Earlier this spring, a federal judge in Phoenix had to step in and protect law-abiding Americans from a prosecutor who had lost all sense of limits. He struck down Kris Mayes’s case against the prediction market Kalshi and, in doing so, exposed one of the more reckless abuses of government power our state has seen in recent memory.
The story should alarm every Arizonan, regardless of whether you have ever placed a trade. In March, Mayes made Arizona the first state in the nation to bring criminal charges against a federally regulated exchange—twenty counts against an American company operating under the direct supervision of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission. And she didn’t stop at the criminal docket, either; her allies in the state government pressed a parallel civil campaign to choke an American innovator out of existence.
It took a respected federal judge, appointed by President Trump, to end the spectacle. In finding that federal law leaves “no room for state regulation” of these markets, he warned against precisely the “inconsistent regulatory patchwork that Congress intended to avoid,” and that Mayes tried to foist on Arizonans. Mayes’s crusade was doomed from the start, and any honest lawyer in her office could have told her so. Instead, she torched your tax dollars and Arizona’s reputation, all to chase a headline.
This is what the weaponization of a prosecutor’s office looks like. We have watched the radical left turn the law into a club against the people they dislike: parents, police, people of faith, and President Trump himself. Mayes has now turned that club on the future. Prediction markets let ordinary citizens put their own judgment, and their own money, behind what they actually believe will happen in the economy and the world. They cut through the noise of the mainstream media and pundit class, and they are one piece of a sweeping wave of financial innovation that is remaking the global economy in real time.
President Trump understands this in his bones. While Mayes was busy criminalizing the future, the President was busy building it. His CFTC Chairman, Michael Selig, has led the charge, defending federal authority in courtrooms across the country, advancing clear and sensible national rules, and declaring that America’s financial markets are ready for a new Golden Age. The President has been emphatic that the CFTC must retain exclusive authority over these markets, and he is right. That is America First leadership: clear rules, room to grow, and the confidence that fifty different prosecutors won’t be allowed to strangle American innovation in its crib.
Arizona ought to be racing to the front of that parade. Instead, our Democratic officials keep stomping on the brakes. I led the fight to make Arizona the first state in the country with a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, only for Governor Katie Hobbs to veto it. I pushed to let Arizonans pay their taxes in digital currency. Again and again, the message from this state’s Democrats has been the same: if you dare to build something new, we will tax it, ban it, or drag you into court. Innovators don’t flee to Texas and Florida by accident. They flee politicians who treat builders like criminals.
I have spent fourteen years at the Capitol doing the opposite—defending the Constitution, guarding taxpayers, and standing up for the right to build without first begging permission from the government. As your attorney general, I will never turn the power of that office into a weapon against a company for the crime of innovating. I will use it to defend Arizonans, to enforce the law as it is actually written, and to show Washington’s worst instincts, and our own state’s, exactly where the line is drawn.
This task is too important to leave to my opponent in the Republican primary. Rodney Glassman didn’t merely vote for Democrats, he ran for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat at the request of another liberal Democratic attorney general, Terry Goddard. So, ask yourself: when the radical left comes for innovation, for crypto, for free markets—and they will come—who do you want holding the line? A proven conservative who has already taken the arrows, or a man who spent the prime of his career carrying the other team’s banner and discovered his “convictions” only when trying to grab President Trump’s coattails?
The attorney general’s job is not to chase headlines by prosecuting the future. It is to be the wall that protects the rights, the savings, and the freedom of Arizonans. Kris Mayes tore that wall down. I intend to rebuild it.
President Trump is leading America into a Golden Age of growth, opportunity, and renewed confidence. Arizona belongs at the front of that charge, but is instead being dragged from behind, handing out indictments to the people who create our jobs. Give me the honor of serving as your attorney general, and I’ll make sure that our great state is exactly where it should be.
I have opposed Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) Superintendent Dr. Menzel and his Governing Board allies since his arrival, and for good reason.
