Arizona’s most recent Republican governor is cheering on his state’s latest ranking in a key education report.
This week, Governor Doug Ducey shared a new report from the Reason Foundation on the “K-12 open enrollment laws of all 50 states.” Ducey said, “Another new report shows that Arizona’s education system is one of the best in the nation. Arizona ranks number 3 among all 50 states for our expansive open enrollment policies that ensure every Arizona family has access to a good, high-quality education.”
Another new report shows that Arizona's education system is one of the best in the nation. Arizona ranks number 3 among all 50 states for our expansive open enrollment policies that ensure every Arizona family has access to a good, high-quality education.https://t.co/y88EOVhJjo
Jude Schwalbach, a Senior Policy Analyst for Reason, said, “K-12 open enrollment lets students transfer to public schools other than their residentially assigned one so long as space is available. School parents widely support this policy. Public polling from October 2023 by yes. every kid. and YouGov showed that 84% of school parents supported it, while EdChoice’s July 2024 polling showed that 73% of school parents supported open enrollment.”
Schwalbach added, “Students participating in Arizona’s, Colorado’s, and Florida’s open enrollment programs tended to transfer to school districts that were ranked higher by the state, according to Reason Foundation research… On average, 10% of students in Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin used open enrollment during the 2021-22 school year, totaling more than 450,000 students. Nearly 177,000 of these transferred to schools in other districts. In Wisconsin, open enrollment was the most popular form of school choice and the second most popular in Arizona and Florida during that time, according to data published by Education Next.”
State-specific analysis for Arizona revealed that “the Grand Canyon State also requires districts and schools to update their available capacity every 12 weeks by grade level on their website. The Arizona Department of Education must also provide an annual report to policymakers and the public that shows ‘the open enrollment participation rate by school district, school, and county, including the number of pupils, by student subgroup designation, in each school and school district that are open enrolled as resident pupils, resident transfer pupils, or nonresident pupils for each school district and the school districts and zip codes from which students are rejected.’”
The report gave three suggestions for Arizona to increase its standing with the open enrollment laws. Those ways were as follows:
“Require the SEA to publish the number of rejected applicants and explain why they were denied in its annual report.
“Clarify that school districts cannot reject transfer applicants based on their abilities.
“Require school districts to inform parents of rejected transfer applicants in writing the reasons for rejection.”
In the 2022 report, which was the final one of Ducey’s administration, Reason wrote of the Arizona system and subsequent ranking, “Opponents to open enrollment often object to the policy because it could lower the value of homes inside the district or attendance zones, unfairly penalizing families that ‘bought into the system.’ However, the public school choice options available to families in Arizona should allay those fears. The state’s mandatory cross-district and within-district open enrollment program operates side by side with a robust charter school system. Despite the fact that nearly one in four students enrolled in affluent Scottsdale’s public schools is assigned to different school districts, home values have not decreased. In fact, Scottsdale home prices have steadily increased in recent years. This shows that open enrollment does not damage property values; instead a robust education marketplace can actually be an attractive component to home buyers.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is facing serious criticism after legal threats issued to families using the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The threats slammed the brakes on purchasing “supplementary materials” considered self-evident in need by the State Board of Education.
As reported by the AZ Mirror, a July notice from Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office told the director of the ESA program that they may be in violation of Arizona law by issuing reimbursements to families for supplementary education materials, (i.e. flash-cards, periodic tables of the elements, early books for new readers) without requiring that parents provide documentation that it is required under a curriculum.
In the six-page letter, Assistant Attorney General Kathryn Boughton wrote, “Approving ESA funds for materials that have no nexus to the student’s actual curricular needs contradicts the intent of the program and constitutes a payment of funds made without authorization of law.” She went on to claim that doing so, “may enable account holders or vendors to engage in fraudulent behavior, such as purchasing items with ESA funds solely for the purpose of resale.”
She advised that director, John Ward stop authorizing the reimbursements immediately.
Faced with a potentially damaging legal battle, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne told parents in a statement that he would have to concede the point for now. “When I received the attorney general’s message, I sent it to the most knowledgeable people in my department,” Horne wrote.
“I asked them to look at it, not as an advocate, because we all disagree with the Attorney General, but in a neutral way, as though they were judges to determine if they could give me a reasonable assurance of success. They analyzed the statutes on which the attorney general relied, and indicated to me that as a neutral judge, they would rule against me if I made a fight out of it and refused to comply. Getting into a fight and losing, would be much more damaging.”
