Texas Title I Funds for SPED Math | Times Tables Software

When I looked into what's actually happening across Texas districts heading into the 2026-2027 school year, the picture is pretty consistent. The Texas Education Agency has been clear that pandemic relief money is spent. Districts that built their intervention programmes on ESSER funding are now auditing every tool in their stack, asking hard questions: does this earn its place, or is it EdTech bloat?

What I keep seeing reported in coverage from EdWeek and in TEA memos is that districts are leaning harder into Title I allocations and state-level special education budgets to fill the gap. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. It's actually forcing a more honest conversation about what works for Tier 2 and Tier 3 students, particularly in maths, where the STAAR outcomes continue to put real pressure on campus accountability ratings.

The single biggest constraint isn't money alone, it's the combination of tighter budgets and an already-stretched teaching workforce. A tool that requires significant teacher training, ongoing admin, or daily facilitation isn't really solving the problem, even if it looks impressive in a procurement meeting.

Tier 2 sits in a tricky space. It's targeted support for students who haven't responded to core instruction, but it's supposed to run without pulling a specialist teacher out of the room every single time. For a lot of Texas campuses I read about, that's where things break down. The intervention exists on paper; the staffing to run it consistently doesn't.

For a Tier 2 maths intervention to actually function in a resource-constrained campus, it needs a few things. It needs to engage students without requiring an adult to sit next to them the whole time. It needs to build fluency systematically, not just expose children to content. And for students with IEPs, students with maths anxiety, or neurodivergent learners, it needs a design that doesn't create the stress response that shuts learning down before it begins.

Gamification, done properly, addresses all three. Not shovelware with a few stars bolted on, but genuine game mechanics that children already associate with fun. Multiplayer formats matter here too because they build motivation through social engagement, not just reward points.

One thing that stands out to me when I look at what's happening in this space is how much the research on maths anxiety points back to the emotional environment around the subject. Children who've decided they "aren't maths people" don't respond well to more drilling. They respond to contexts where maths is incidental to something they're already enjoying.

That's the premise behind XTables Champions. The platform is built specifically for children with maths anxiety, SEND needs and neurodivergent learners. Times-tables and maths fluency practice is embedded inside popular game formats that children already know and want to play, including multiplayer modes where they're competing and collaborating with classmates. The maths is real and systematic. The experience doesn't feel like an intervention.

As our founder Gal Darrash puts it, *"The children who struggle most with maths are often the ones who've already learned to feel bad about it. If we can meet them inside a game they love, we get to change that story."*

From the schools we speak to in our early conversations, this distinction matters enormously for SPED and SENCO contexts specifically. A child who disengages from a standard fluency drill will often stay on a multiplayer game for twenty minutes without prompting. That's Tier 2 intervention time that doesn't require a teacher to manage every second of it.

For campus leaders trying to make the case to district leadership or a federal programmes coordinator, here's how I'd frame this. Title I funds can support supplemental educational services for low-achieving students at Title I schools. Maths fluency software used as a targeted, documented Tier 2 intervention for eligible students sits squarely within that framework, provided it is used as a supplement to, not a replacement for, core instruction.

For SPED-specific funding, the argument is even more direct. If a student's IEP includes maths fluency goals, and a software tool is being used to support those goals in a structured, documented way, that use can reasonably align with state special education funding purposes. Your district's federal programmes office will have the final word on allowability, but the category is not a stretch.

The audit question districts are asking right now is whether a tool earns its place. The honest answer for any intervention software needs to cover three things: does it engage the students who need it most, does it reduce rather than add to teacher workload, and does it produce measurable movement on fluency benchmarks? Those are the questions worth asking of any tool in your stack, including this one.

We're a young company, and I want to be honest about that. We don't have ten years of district-wide data to wave around. What we do have is a clear, specific focus: children who struggle with maths, often because of anxiety, neurodivergence or SEND needs, and a product designed from the ground up with those children in mind, not retrofitted for them.

In our early conversations with schools, the consistent feedback is that the children who engage least with traditional fluency resources are often the ones who stay on XTables Champions longest. That's the starting point. It's not a grand claim. It's the thing that makes us confident this is the right direction.

For Texas ISDs working through a post-ESSER stack audit and trying to justify every line item against STAAR outcomes and IEP goals, a tool that engages reluctant maths learners without adding teacher prep is a straightforward case to make.

If you're a SPED coordinator, federal programmes director or campus leader at a Texas ISD thinking through your maths intervention provision for 2026, I'd genuinely love to hear from you. Not to pitch, but to understand what your students need and talk through whether XTables Champions could be a useful part of the answer.

Visit xtableschampions.com or get in touch directly to start a conversation. We're a small team and we respond personally. Tell us about your students and your intervention goals, and we'll give you an honest picture of what we can do.