As an Arizonan, a small business owner, and a concerned citizen, I’m deeply troubled by how the Left’s government shutdown is hurting our communities. Every day Washington fails to act, hardworking Arizonans pay the price.
Military families at bases like Luke and Davis-Monthan, air traffic controllers keeping our skies safe, National Guard members protecting our borders, and countless small business owners are being forced to shoulder the consequences of political inaction—many continuing to serve without pay or any certainty about the future. Furloughed federal workers in Tucson and Phoenix are dipping into savings just to cover groceries, while delayed permits and contracts grind local projects to a halt.
I run two small businesses here in Arizona—a volleyball coaching company and a social media management brand—so I see firsthand how government shutdowns ripple through real lives. They slow things down, shake confidence, and make it harder for families and business owners to plan ahead. When federal payments stall, suppliers wait longer to get paid, employees across industries worry about their next paycheck, and everyday customers start cutting back. It’s working families, small businesses, and community builders who feel it most—while politicians argue over deadlines and programs they created themselves.
Let’s rewind to March 2021. President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan—a massive spending package sold as emergency relief. Hidden inside was an expansion of premium tax credits under the Affordable Care Act, increasing federal payouts to insurers and expanding who qualifies. These subsidies were supposed to be temporary bridges to help Americans get through the pandemic. Yet years later, some in Washington are treating them as untouchable—willing to shut down the government rather than let them expire.
These subsidies were never meant to be permanent, and they can’t be sustained responsibly. The Congressional Budget Office projected that making them permanent would add over $34 billion to the federal deficit in the next decade.
Even worse, these handouts have distorted the healthcare market. When the government guarantees bigger subsidies no matter the cost, insurers and providers raise prices—knowing taxpayers will cover the difference. Executives pocket bonuses, red tape piles up, and real healthcare workers get squeezed. What was supposed to make care “affordable” has instead insulated the system from competition and transparency, driving costs higher for everyone not lucky enough to qualify for the subsidies.
The hard truth is that the Affordable Care Act never lived up to its name. It drove up prices and created layers of bureaucracy. Now, temporary subsidies—originally sold as short-term relief—are being treated as permanent entitlements. Holding the government and everyday Americans hostage over these failed policies is simply wrong.
Senators Kelly and Gallego, you represent a state known for independence and common sense. The House has already passed a clean Continuing Resolution to fund the government and end this unnecessary pain. Support it. Reopen federal agencies. Let our military families breathe easier, our air traffic controllers get their paychecks, and our small businesses plan for the future without Washington’s chaos.
Arizona’s working people have carried enough. It’s time for our leaders to choose stability over subsidies, solutions over gridlock, and the Grand Canyon State over partisan games. End the shutdown now.
Alison Furno is an Arizona Resident, Small Business Owner, and Independent Women’s Network Phoenix Co-Leader.
The Green New Scam got its start in Arizona two decades ago when a 5-0 Republican Commission (including then Republican Kris Mayes) adopted the Renewable Energy Standard and Tarriff Rules, or the REST Rules. Among other things, most significantly it ushered in the first “renewable” mandates in our state, forcing utilities to obtain at least 15% of their power from “renewables.” Ratepayers have been paying the costs (over $2 billion) ever since.
The REST Rules had a target date: 2025. Well, it’s now 2025, and the utilities have not only met that mandate, but they have also voluntarily exceeded it. Now our current 5-0 Republican Commission has started the process of repealing them.
Repealing the REST Rules is important, but the targets have already been met, and the price has already been paid. Substantively, the repeal won’t really affect ratepayers all that much. Why? Because mandate or no mandate, our utilities are completely committed to going “Net Zero” by 2050, and so far, they’ve been allowed to do it…
“From the data on the class of 2025, college admissions officers and future employers can reasonably conclude that if the applicant is a graduate of Arizona schools, more likely than not, they cannot proficiently read, write, perform math, or understand science in comparison to their peers.”
A Legal Process also noted that a majority of Arizona’s 2025 graduates failed to meet one core academic benchmark. “55% of Arizona’s students can graduate high school and still not demonstrate college-ready level competency in a single core academic subject matter,” the publication said.
World Population Review published Public School Rankings by State 2025, which shows Arizona dead last overall in four categories: K-12 performance, school funding and resources, higher education quality, and safety. This is corroborated by Consumer Affairs, which rated Arizona number one on its list entitled, “Which states rank poorly for education?”