However, the tune from Mayes’ office changed sharply just one day after the Goldwater Institute filed lawsuit challenging the blatantly partisan determination. Attorneys from Goldwater representing two Arizona mothers wrote, “Following …unsuccessful legislative attempts, the office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes initiated a new effort in July 2024 to dramatically limit the use of ESA funds, calling for a prohibition on the purchase of basic educational materials, including books, workbooks, and other ‘supplementary materials’ unless parents could provide an explicit ‘curricular’ document justifying the use of each specific book title or material for their child.”
“Arizona law expressly allows the purchase of such materials with ESA funds, however. In fact, state lawmakers added clarifying language in 2020 with the explicit purpose of ensuring that such purchases would not be denied, following the actions by former State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman that had restricted the purchase of many such items. The State Board of Education has likewise approved rules for the program explicitly permitting the purchase of these materials without additional documentation.”
The AG’s Office then began a campaign of feverishly walking back their determination with a statement responding to the suit. “The Attorney General has simply stated what is required by law,” adding, “The law doesn’t prevent parents from purchasing paper and pencils, but it does require that materials purchased with ESA funds be used for a child’s education.”
But this isn’t what Mayes’ office said in July when they demanded Superintendent Tom Horne’s department “promptly cease approving supplementary material expenses without the requisite documentation of a curriculum nexus,” no matter how self-evidently educational the materials are, as Matt Beienburg,the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute pointed out in an Arizona Daily Independent op-ed.
As Beienburg notes, Mayes’ office, far from simply targeting extravagant spending, threatened ESA administrators with legal liability unless they applied the same requirements on the list of obviously educational materials approved in the State Board of Education’s ESA Handbook: things like “books,” “workbooks,” “writing utensils,” “atlases/maps/globes,” “calculators,” “flash cards”, etc.
“Thesematerials are what Attorney General Mayes’ intervention is now blocking en masse—unless parents can cite a specific pre-established curriculum calling for the individual book title or resource,” Beienburg explained.
“In other words, the Attorney General’s office still demands that flashcards and other self-evidently educational materials be allowed only if a parent can produce an arbitrary piece of paper calling for their specific use.
The Attorney General’s attempted public deflection away from this fact demonstrates the absurdity of her summer demands. Perhaps she really does believe that families should have to justify their purchases of books like ‘Brown Bear Brown Bear, What do You See?’ and ‘Little People Who Became Great’ to wiser government bureaucrats. But for the rest of us, such restrictions are clearly nonsensical and—under state law, illegal.
The Attorney General is supposed to uphold state law, not torture it to impose her policy preferences. We encourage the Attorney General to withdraw her summer demand letter, or else acknowledge flatly that her position is that families should have to justify why they picked ‘Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See?’ to read to their own children.”
The vice president of the Higley Unified School Board, Anna Van Hoek, received a package with an apparent threat of violence from a leftist parent.
The package, sent from Amazon, contained a rope and a book containing sexually explicit content, “Homegoing.” Following a report from Van Hoek, Gilbert Police submitted a warrant to Amazon and identified the sender as Queen Creek mother Lindzie Head.
Lindzie Head sent a copy of “Homegoing” along with a rope to Higley school board member Anna Van Hoek.
Head is a medical technologist (clinical lab scientist) at Mercy Gilbert Medical Center who serves on the Queen Creek Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. She previously held leadership roles with the PTO for Cortina Elementary School and Sossaman Middle School.
Van Hoek has taken stances on issues such as removing dirty books from classrooms and barring boys (identifying as transgender girls) from girls’ sports, in alliance with organizations such as Arizona Women of Action.
The package came after a high school English teacher, Brittany O’Neill, came under investigation for assigning the very book Head sent to Van Hoek, “Homegoing.” The book is a historical fiction addressing slavery that contains a number of passages depicting sex and rape, as well as abuse and drug use.
State law prevents the provision of sexually explicit books unless the materials are deemed educational, and parents give their consent. The Gilbert Police Department notified the district that it was investigating O’Neill over the assignment last month.
In that controversy, Van Hoek sided with the aggrieved parents who believe the book shouldn’t have been assigned to minors due to its content.
Van Hoek said in a statement that Head and her husband, Kyle Head, indicated to police that they have retained legal counsel.
In her statement, Van Hoek also said that she would not tolerate this threatening behavior. Van Hoek advised that she had previously endured an attack on her property: her tire was slashed during a board meeting last October.
“I want to make it unequivocally clear that I will not tolerate this kind of harassment and threats directed not only at myself but also at our district parents,” said Van Hoek. “Everyone has a right to express their concerns and speak out without fear of intimidation.”
Van Hoek also advised that another district parent had received the same sexually explicit book in an anonymous package from Head (confirmed by Gilbert Police) with the following message:
“Read the book and maybe you’ll learn something,” said Head’s message.
