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.
Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) is entering a period of upheaval, one that is very concerning to parents, teachers, and taxpayers. Superintendent Dr. Scott Menzel recently announced that the district staff will bring forward proposals for consideration by the Governing Board to deal with the impact of declining enrollment in SUSD, which will reshape several campuses and alter the educational landscape of Scottsdale for years to come.
The first recommendation by district staff under consideration is for Echo Canyon K–8, Pima Elementary schools, and Desert Canyon Elementary and Middle Schools to be repurposed. Dr. Menzel has not made clear exactly what repurposing means. The official explanation for this is straightforward: declining enrollment and a need for “operational efficiency.” But as anyone who has followed SUSD’s trajectory over the past several years knows, declining enrollment is not isolated to a few schools. It is a district-wide problem — one that has deep roots in leadership decisions, cultural conflicts, and misplaced priorities.
A District in Decline
Beyond these four schools, six others have been placed on a “watch list.” These campuses, too, are being monitored for potential closures or repurposing as enrollment continues to fall. Since Dr. Menzel’s arrival in July 2020, the district has lost more than 2,500 students, dropping from over 22,300 to 19,700, an 11% decline in just five years. This decline represents not only a fiscal crisis for the district but also a crisis of confidence among Scottsdale parents.
So, how did we arrive here?
The Menzel Philosophy: Disrupt and Dismantle
If you want to understand how we got here, you need to understand Dr. Menzel’s philosophy of education. In a 2019 interview titled “Public Schools and Social Justice: An Interview with Dr. Scott Menzel,” he explained that understanding how systems operate gives leaders “the opportunity to dismantle, disrupt, and then recreate something that’s socially just and more equitable.”
This wasn’t a throwaway line. It was a mission statement.
Since arriving in Scottsdale, Menzel has followed this blueprint:
He has recommended firing respected teachers while hiring unlicensed social workers and “wellness” staff.
He has proposed cutting classroom budgets while expanding administrative overhead.
He has recommended reducing opportunities for public comment at board meetings.
He has directed teachers not to inform parents about students’ gender transitions unless asked directly.
He has consolidated power and minimized accountability, all while using district communications, podcasts, and social media to promote his leadership as a success story.
He has championed the elimination of valedictorian honors and class rank.
Unfortunately for the students and parents, the board has approved every recommendation made by Dr. Menzel.
At board meetings, Menzel regularly dominates the discussion, often interacting with the board president as though he were chairing the meeting himself. He highlights a few exceptional student achievements as evidence of district success, perhaps a few hundred students out of nearly 20,000, while ignoring the systemic academic underperformance that affects the majority.
The Illusion of Success
The numbers tell a sobering story. In 2024, SUSD reported a 92% graduation rate (down from 94% in 2022) and a 98% promotion rate. Yet proficiency in core academic subjects remains around 52%. In other words, nearly half of all students graduate or advance to the next grade level without mastering reading, writing, math, or science at grade level.
When questioned about these numbers, Menzel points out that SUSD still outperforms the statewide average of roughly 30% proficiency. But comparing yourself to the bottom of the barrel isn’t a standard of excellence — it’s an excuse for mediocrity.
Despite this record, the Governing Board continues to reward Menzel with pay raises, bonuses, and contract extensions. Two successive boards have failed to impose any meaningful accountability or measurable academic goals.
The “Woke” Agenda and Its Consequences
In Scottsdale, Dr. Menzel’s leadership has been defined by his emphasis on Social Emotional Learning (SEL), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), gender identity programs, and related “woke” initiatives, all fully endorsed by the leftist majority on the current Governing Board. These programs were sold as a way to build empathy, inclusion, and belonging. Instead, they have deepened division, distracted from academics, and driven families out of the district.
At the same time, the district has invested heavily in administrative roles tied to “behavioral health,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” while cutting classroom teaching positions. This inversion of priorities is not only financially unsustainable, it’s academically disastrous.
Parents Are Walking Away
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne recently provided a candid explanation for the declining enrollment. In a public statement, he argued that “the promotion of woke ideology is a significant reason behind potential school closures in several school districts,” explicitly calling out SUSD’s efforts to promote gender ideology among elementary and middle school students.
He went further:
“This happens because of the expenditure of a large amount of campaign funds to elect woke school board members who do not represent their communities. Parents have a choice, so they move their children. The school boards in these districts have no one to blame but themselves for allowing the classroom to be corrupted from a place of learning to a venue for indoctrination in woke principles.”
Love him or hate him, Horne’s diagnosis resonates with many SUSD parents who feel that the district has prioritized social engineering over education.
The Voter’s Responsibility
While Dr. Menzel and the Governing Boards are directly responsible for what has happened to SUSD, the truth is that Scottsdale voters bear responsibility as well.