For decades, progressive education experts have promoted policies they said would raise achievement, often without any evidence. Whatever their intentions, the results have been disappointing and well documented.
After years of weak results, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002 brought accountability-focused reform. By raising standards, measuring results, and targeting low-performing schools, it helped improve outcomes. Over its first decade, nearly half the states gained in 4th-grade reading and almost all improved in 4th-grade math.
Despite that progress, the “experts” replaced NCLB with Common Core and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). According to numbers from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), that experiment has failed.
For 50 years, the National Center for Education Statistics has tracked performance through the NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card. The 2024 results reinforce concerns about the last decade of education policy and echo warnings first raised in 1983.
Let’s take a look at some of the key findings:
Student proficiency has stagnated or declined since the early 1990s.
Public school performance improved under NCLB, then stagnated after Common Core and declined under ESSA.
From 2013 to 2024, charter schools were more stable across achievement levels.
States with educator bargaining laws saw steeper reading declines, suggesting less instructional flexibility.
Even with record per-pupil spending in some states, achievement remains low, showing funding alone is not enough.
“The declines reflect the failures of more than a decade of educational policy—specifically, a retreat from expectations that began under the Common Core Standards and continued under the Every Student Succeeds Act.”
The data show that the pedagogies favored by education experts, including Dr. Menzel and the majority of the SUSD Governing Board, and have failed for decades.
Whole language failed as a reading method in the 1980s and 1990s. In its place, the Science of Reading emphasizes systematic, explicit phonics.
Common Core deemphasized cursive, and instruction declined after 2010 as its authors argued keyboarding mattered more. Another failure.
Was prioritizing laptops and keyboarding over handwriting the right choice?
“These studies show that handwriting is an essential cognitive process and a valuable intellectual activity that supports learning from the first day of school through advanced levels of education.”
“…children should first learn handwriting. Only after they become fully proficient—especially in complex narrative writing—should typing be introduced.”
One of the most consequential failures in recent U.S. education policy was the COVID-era closure of public schools, supported by education experts and teachers’ unions, which resulted in widespread learning loss. The shutdowns were not only costly and unnecessary but also lacked scientific support.
These are only a few examples of the failures of expert-led public education. In my view, the most damaging and still spreading nationwide, including in SUSD, is the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS).
In FY2020–2021, Dr. Menzel’s first year at SUSD, the Governing Board launched a future-focused strategic plan that made MTSS a key initiative.
In 2023, after a Scottsdale parent’s complaint, the Arizona Attorney General found that Menzel and the Governing Board’s strategic planning design team violated Open Meeting Law (OML). The AG did not punish the district or require rescission of the Strategic Plan, issuing only a warning, so the district still uses it today. Despite the OML training required by that finding, SUSD was hit with another OML complaint. Will Menzel ever learn?
MTSS began in the 1960s as a model for delivering mental health services in large urban areas. Schools later adapted it to identify students with special needs, and in the 2000s expanded it to all students.
MTSS requires schools to create support teams and policies that reshape how they handle behavior and learning. It has three tiers: tier one exposes all students to mental health awareness programs; tier two provides individual or group counseling for students identified by staff or self-referral; and tier three refers students needing more extensive services to outside professionals or clinics. In short, MTSS is designed to reshape school culture and organization around delivering mental health services.
Response to Intervention (RTI) focuses on academics, while Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) fits within MTSS on the premise that students cannot learn if social or emotional barriers block learning. Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and RTI were originally developed for special education students but are now used schoolwide.
MTSS spread gradually through U.S. public schools over two decades, with wider adoption in the 2010s.
Under Dr. Menzel’s leadership, SUSD has implemented MTSS and integrated PBIS, RTI, and SEL across the district, describing them as research-based and effective. The district also describes itself as a national leader in RTI.
Despite SUSD’s claims that MTSS is research-based and improves academic and social outcomes, the objective data from multiple studies do not support the claims.
