Playing high school sports in parts of Texas now comes with an invoice. Six school districts — Midlothian, Aledo, Hays Consolidated, Deer Park, Wimberley and Eanes — are charging students athletic participation fees this school year, with some families on the hook for more than $300 to keep their kids on the field.
The trend, first detailed by The Dallas Morning News, comes as districts across the state grapple with rising program costs, shrinking budgets, lost revenue and failed local tax elections. Hays CISD is charging a fee for the first time this year, part of a strategy officials say was meant to prevent cutting sports teams outright. Lance Moffett said the district adopted the fees to preserve broad access to community-based athletics, according to the same report.
Hays CISD's fee structure charges $175 for a student's first sport, $90 for a second, and $50 for a third — meaning a family with a three-sport athlete could pay as much as $315 in a single year. The district built in relief for lower-income families: those who qualify for free lunch get a 90% discount, while students eligible for reduced-price lunch receive a 50% discount, per the Morning News report.
Why the Fees Are Showing Up Now
Hays CISD said the state's recent funding bump amounted to a less-than-1% increase, far short of the roughly $1,000-per-student boost the district says it actually needed. That gap tracks with a broader statewide shortfall: the 89th Texas Legislature raised the basic student allotment by just $55, to $6,215 per student for the 2026-2027 biennium, according to Raise Your Hand Texas. It was the first increase to that baseline since 2019, and education advocates argued it fell hundreds of dollars short of what was needed to keep pace with more than 17% cumulative inflation.
The squeeze has been especially acute in Hays CISD, which cut its overall athletic budget by 8.5% this year and eliminated 96 coaching stipends, according to the district's own accounting cited in the Morning News piece. That athletic budget covers officials, buses and game-day operations. Hoodline reported in June on a similar budget crunch in Spring Branch, where a state funding formula shake-up ripped $9.6 million from the district's books.
Midlothian ISD is also charging an athletic participation fee for the first time this year — $50 for middle schoolers and $75 for high schoolers — with a 50% reduction for students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Rusty Purser said Midlothian adopted the fees to address declining budgets and maintain facilities, and predicted that participation fees will become more commonplace across Texas over the next two to three years, according to the Morning News.
Thousands of Dollars at Stake for Athletic Departments
The numbers add up fast at the school level. Midlothian High has roughly 700 students who could pay the fee this year, and Midlothian Heritage has between 580 and 600, per the district's own figures. As of August 17, Midlothian had already received payments from 538 students districtwide, while Midlothian Heritage alone had logged 399 payments by that date. Altogether, the district's athletic department could take in up to roughly $100,000 from the fee, money that could go toward maintenance costs, supplies or tournament fees, the Morning News reported.
Other districts have their own versions. Aledo charges $100 per student in grades 7-12, a fee it implemented for the 2024-25 school year, and issues an Aledo Sports Pass to paying athletes that covers entry to any home sporting event except varsity football. The fee offsets transportation, equipment, officials and day-to-day operations. Wimberley ISD charges $100 for a family's first student and an additional $50 per additional student, up to $200, to cover equipment, uniforms, event entry fees and other necessities.
Deer Park ISD has been charging athletes for years, having adopted its fee back in 2003 — $50 per student in grades 7-12, assessed once per year regardless of how many sports a student plays. The district allows athletes who can't pay to request a waiver. At the wealthier end of the spectrum, Eanes ISD charges a flat $375 to play sports at Austin's Westlake High School — a figure tied to the district's unusual finances. Eanes retains only 36 cents of every local operating tax dollar it raises, according to Westlake Band Parents, sending the rest back to the state under Texas's recapture system, which requires property-wealthy districts to return local tax revenue that exceeds state limits.
The Legal Guardrails — and a Very Different Approach in California
Texas law gives school boards room to charge these fees, but it doesn't leave families without protection. Texas Education Code Section 11.158 authorizes districts to charge for personal athletic equipment and apparel, but a subsection of that statute requires districts to adopt and publicly post procedures for waiving fees when a student or family can't pay, according to FindLaw. A policy analysis in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that 17 states have laws outlining the practice of charging extracurricular activity fees, though few require districts to clearly communicate how those fees or waivers actually get administered.
Texas's approach stands in sharp contrast to California, which bans fees for extracurricular activities in public schools entirely. That prohibition traces back to the 1984 California Supreme Court decision in Hartzell v. Connell, which found that sports and music are “educational in character” and protected under the state constitution's free-school guarantee, according to Education Week. California's high court went further than simply requiring waivers — it ruled that offering fee waivers doesn't satisfy the constitutional requirement that public educational opportunities be free regardless of family income.
A Practice That Has Come and Gone Before
Pay-to-play fees are more typically associated with club sports than public school programs, but Texas has flirted with them before under similar financial pressure. Frisco ISD charged $100 for middle school athletes and $200 for high schoolers starting in the 2019-20 school year, after state budget cuts and a rejected 2016 local tax increase squeezed its finances. The district ended the fee that same school year after receiving an estimated $25.2 million in new state funding following a school finance overhaul, and Frisco ISD has not discussed reinstating the fee this year.
Bruce Howard said small participation fees in the $50 to $100 range per sport are fairly common nationally, and survey data from the Michigan High School Athletic Association shows between 40% and 57% of public high schools nationwide have required pay-to-play fees in recent years to offset rising costs. Rusty Dowling reported a rising number of conversations about athletic participation fees among association members, and said districts looking for alternatives to the fees have few other revenue options — though some could turn to booster clubs to help close the gap.
Whether that gap will close on its own is an open question. Hoodline reported in February 2025 on the broader financial strain facing Texas schools from flat state funding and inflation, and again in August on how districts are now accepting TEFA voucher funds as another workaround. For now, families in these six districts are simply being asked to help cover what the state budget no longer does.
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