In the last election cycle, three board seats were up for grabs, an opportunity to shift power away from the progressive bloc that rubber-stamps every one of Menzel’s initiatives. Instead, voters elected candidates who reinforced the status quo: one a former superintendent from a failing Phoenix district, another who told parents to effectively butt out and leave education decisions to “experts,” and another whose own child attends private school, since it was a “better fit.”
Can SUSD Be Saved?
It’s a painful question to ask, but one that must be faced honestly: Can SUSD be saved under current leadership?
Dr. Menzel has shown no willingness to shift his priorities. The Governing Board has shown no appetite for holding him accountable. Parents are leaving, teachers are demoralized, and the district is closing schools while insisting that everything is fine.
The future of Scottsdale’s public schools doesn’t depend on clever slogans, glossy podcasts, or PR campaigns. It depends on leadership that values education over ideology and on citizens willing to demand it.
Scottsdale’s parents, taxpayers, and voters have few options. With the three progressive members’ terms extending to 2028 and the remaining two members up for re-election next year, the balance of power will remain firmly in Menzel’s camp for the foreseeable future. The progressive board members will allow Dr. Menzel to continue “dismantling and disrupting” SUSD until there’s little left to rebuild.
If we want to restore SUSD to its rightful mission, educating children in reading, writing, math, science, and the arts, parents need to speak up, and demand change now. Waiting for an election in 2028 will be too late.
You can start by attending the public meeting scheduled for November 13, 2025, at 6:00 p.m. in the Governing Board Room located at Coronado High School. The purpose of this meeting is to obtain public comment regarding the potential closure and repurposing of Echo Canyon K-8 School and Pima Elementary School. Each speaker will be given two minutes to voice their opinion on the closure/repurposing of the schools. Don’t feel constrained; you can also voice your opinion on Dr. Menzel and the board members’ actions that have led us to this point.
All SUSD parents should attend the meeting, even if their child does not attend Echo Canyon or Pima. Remember, as enrollment continues to decline, these schools are just the beginning; your child’s school may well be next.
Mike Bengert is a husband, father, grandfather, and Scottsdale resident advocating for quality education in SUSD for over 30 years.
This November, Tucson voters will decide whether they would like to continue doubling down on Tucson’s failed policies that have invited rampant crime, made it impossible to navigate the city without extreme frustration, and drain its wealth and livability to pursue virtue-signaling but poverty-inducing policies. Or if they would rather get off the merry-go-round of insanity.
Prop 417 is the city’s updated 10-year general plan, and a ‘Yes’ vote continues the madness. A ‘No’ vote on Prop 417 is the only reasonable choice for anyone who wants to save Tucson from itself.
Take for example the city’s climate action plan published in 2023 which set the delusional goal of having 40% of Tucson residents to be walking, biking, taking public transit or “rolling” around the city by 2050. The plan includes a commitment to “net zero” by 2030 for government operations and by 2045 city-wide—including private residents and businesses.
To achieve this fantasy, the city plans to build out a massive transit agency that if they meet their targets of hiring 900 new people every year will eventually eclipse Raytheon as the largest employer in Tucson by more than double (despite collapsing ridership and a 100% taxpayer subsidy since fares were permanently eliminated in 2020.)
The plan requires residents to hold to a “Zero Waste” commitment to empty out the landfills, imposes new road diets, and even pays city employees to not use their cars. This list of insane ideas is also very very expensive, with a price tag of roughly $365 million…
While most rational people oppose fascism or any authoritarian government, most don’t become violent.
Every movement begins with an idea that sounds noble. Oppose tyranny. Fight fascism. Protect the oppressed. But history teaches us that ideals can mutate once rage replaces reason. That’s the uncomfortable truth behind today’s Antifa, an American network whose actions often betray the very freedom it claims to defend.
Antifa is short for Antifaschistische Aktion, a 1930s German Communist front that fought Hitler’s Brownshirts. Antifa in America traces its roots to 1930s anti-fascist movements and later reemerged in the 1980s punk and anarchist scenes as groups like Anti-Racist Action confronted neo-Nazis in the streets. After 2016, Antifa gained national visibility during protests and riots in cities like Berkeley, Portland, and Seattle, where confrontations often turned violent. While far less extreme than organized insurgent groups abroad, the warning signs are unmistakable. Its trajectory shows how movements that begin with moral conviction can drift toward aggression and chaos when confrontation becomes the goal instead of justice.
Equating a handful of masked militants in Portland with the soldiers who stormed Normandy is not only absurd, it’s historically dishonest. Since 2016, the black-bloc style of protest has repeatedly evolved into assault and arson. Here are some examples of the hundreds of instances of violence:
Sacramento 2016: counter-protesters, including Antifa-affiliated activists, confronted a group hosting a rally. Among the outcomes: at least eight people were injured (five of them stabbed) in the clashes.