Arizona wastes between $10,000 and $14,000 per student, depending on the source. Meanwhile, the average ESA is estimated between $6,000 and $9,000 for students in 1st through 12th grade. Current trends also reveal that K-12 families are ditching government education at an impressive rate. Even if these calculations are off by 10 decimal points, my conclusion remains the same: The A-F School Letter Grade classification system is a complete joke, and school choice is the one good thing happening in Arizona education.
“Arizona school district superintendents receive high salaries. Yet, the true scale of that pay is often obscured by a triangle of complex contract provisions that school boards, and the superintendents themselves, deliberately design to mask the full measure of compensation from taxpayers…
These same school districts go to great lengths to block access to superintendent contracts—in some cases even from their own board members—shielding from the public how tax dollars enrich those who often are their community’s highest-paid public employees.”
Goldwater requested more than 40 superintendent contracts—official records that should be accessible to the general public—only to receive the documents after four months of repeated requests and warnings of potential litigation. The following information is also sourced from their report:
Not including health insurance or pension costs, Arizona superintendents’ base salaries average $215,000 a year, while taxpayers are charged up to $490,000 per superintendent after accounting for “lucrative perks.”
In addition to pension benefits, several school districts are double-charging taxpayers for superintendents’ retirement packages.
Taxpayers are funding superintendents’ personal and vacation leave to the tune of 15 weeks off, when combined with school holidays. When vacation days are unused, superintendents receive a payout in the form of additional compensation.
Goldwater rightly called attention to Tolleson Union High School District Superintendent Jeremy Calles, who makes off with roughly $500,000 a year. Although Tolleson ranks as the 16th largest district in the state, Calles earns at least $100,000 more than any other Arizona Superintendent. Not surprisingly, he was accused of financial misconduct and, according to ABC 15, the auditor general’s investigation into Calles is expected to be completed by January 2027.
Notably, Calles also stands accused of inflating enrollment numbers, loaning $25 million to the Isaac School District, and allowing one teacher to resign with full benefits after complaints that the former employee had an inappropriate relationship with a student. Regardless, Calles appears to have an explanation for everything. And, despite the embarrassing controversy, he still finds half a million reasons to show up for work.
“There are so many good things happening [in] our district right now that it is difficult to put them all into one newsletter…Our letter grades continue to rise…Success is not without consequence. If we are going to be the best district in the state, then we cannot get there by trying to do what everyone else is doing; we have to innovate.”
He signed off by stating that how Tolleson residents respond to a bond and override this November will “reveal how the community feels about the direction of the district.” I know how I would vote if I lived in Tolleson—it’s the same way I’m voting in Peoria.
If you’re anything like me, you’re a fish out of water when it comes to district finance. Simple is the only way I know how to be. Thus, maintenance and overrides (M&O) allow school districts to exceed their budget for salaries and daily operations by 15% in most cases. M&Os are marketed to the public as a means to “enhance student safety and special education programs.” Districts sell educators on increased pay, so (radical) teachers’ unions generally support overrides as well.
Tax increases are presented to homeowners in fractions and decimals and crumbs, rather than the sum total. Consequently, landowners must research their property value before they can know the full size of their “fraction.” Note that since overrides have literally been in place for decades, district representatives automatically expect taxpayers to honor the tradition of compliance as they’ve done in previous elections.
“Despite a 5% drop in district school enrollment since 2019, Arizona’s public-school districts have continued to expand facilities, increase capital spending by 67% to $8.9 billion, and boost transportation costs by 11.3% to $561.2 million, even as eligible bus riders plummeted by 45%…The fastest-shrinking districts have increased capital spending the most, with 20% of districts (serving 73% of students) receiving 81% of capital funding.”
Let’s be real. Taxpayers are not investing in gifted programs or sponsoring all-day kindergarten. This, my fellow proletariats, is what you call a bailout.
Rather than telling Arizonans how to vote in this election, I will instead refer you back to the information covered in this post. I encourage parents, property owners, and slighted educators to use sound judgment at the ballot box. Remember, the most basic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
Again, I’m no mathematician. But I’m willing to believe that at least a significant portion of the funds required to increase teacher salaries, enhance special needs programs, and implement cutting-edge safety plans can be found in the bank accounts of every district’s highest-paid employee.
Tiffany Benson is the Founder of Restore Parental Rights in Education. Her commentaries on education, politics, and Christian faith can be viewed at Parentspayattention.com and Bigviewsmallwindow.com. Follow her on socials @realtiffanyb.
Just two years after voters approved a $161 million bond in 2023, the Kyrene Elementary School District has unveiled a deeply unpopular, albeit long overdue, austerity plan to shutter nine of its 25 schools. Final decisions on which campuses will close remain in flux until December.
