayer funded assistance, he said. The state “should be able to provide the funding to make sure that child gets an education just like every other child in the state of Texas.”

Another example “is the pervasive woke leftist agenda that's being forced on our kids in our club and schools.” He cited an administrator in the Irving Independent School District talking to a potential parent about how “that school was working on ways and could provide ways in which they could circumvent” a law he signed prohibiting biological boys from performing in girls’ sports.

“You have administrators using your taxpayer dollars to circumvent Texas law, but also to impose as leftist ideology about boys in girls’ sports. That is just wrong. If you are a parent of a child who's being forced to have your daughter playing sports with boys, you should have a right to move your daughter to a different school in the state of Texas,” he said.

Abbott also pointed to a Dallas Independent School District program to provide information to children about how to change their biological sex. “I heard similar programs taking place up in the panhandle as well as other regions in the center of Texas,” he said. In Houston, Bellaire High School educators allegedly “inappropriately ‘socially transitioned’ a student against the wishes of the child's parents in violation of state laws that protect parental rights and guard against child abuse,” prompting Abbott to direct the Texas Education Agency to launch an investigation.

The incident was brought to his attention by state Rep. Steve Toth, R-Conroe, whom Abbott replied in a letter stating, “No school should be ‘transitioning’ children.” If the allegations are true, he argued, the school violated parental rights and state law.

A teenage student was being trained by school employees to “use pronouns that were contrary to her biological sex,” Abbott said. “That's wrong for educators to be trying to advance and aid and support somebody's sexual transitions, but it's also wrong to act contrary to the wishes and the desires of that daughter's parents. That daughter's parents deserve to move that daughter to a school of their choice.”

He also brought up the issue of a “furry” subculture in some public schools in Texas, pointing to a bill that was filed on Thursday to ban it. Education should be about “learning the fundamentals of education, reading and writing and math and science,” he said. If children are “being distracted by furries, their parents have a right to move their child to a school of their choice.”

He also noted that every single session for the last four sessions, including the current legislative session, the Texas Senate has passed a school choice bill.

“For the first time ever in the history of the state of Texas, we have a majority of the members of the Texas House of Representatives who come out in favor of school choice,” he said, expecting the bill to pass and become law.