Since 2010, SUSD enrollment has fallen by more than 6,000 students. Nearly 29% of that decline occurred during Dr. Menzel’s tenure from 2021 to 2025, including more than 1,200 students in the 2024–2025 school year alone.
Arizona Department of Education data show that since 2021, SUSD students have averaged 60% proficiency in English Language Arts, 56% in math, and 40% in science, with little improvement.
These numbers do not support the SUSD claims of better academics, improved discipline, or a more positive school culture at SUSD. If the claims were true, why have proficiencies remained stagnant during Menzel’s tenure?
While MTSS is simply a means of organizing and providing mental health services in schools, programs like PBIS address behavior through encouragement rather than disciplinary policies. Revising disciplinary policies was one of Menzel’s early priorities after coming into office.
Follow this link to SUSD’s policies, and you’ll notice that the policies JK Student Discipline, JKD Student Suspension, and JKE Expulsion of Students and their related regulations and exhibits were all updated December 12, 2023, within Menzel’s first couple of years at SUSD.
In May 2024, the SUSD Code of Conduct Committee made a presentation to the Board. Two points stand out: the committee appears to classify bringing a loaded gun to school as “a minor aggressive act” (slide 5 and item #2 on this list of 24 Shocking Moments of 2024)
Slides 6 and 7 emphasize MTSS, SUSD’s core discipline framework.
While the entire 24 Shocking Moments of 2024 list is worth reading, pay particular attention to #3, #5, #9, #10, #13, #16, #20, and #21. They illustrate what Menzel calls better academics, improved discipline, and a more positive school culture at SUSD.
Consistent with that list, exit interviews show parents most often leave SUSD over weak academics, excessive technology use, poor discipline and policy enforcement, bullying and safety concerns, and dissatisfaction with leadership.
MTSS also carries costs: it requires more master’s-level non-teaching staff and uses class time for mental health programming. Along with PBIS, RTI, and SEL, it has shifted resources from classroom instruction to non-academic support services.
According to the AZ Auditor General’s SUSD spending report, SUSD academic instructional spending fell from nearly 64% of the operating budget in 2004 to 54% in 2025. In the five years since Menzel was hired, non-academic support spending rose 1.9% while instructional spending fell 2.3%—a swing of more than 4 points. In 2025, SUSD spent $1,449 per pupil on support services, about 21% of its instructional spending ($6,959), up from $871 and 16% in 2020.
For years, education experts have promoted school-based mental health programs and SEL as ways to improve academics. But multiple studies—including a 2024 long-term study of nearly 500,000 Minnesota students—found no meaningful gains in test scores, attendance, or other academic outcomes. Research from Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America reaches the same conclusion: SEL may help behavior or social-emotional skills in some cases, but it does not reliably raise academic performance. (For more, see here.)
Schools often use universal mental health screenings to identify students for intervention. But without adequate safeguards and expertise, these screenings can produce false-positive rates as high as 90%, with potentially lasting consequences.
SUSD says it uses universal screening. Arizona Revised Statutes 15-104 and 36-2272 require written parental consent before school mental health screening. If your child was screened without your consent, you should contact the Arizona Attorney General’s Office and file a complaint.
Since March 2024, there has been no statutory exemption allowing school-based behavioral workers to practice behavioral health without a license. If you believe your child was subjected to behavioral health services at SUSD through MTSS or otherwise, you can file a complaint with the Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners here.
Dr. Menzel is on a mission to disrupt and destroy SUSD, and he should be stopped.
If you think things can’t get much worse in SUSD, or in public education more broadly, just wait until the experts implement AI in the curriculum. We should build real intelligence in students before turning to artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately, the SUSD staff recently attended a 2-day event to “level up” and attend 66 engaging learning sessions focused on innovative instructional practices, student support, technology integration, and more. I can’t wait!