The same district parent who received Head’s package reported having his identifying information doxed on social media.
Van Hoek said that no additional information about the incidents could be provided due to an ongoing investigation.
These unwelcome packages appear to be the latest efforts by Head to become more civically involved.
Last May, Head participated in and graduated from the town of Queen Creek’s Citizen Leadership Institute. It was several months after this graduation that she applied for (and was given) the board member role for the Queen Creek Parks and Recreation Board.
Last October, Head wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Independent asking Congress to work in a bipartisan manner and pass the budget.
Head’s Instagram bio reads, “You can sit with me. Here to be unreasonable. Uninformed and relying on hearsay.”
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
Grand Canyon University (GCU) will now cover the college costs for over 300 students this academic year.
The university expanded its Canyon Rising Scholarship (formerly the Students Inspiring Students Scholarship) to meet the needs of 305 high-achieving, low-income high school seniors. 100 of those scholarships will also include total coverage of costs for on-campus housing and meal plans.
GCU President Brian Mueller said in a press release that the university had a duty to give back to the community around it by offering opportunities for growth.
“As GCU continues to grow, it is important to the university that the community surrounding it grows along with it,” said Mueller. “Historically, education is the great equalizer in society, providing equality of opportunity for all socioeconomic classes.”
Mueller shared that the majority of students within the scholarship program were first-generation college students and students of color.
“Since this program’s inception, the overwhelming majority of scholarship recipients have been first-generation college students and students of color because that is the demographic of the community in which we reside,” said Mueller.
The scholarship program is open to over 20 high schools in GCU’s inner-city neighborhood.
GCU began its Canyon Rising Scholarship (Students Inspiring Students Scholarship) in 2016. The university initially partnered with Alhambra High School.
GCU has offered over 1,000 scholarships since the program’s inception eight years ago.
Those admitted into the program participate in an honoring ceremony at the start of the school year at GCU’s Global Credit Union Arena, attended by loved ones of the students as well as donors to the program.
GCU revealed in its press release that it plans to expand career counseling efforts to assist these program students for job preparation post-graduation. Jennifer Mitchell, GCU K12 and Collegiate Advancement director, explained that the counseling fulfills GCU’s goal of sustained success to impact not only program participants’ futures but the well-being of their communities.
“Our program leaders will work to connect scholars with real-life work experience in their neighborhood, which means a greater likelihood they’ll stay and be part of the transformation of their community,” said Mitchell.
These scholarships are renewable for up to eight semesters and not subject to GCU CAP policy. In order to be eligible for the next round of Canyon Rising Scholarship grants, students must qualify to receive the maximum Pell Grant amount as determined by the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), have a minimum 3.0 unweighted high school GPA, be a graduating senior from an Arizona high school, and be an incoming high school senior starting in the fall 2025-26 academic year.
In order to get started, students must apply to GCU, which doesn’t require an application fee; submit their high school transcripts; meet with their university admissions counselor to review eligibility requirements; complete FAFSA (GCU school code 0010704); and register for courses and begin their degree program at GCU.
Those accepted into the scholarship program must also participate in the Canyon Rising Scholarship Seminar, which equips students with introductions to university management, LEAD support, presentation for success at GCU, and expectations for the school year.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
24-year-old Daniel Ashpes of the Tempe Union High School District was arrested for threats against Donald Trump Jr. and Turning Point USA founder, CEO Charlie Kirk.
The Tempe Police Department announced Ashpes’s arrest on Tuesday; he was taken into custody on Thursday, Oct. 17. Ashpes messaged threats directed at Trump Jr. and Kirk through a mass messaging system while they were in town for a political rally last week.
“Daniel Ashpes was taken into custody by Tempe police on Thursday, after detectives were notified of threatening messages sent in response to an automated mass-messaging system asking for an RSVP to the Turning Point rally at a Tempe hotel,” said the department on Facebook. “TPD’s Threat Mitigation Unit launched an immediate investigation and developed probable cause for Ashpes’ arrest that same day. In an interview with detectives, Ashpes admitted to sending the messages.”
The Tempe Police Department is announcing the arrest of 24-year-old Daniel Ashpes for multiple counts of online threats made toward Donald Trump Jr., and Charlie Kirk who were in Tempe for a political rally last week. pic.twitter.com/KKxn6eoxKy
Ashpes is facing the following misdemeanor charges: three counts of threatening to cause physical injury to another person and one count of using a phone to threaten or intimidate. Penalties for these charges range up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $2,500.
Ashpes is not an Arizona native. According to his since-deleted Facebook profile, Ashpes was from Irvine, California, where he attended Arnold O. Beckman High School in Tustin, California. His profile mentioned that he also lived for a time in Portland, Oregon.