This should alarm not only Kyrene residents but also taxpayers in neighboring East Valley districts such as Chandler, Gilbert, and Mesa, which have likewise postponed needed consolidations despite data showing the urgency for school districts to “rightsize” to avoid future financial shocks.
Kyrene’s predicament shows what happens when district leaders, aided by special-interest boosters, ignore demographic realities and lean too heavily on bonds and overrides to prop up aging, half-empty facilities. Beyond the loss of schools and public trust, Kyrene’s crisis is a cautionary case study in how long districts can keep kicking the can on closures and restructuring before the math catches up.
For decades Kyrene ESD has fiercely defended its autonomy, resisting consolidation with Tempe Elementary School District, most notably in 2008, when Tempe voters approved a merger that Kyrene voters rejected by a 2-to-1 margin. The district has also resisted unifying with Tempe Union High School District, which serves most Tempe and Kyrene graduates. The result: three separate, duplicative bureaucracies servicing the same boundary zones of attendance.
That independence once seemed justified. By the 1980s and 1990s, Kyrene’s fortunes soared with population growth and rising property values following Phoenix’s annexation of Ahwatukee. A building boom beginning in the 1970s relieved Kyrene’s historic reliance on drawing students from outside its boundaries. That same appetite in housing translated to Kyrene’s expansion of schools, fueled by voter-approved bonds and overrides. Like many East Valley districts, Kyrene’s bond and override measures have passed easily, and typically without organized opposition.
Those glory days are long gone. Enrollment has fallen from 20,000 students in 2001 to roughly 12,000 today. That represents a 40 percent drop while the district continues operating 26 schools, a daunting figure considering it only serves grades K-8. Demographers project another 1,000-student decline within five years, equating to roughly $7 million less in state funding. Eight Kyrene campuses are less than half full, and three others are barely above that mark, culminating in the present restructuring effort.
Although Kyrene does have an override measure on the ballot for 2025, it remains to be seen if the drastic restructuring plan will have any impact on voter sentiment in the area for future bond requests. Given that Kyrene has spent millions from the recent bond request on schools now marked for closure, governing board members would be hard-pressed to make their case to residents for additional funding. Taxpayers who were told in 2023 by Superintendent Laura Toenjes that the bond would be “one more example of Kyrene’s commitment to fiscal responsibility” are right to demand answers about the gap between two decades of declining enrollment and the district’s continued inaction.
Kyrene is hardly alone. Large systems such as Chandler Unified remain locked in a perpetual bond-and-override cycle, masking structural enrollment declines with new debt and vague promises of an enrollment recovery effort that grows less plausible each year.
As seen in the chart below between 2020 and 2024, bond requests across Maricopa County have ballooned as pandemic stimulus dollars expired and districts turned back to property-tax financing. The pace of school bond elections far exceeds municipal ones, and the total amounts sought have surged as seen in the 2nd chart below. Inflation alone doesn’t explain the escalation, though it is often erroneously cited as the root cause of this growth.
The lesson isn’t that districts should never seek voter support, but that leaders must confront an uncomfortable truth: demand for traditional district schools is shrinking. Some causes, like rising housing costs and lower birth rates, are beyond their control. Others, like families choosing charters or ESAs, are the direct result of competition and consumer preference. Pretending otherwise guarantees more sudden, painful closures down the road, along with wasted opportunities adding up to hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds.
Kyrene’s crisis is neither the first nor the last domino of overbuilt school districts. Every district that keeps chasing bonds to prop up half-empty schools is writing the same ending. The can has been kicked far enough. It’s time to stop borrowing from tomorrow to preserve yesterday’s mistakes.
Arman Sidhu is a lifelong Arizona resident and educator who has served as a teacher and principal in both traditional public and charter schools. He is a doctoral student in education at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. His opinions are entirely his own.
In 2022, the Arizona legislature passed—and then-Governor Ducey signed into law—a landmark election integrity bill: HB 2492. Authored by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, the law bolsters safeguards to our election process by requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, ensuring that only U.S. citizens are voting in our elections.
It’s commonsense legislation that is popular with the public and a blueprint for other states looking to adopt nearly identical bills. And why wouldn’t it be? U.S. citizens cannot go into France, Australia, or any other country throughout the world and vote in their elections, so why should citizens from other countries be allowed to vote in our elections?
Yet immediately after HB 2492 was passed, a consortium of liberal organizations and the Biden Justice department sued to stop the law from going into effect. Now, after multiple trips to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of which included a bizarre ruling that required an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to let Arizona enforce our proof of citizenship requirements for the 2024 election (which we won), the entire law will now be going to the nation’s highest court.