After researching and writing this piece, I am more convinced than ever that focusing on and supporting truly evidence-based academics and fiscal responsibility in our schools, puts me on the right side of the issues.
Wherever you live and whatever school your children attend, if you care about your child’s education, please visit Restore Parental Rights in Education and support its mission to “awaken and empower everyday citizens who advocate for excellence in K-12 education.”
Reversing the decline of public education in America will require people to unite and act together.
Mike Bengert is a husband, father, grandfather, and Scottsdale resident advocating for quality education in SUSD for over 30 years.
For months, we have documented the pattern of errors, distortions, and outright fabrications that characterize the coverage of Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program by Channel 12’s political reporter Craig Harris. Each new episode—the fabricated 20% fraud claim, the defiance in the face of correction by the Arizona Department of Education itself, the constant shifting of goalposts as each of his claims is debunked—seemed like it might result in Channel 12 taking appropriate corrective action.
But they never did.
Last week, at the Arizona Legislature’s final stretch of its 2026 session, the mask came off entirely.
While lawmakers debated a series of consequential ESA-related bills and resolutions on Thursday and Friday—including a constitutional amendment to protect military family scholarships—Harris was captured on camera doing something that no journalist who takes the job title seriously can explain away: coordinating, via text message, with members of Save Our Schools Arizona, the anti-school-choice advocacy group that is a principal sponsor of the Protect Education Now ballot initiative, about where they should position themselves inside the Capitol building for maximum political impact.
Text message conversation between Channel 12’s Craig Harris and anti-school choice activists.
Let that sink in. A reporter on the education beat, covering legislation in real time, was not observing the advocacy groups in the building. He was directing them.
The text exchange was visible on the screen of a Save Our Schools activist—readable thanks to a conspicuously large font and no privacy screen—and was flagged by our Heritage Foundation colleague Corey DeAngelis, who shared images of the messages on social media after receiving them from a local activist. Harris subsequently confirmed on X that the images of the group chat, named “ESA DDD Confidential 12News,” were real.
After Harris told the activist that he was in the state senate chamber as that is “where [the] bill will first get introduced,” Save Our Schools board member Kathy Boltz asked Harris for advice regarding where their team of activists should place themselves in the capitol building. “Should we be in the senate? Hmm,” she asked. Within a minute, Harris answered in the affirmative.
This is not ambiguous. This is not a misunderstanding. This is a journalist using his knowledge of the Arizona Legislature’s political process to provide tactical advice to an advocacy group that has a direct political stake in the legislation he is supposed to be covering neutrally.
Harris was no longer covering the news. He was helping to manufacture it.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The same captured text conversation revealed Harris mocking a local school choice supporter, asking whether the individual “stars in porn.”
This derision was not just a lapse in professionalism. This was contempt—contempt for the families, advocates, and ordinary citizens who show up at the Capitol to make the case for educational freedom, expressed in a private conversation with advocates on the other side of the issue.
Text message conversation between Channel 12’s Craig Harris and anti-school choice activists.
Multiple Arizona politicos were quick to call out the behavior publicly. State Senator Jake Hoffman called for Channel 12 to fire Harris and called on the station to “open an investigation into every story he was involved in and retract any instance of undisclosed coordination.” Hoffman observed that this coordination with activists is “precisely the kind of unethical behavior that has caused the majority of Americans to deeply distrust the media.”
Arizona Republic columnist and former State Senator Paul Boyer called it “a really bad look” for Channel 12 to have their reporter, “who is also reporting on these same groups” to be discovered “coordinating with them at the legislature to defeat the same type of legislation he’s myopically focused on.” Similarly, J.P. Twist, executive director of Citizens for Free Enterprise, called out Harris for “literally strategizing with a partisan union to undermine parents’ rights.”
The parent company of Channel 12 publishes a “Principles of Ethical Journalism” statement committing its journalists to the values of truth, independence, public interest, fair play, and integrity. It’s hard to see how coordinating with one group of political activists and crudely mocking the other side comports with those standards.