All of Ashpes’s other social media profiles — including Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn — were deleted, limiting access to an online footprint that may have provided further insight to Ashpes’s political beliefs.
Ashpes attended Northern Arizona University and was a student teacher at Flagstaff Unified School District.
Ashpes taught social studies at Desert Vista High School; he was hired in July.
On Wednesday, Desert Vista informed parents that Ashpes was placed on administrative leave over his arrest.
“We are writing to inform you that Mr. Daniel Ashpes, a social studies teacher at DV, has been placed on administrative leave while authorities conduct an investigation,” stated the school. “Yesterday, at 1:33 PM, we notified Mr. Ashpes’ students and their families of the situation, prior to any media reports. As this is an ongoing matter, our priority was to first inform those directly impacted before communicating with the wider Desert Vista community. While we are unable to provide details at this time, we are aware that the Tempe Police Department has filed charges related to alleged online threats. Please note that the Tempe Union High School District (TUHSD) does not tolerate or condone any form of threats or harassment by employees or students.”
Donald Trump Jr.’s father, Donald Trump, has survived two assassination attempts this year: one in July and one in September.
In the July assassination attempt, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks shot a near-fatal bullet that grazed Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania rally. The gunfire killed one, 50-year-old Pennsylvania firefighter and father Corey Comperatore, and injured seven others: 57-year-old David Dutch and 74-year-old James Copenhaver were shot and critically injured but recovered; the nephew of Congressman Ronny Jackson was grazed in the neck by a bullet but recovered; and four Pittsburgh Police officers were injured minorly by debris from objects hit by the gunfire.
The second assassination attempt occurred in September. The would-be assassin, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, never made it to the point where he fired off any shots at Trump. Routh had set up an AK-47 rifle, backpack, and Go-Pro camera along the fencing adjacent to the Trump International Golf Club course. Routh was spotted by the Secret Service about 400-500 yards from Trump while he was playing golf. The Secret Service then fired several rounds at Routh and caused him to flee.
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A Republican running for Maricopa County School Superintendent picked up a key endorsement ahead of the November General Election.
Late last month, Shelli Boggs announced the endorsement of Riley Gaines for her campaign for Maricopa County Superintendent. In her endorsement statement, Gaines said, “My advocacy has brought me to Arizona multiple times and I have gotten to really know Shelli Boggs. She is genuine. Kids and education are her passion. She believes in empowering students with knowledge and skills.”
Gaines added, “Shelli will always put students and their academic needs first! That is why I fully endorse Shelli Boggs for Maricopa County School Superintendent.”
Over the past few years, Riley Gaines has shot to national prominence over her flawless defense of the integrity of women’s sports as ladies around the country battle the encroachment of biological men within their events. Gaines was a twelve-time NCAA All-American Swimmer, and she serves as an Ambassador for the Independent Women’s Voice.
Boggs responded to the endorsement from Gaines, writing, “I am honored to have Riley Gaines’ endorsement! Riley has been a strong advocate for protecting girls’ sports and ensuring fairness for female athletes. I am grateful for her support as we work to uphold integrity in education and create opportunities for all students in Maricopa County schools. Together, we will protect what matters most in both academics and athletics.”
On her website, Boggs describes herself as “a proud Arizona mom, mimi, teacher, and education leader who got started in Arizona politics when she saw firsthand the decline in education quality and the invasion of radical politics into the classroom.” In 2018, Boggs won a seat on the Governing Board of the East Valley Institute of Technology (EVIT), where she served as its Vice President and then President. She states that under her leadership, “EVIT has seen enrollment double, administration costs decrease, radical politics and activism removed from classrooms, and more dollars going directly towards student success WITHOUT raising taxes.”
The Republican nominee for county superintendent promises to “ensure that the school children of Maricopa County get the education they need to succeed in life, politics are removed from classrooms, parental rights are defended, fiscal accountability is restored, school board vacancies are filled with responsible leaders, and that good teachers are being supported.”
Boggs vows to protect boys and girls in schools “because we recognize the difference between them.” She intends to “always fight to protect girls’ sports from those who want to allow biological boys to compete against our female athletes.”
Running against Boggs is Dr. Laura Metcalfe, a Democrat and an EVIT School Board Member. Metcalfe lists a number of endorsements on her campaign website, including from Arizona List, Save Our Schools Arizona, Maricopa County Young Democrats, Young Democrats of Arizona, National Organization for Women Arizona PAC, and former Democrat State Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman.
The winner will replace Steve Watson as the Maricopa County School Superintendent. Watson is a Republican.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