We are confident that the Supreme Court will uphold the law in its entirety, but one issue about the litigation has been simmering beneath the surface: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes…
As education has evolved over the last several years, Career and Technical Education (CTE) Programs have developed into critical pathways for a student’s future employment success. The learning of essential technical skills can directly impact a student’s ability to get placed in high-paying career jobs.
A CTE Program is defined as a pathway sequence of courses in a technical field that leads to a certificate, license, or degree. This is usually two or three year-long courses at the high school level. The expenses of a CTE program pathway sequence are supplemented by the Arizona Department of Education and administered by local Career and Technical Education Districts (CTEDs) set up by Arizona statute for this purpose. East Valley Institute of Technology (EVIT) has jurisdiction over programs in East Valley High Schools, including Chandler Unified School District (CUSD), which are referred to as “satellite” districts.
But this isn’t what is really happening.
A recent annual report from CUSD, mandated by the state of Arizona, revealed that less than one-third of CUSD students enroll in the next CTE course as required in their program sequence. This measurement is known as “persistence,” meaning that students are persistent in following a defined program sequence to its completion. It appears that CUSD students, with the tacit approval of their academic counselors, are simply using CTE courses as general education electives in their academic curriculum. It is quite likely that the other member satellite districts in the EVIT CTED are doing this as well.
This is not the intent of the CTE initiative and appears to be a systemic misuse of state funding designated for this purpose. Arizona state statute is very clear in that CTE funds are to be used to “supplement rather than supplant” funding on general education, already provided by base educational funding, to cover additional expenses incurred by spending on CTE program sequences.
This was one of the serious issues pointed out by an AZ State Auditor General report in 2024. CUSD initially refused any responsibility for the conclusions and corrective recommendations in that report but has since begun to acknowledge that they, as EVIT satellite districts, are under the same scrutiny as their parent CTED organization.
In addition, it appears that CUSD has systematically accumulated excess CTE expense reimbursements over several years to build a slush fund of $10,463,714 in their special purpose CTE fund account (Fund 596). This appears to be in direct conflict with state statutes as the district is only allowed reimbursements for specific CTE program sequence expenses. Actual CUSD reported CTE expenses last year were $8,789,583 against adjusted reimbursements (revenue) of $8,283,094. (CUSD Annual Financial Report, Fiscal Year 2024-25).
EVIT has re-written their Inter-Governmental Agreements (IGAs) to address these systematic abuses and to comply with recommendations from the Auditor General of the State of Arizona. Instead of unreviewed pass-through funding, EVIT put in place effective monitoring and an incentive structure to pass-through funding to direct attention toward meaningful improvement in persistence rates in CTE programs. In this way, they become what they were intended to be: career pathways for students to advance their post-secondary career plans. The proposed goal was set at a meager 30% minimum persistence rate in the new IGA. By comparison, persistence rates at the EVIT main campus, where that administration is far more focused on getting students to complete program sequences and placed in career jobs, is over 80%.
The response from CUSD has been disappointing. They seem to be focusing their efforts on a heavy public relations campaign to portray themselves as victims and characterize EVIT as the villain for holding them accountable for their failures in demonstrating effective program sequences. The CUSD rhetoric implies that, just by offering CTE classes as general electives, it is somehow equivalent to completing a program sequence. This is clearly insufficient and simply not what they were getting funded for.
None of the unfavorable persistence data was ever presented to the CUSD Governing Board, until specifically requested recently, who were kept in the dark about the CUSD CTE program insufficiencies. The district administration let the board down and concealed their lack of performance on persistence measures central to CTE program success.
Instead, the administration orchestrated a PR stunt at a recent CUSD Board meeting using about 20 students and staff to make false insinuations that programs would be shut down and teachers would be laid off. This seemed to be a sordid attempt to generate public sympathy for their cause. The truth is that no such proposal has ever been considered that would cut programs or staff. The district has millions of dollars in reserve to cover any unexpected shortfalls. It is appalling to realize that vulnerable students were groomed with misinformation and then used in this unethical stunt.
It is far past time for CUSD to drop the gamesmanship and lawfare, accept the oversight given to the EVIT CTED by statute, and to comply with all statutory requirements, performance expectations, and financial controls they are responsible for.
Kurt Rohrs is a Governing Board Member for the Chandler Unified School District. Amber McAffee is the President of the EVIT Governing Board. The views expressed here are the authors’ personal opinions and do not represent the views of their respective Governing Boards.