Sadly, Harris’s breach of journalistic ethics does not end there.
Later that night, in a hearing on legislation to protect military family scholarships, Harris took to social media to characterize two of the three supporting witnesses who testified as people “making money off ESAs,” implying their support was financially motivated rather than principled.
One of those witnesses was Kevin Biesty, spokesperson for the Arizona Christian Education Coalition. As Biesty detailed on X, he reached out to Harris privately and asked him to correct or remove the post. Harris declined. As Biesty observed, the logic Harris applied to him — that representing clients who are affected by ESA policy makes one a financially conflicted advocate — is never applied to the other side. The staff and lobbyists of Save Our Schools Arizona and the teachers unions, who are paid to oppose the ESA program, are never characterized by Harris as people “making money off” the issue.
Harris also claimed that no military family spoke at the hearing. That too was false. Biesty had personally presented a written statement from a military mother who could not remain for the late-night session, and referenced letters from other military families — all of this while Harris was in the room. At no point did Harris ask Biesty for that mother’s contact information or seek to include her perspective in his coverage. He was, however, apparently attentive enough to the gallery to communicate with his Save Our Schools contact — the same ESA mother and SOS board member who, Biesty observed, is never identified as such in Harris’s stories — while sitting at the press desk on the floor.
Indeed, when ESA students and their families share their stories, Harris is quick to dismiss them. Recently, a young ESA student with disabilities named Jordan Visser shared on video about the ways the Protect Education Now initiative would harm students like himself. Harris went on social media to dispute his account, claiming that the initiative would not affect students with special needs—effectively accusing a student with disabilities of lying about the impact of a ballot measure on his own situation.
He was wrong. As the student’s mother, Kathy Visser, and others documented, the text of the initiative itself bore out what the student had said—the ESA funds that the family had saved to continue providing him with services would be seized by the state if the Save Our Schools ballot initiative were adopted.
The irony of Harris’s posture—aggressively checking the credibility of a disabled student while coordinating inside the Capitol with the very advocacy group sponsoring the initiative in question—encapsulates the problem. It is not that Harris is a journalist who occasionally makes mistakes. It is that the mistakes run in one direction, consistently, and that when corrected, he doubles down rather than acknowledging any error. And it is now documented, on camera, that he was coordinating tactics with one side of the debate he was purportedly covering.
Arizona families with children in the ESA program deserve better than a reporter who coordinates with the opposition at the very hearings he is assigned to cover. Arizona viewers deserve better than a news organization that has allowed this pattern to continue unchecked. And the thousands of children—including those with disabilities—who rely on these scholarships deserve a press corps willing to represent their stories honestly.
Channel 12 has not issued a correction or a retraction of the false fraud statistics. It has not yet acknowledged Harris’s coordination with activists or the mockery of a school choice supporter.
Channel 12’s parent company should answer a simple question: Is the behavior documented at the Capitol last week consistent with its Principles of Ethical Journalism? If not, what will it do about it?
Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow and Matthew Ladner is aSenior Advisor for education policy implementation at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
A quiet technical decision in climate science should trigger one of the most consequential policy corrections of this decade.
Deep within the bureaucratic machinery of global climate research sits an obscure modeling group called the Scenario Model Intercomparison Project. It is a foundational component of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project organized by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), which was established in 1980 under the joint sponsorship of the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science.
WCRP coordinates Earth System Model simulations driven by alternative trajectories of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and land use changes. These simulations provide projections used by scientists, climate-impact researchers, and international entities like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to analyze risks of climate change. The projections feed into IPCC assessment reports, which are treated as the gold standard of climate analysis and shape nearly all academic research on the subject and eventually energy policy.
For years, the most alarming climate narratives leaned heavily on the RCP8.5 scenario and its successors, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0. Their fearmongering projections of extraordinary warming assume a high sensitivity of Earth’s climate system to greenhouse gases. Embracing these predictions of widespread catastrophe, researchers, policymakers, financial overseers, and others foisted onto the public all manner of burdens.
Scientist Roger Pielke Jr. examined what this means by comparing the new scenarios against previous benchmarks, saying: “The new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades … This is an absolutely huge development in climate science which will have lasting impacts across research and policy.”
In short, the latest projections of warming are significantly lower. Forecasts that drove many of the scariest headlines are no longer considered realistic enough to guide modeling for the next IPCC report. The “worst case” that powered a generation of alarmist narratives has been quietly retired by the community that once promoted it.
This is not an academic housekeeping exercise. The discarded scenarios are embedded in the machinery that shapes energy bills, job prospects, and the economic development of nations. Pielke points out that national climate impact reports in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Netherlands have relied on RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 as central reference cases.
The financial sector went even further. The Network for Greening the Financial System, a club of more than 140 central banks and supervisors, built its “Hot House World” scenario on a risk profile calibrated to RCP8.5. This scenario has informed climate stress tests at the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Banque de France, and the U.S. Federal Reserve, influencing allocation of capital and the price of loans linked to fossil fuel projects.
For many developing countries, these documents—like IPCC’s assessment reports—are central to decisions on coal plants, pipelines, and other industrial development. When the underlying scenarios become “officially implausible,” the credibility of documents vanishes.
You might expect this news to dominate front pages and prime-time climate coverage. It has not. The narrative used to justify punitive energy policies ought to adjust. If it does not, you are witnessing a political agenda searching for new rationales.
We must completely dismantle the regulatory apparatus built on these bogus models. We cannot allow unelected banking cartels and extreme environmental groups to govern the global economy using discredited computer simulations.
This moment offers developing nations a rare opportunity to reclaim energy sovereignty. They can accelerate fossil-fuel development where it makes economic sense, integrate newer technologies where they prove competitive, and reject any framework that treats affordable energy as a luxury.
Climate deniers will be those who reject these scenario updates that upend their crisis evangelism. Their forecasts of doom are false and always have been.
Vijay Jayaraj is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
For generations, Arizona’s wide-open land has supported ranchers, farmers and the communities that helped build our great state.
Then, the climate activists came along.
Armed with nothing more than junk science from climate “experts” like Al Gore and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they got busy imposing costly green energy mandates on states across the country—and Arizona’s political and corporate elites eagerly fell in line. Our state’s utilities committed themselves to achieving “Net Zero” emissions by 2050, a goal that will cost ratepayers billions of dollars while doing little to meaningfully impact the environment.
But higher utility bills are only part of the cost.
Not wanting to disappoint some of her largest campaign contributors, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has been quick to bend the knee to the Green New Scam time and time again. Now, these decisions are not only hitting families in the wallet, but they are transforming our state’s beautiful countryside into an industrial playground for massive, foreign-backed solar and wind developments.
Under Hobbs, the Arizona State Land Department has increasingly operated like a business partner for the solar industry instead of a steward of Arizona’s public lands. The agency now maintains detailed maps identifying the “best” locations for solar development across the state, effectively helping direct industrial solar companies toward Arizona’s most desirable land.
But surely, they must be doing the same for other industries?
At the May 5 Higley Unified Governing Board meeting, the Board approved a lease agreement with AZ Aspire Academy to utilize a portion of Power Ranch Elementary.
I think it’s a good thing that the district is looking for ways to generate additional revenue from unused space. When enrollment is declining and budgets are getting tighter, we should absolutely be looking for creative ways to make better use of district assets.
But let’s be honest: leasing a portion of one building doesn’t solve the bigger problem.
Higley currently has more than 10,200 vacant seats sitting empty across our schools. Several campuses are operating at less than half of their physical capacity. Power Ranch is only about 32% utilized. Centennial is around 31%. Cortina, Chaparral, and Cooley Middle are all below 50%.
While we are making difficult budget and staffing adjustments because enrollment is declining, we have not had the same level of discussion about what it costs taxpayers to maintain thousands of unused seats.
Those numbers should prompt a serious conversation about how we plan for the future.
Every building costs money to operate whether it’s full or half empty. We still pay for utilities, maintenance, landscaping, repairs, insurance, security, and countless other expenses. The cost doesn’t disappear just because the students do.
At the same time, enrollment continues to decline.
For FY2027, Higley is projecting ADM of approximately 11,250 students, down from 11,695 in FY2026. As enrollment drops, so does funding. The district’s M&O budget limit is projected to decline from approximately $118.9 million to $111.5 million, a reduction of more than $7 million in a single year.
Because school funding is largely driven by student enrollment, staffing levels must eventually align with the number of students being served. The district has already reduced M&O-funded staffing from approximately 1,243 positions to about 1,203. While these reductions are difficult, they are a necessary response to declining enrollment and reduced revenue. The district’s maintained M&O reserve is projected to fall from approximately $17 million to about $13 million.
Yet despite making these necessary adjustments in staffing and operations, we continue carrying the costs associated with significant excess building capacity.
We also cannot forget that taxpayers are still paying approximately $3.5 million annually for the two middle schools. Those payments will continue for roughly the next 27 years. Whether a building is full or half empty, the debt payment remains. That makes it even more important that we have a long-term strategy for utilizing our facilities efficiently and aligning them with current enrollment realities.
This isn’t just happening in Higley. A recent report from the Common Sense Institute, Echoes in the Halls: Arizona School Districts’ Growing Problem with Empty Buildings and Empty Buses, highlighted a growing statewide challenge. School districts across Arizona built facilities during years of rapid growth and are now struggling with declining enrollment while taxpayers continue paying to maintain underutilized schools.
The report should serve as a wake-up call.
Too often, whenever school funding is discussed, the conversation immediately turns to needing more money. Before asking taxpayers for more, we should make sure we are using existing resources as efficiently as possible.
As board members, our responsibility is not simply to spend money. Our responsibility is to ensure taxpayer dollars are being used wisely and producing the best possible outcomes for students.
That means asking difficult questions:
What is the district’s long-term plan for aligning facilities with enrollment trends?
Are there additional opportunities to lease unused space?
Are there community partnerships we should pursue?
Are there alternative educational or community uses for underutilized facilities?
How can we maximize the value of existing facilities while minimizing unnecessary costs to taxpayers?
What is Higley going to do with the vacant land voters approved to sell or lease?
These are not easy discussions. But avoiding them doesn’t make the problem go away.
The district currently maintains approximately $13 million in M&O reserves and nearly $6.5 million in capital carryforward. Those reserves provide stability, but they are not a substitute for long-term planning. If enrollment continues to decline, reserves alone will not solve the challenge of maintaining significant excess capacity.
Taxpayers deserve a district that plans ahead instead of reacting after the fact. They deserve transparency about enrollment trends, building utilization, and long-term costs.
The lease approved on May 5 is a positive step. It brings in revenue and puts some unused space to productive use. But one lease agreement is not a long-term facilities strategy.
I believe the next step is for the district to begin a formal long-range facilities planning process. Whether through a board committee, community task force, or strategic planning effort, we need to start having honest discussions about enrollment trends, facility utilization, future land use, and the long-term costs associated with maintaining excess capacity.
The goal should not be to predetermine outcomes. The goal should be to develop a thoughtful 10-year plan that aligns our facilities with the students we serve and the resources available to support them.
Those conversations should happen before circumstances force decisions upon us.
Most importantly, taxpayers deserve confidence that every possible dollar is being directed toward students rather than maintaining excess capacity.
The goal isn’t to preserve buildings. The goal is to educate students and use taxpayer dollars wisely in support of that mission.
When we keep that priority in mind, the path forward becomes much clearer.