Berkeley 2017: fires, smashed windows, and $100,000 in campus damage during protests of a college speaker.
Portland 2019: journalist Andy Ngo beaten unconscious while filming a rally.
Summer 2020: nightly riots outside federal buildings left dozens of officers injured, vehicles burned, and downtowns barricaded.
Atlanta 2023: Molotov cocktails hurled at officers guarding the “Cop City” training site.
Seattle 2024: a journalist chased and bloodied during a university protest.
These are not isolated incidents or random clashes. These are patterns, documented on video, acknowledged even by local Democrat mayors, and costing taxpayers millions in overtime and reconstruction.
Yet some commentators still affirm: “Antifa isn’t an organization, it’s just an idea.” Others claim the violence is defensive. But ideas don’t torch courthouses, burn vehicles, or assault civilians, and self-defense doesn’t include sucker-punching reporters. Calling every riot “mostly peaceful” is like calling a thunderstorm mostly sunny. It insults the victims, the business owners, and the credibility of legitimate peaceful activists. Let’s not excuse it on culture.
Those who do not know history risk repeating it. As a Colombian American, I recognize this trajectory. In the 1960s, Colombia’s FARC guerrillas started as idealists fighting inequality. By the 1990s, they were kidnapping civilians, involved in extortion, illegally mining, and trafficking cocaine. When ideology becomes license for violence, moral authority dies, and public sympathy with it. Antifa risks that same fate: the more it excuses brutality, the more ordinary citizens turn away. This movement lost its way because its ideology won over its ethics. While the scale of violence committed by Colombia’s guerrilla movements like the FARC was far more extreme, their trajectory offers a compelling cautionary example. Antifa is nowhere near that level of brutality, yet it similarly shows how movements born from ideological zeal can drift into aggression, intimidation, and moral decay when rage replaces reason. It becomes anarchy.
Defenders often romanticize Antifa’s “heritage” while denying its modern crimes. That selective memory is not education; it’s propaganda, and quite frankly, intellectually dishonest. You can’t celebrate the legacy of World War II anti-fascists while pretending not to see the fires and shattered storefronts of recent years. You cannot chant about freedom while silencing speakers with fists. To do so is to replace truth with mythology.
Authentic anti-fascism doesn’t wear masks; it stands in daylight. It builds schools, mentors voters, and debates ideas. It fights bad laws with better arguments, not with bats and firebombs. If America truly wants to inoculate itself against authoritarianism, we must model civility, not mirror the thuggery we condemn.
On the other hand, Neo-Nazis and white-supremacist groups have tried to attach themselves to political movements, only to be condemned and even removed from rallies when they appear. Those individuals represent hatred, not ideology. The difference is that such groups are publicly rejected across the political spectrum, while Antifa’s violence too often meets silence or worse, justification from those who should know better. Condemning violence should never depend on which side commits it. Yet that’s the double standard we keep seeing, where outrage is selective, accountability is uneven, and moral courage stops at party lines.
We need accountability. Law enforcement has every right to treat assaults and arson as crimes, regardless of ideology. Journalists should stop romanticizing riots as passionate resistance. Universities should defend free expression, not tolerate intimidation squads. And citizens, left or right, must refuse to excuse political violence simply because it comes from their side.
The White House’s decision to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, as detailed in the official fact sheet, was neither symbolic nor premature; it was a recognition of a growing threat within our own borders. While Antifa lacks the global hierarchy and reach of foreign terror groups, its pattern of organized violence, intimidation, and digital harassment fits the textbook definition of domestic terrorism: using fear to advance political aims. Beyond street riots, Antifa’s tactics include doxing, publicly exposing private citizens and officers, along with targeted threats, online stalking, and mob-style intimidation. These actions are designed not to debate ideas but to destroy reputations and silence dissent through fear. The movement’s decentralized nature makes it harder to track, not less dangerous. Its networked aggression, on the streets and across the internet, creates fear, suppresses free expression, and destabilizes communities. In that sense, Antifa may operate at a smaller scale. Still, its intent to impose ideology through chaos places it firmly on the spectrum of political extremism that the federal government has every right, and duty, to confront.
Let me be clear: there is no fascism in America today. Fascism is when the state controls every aspect of life, when citizens vanish for speaking their minds, when elections are illusions, and fear, not freedom, decides what people say or do. It’s when people whisper instead of debating, when obedience replaces thought, and when loyalty to power becomes a matter of survival. None of that exists here. We protest freely, vote, and challenge authority every single day. We are imperfect, but we are still free. Calling our nation fascist doesn’t expose tyranny; it insults the millions who truly lived under an absolute dictatorship.
Fascism feeds on fear; liberty thrives on honesty. When we excuse violence because it comes from our side, we forfeit the moral high ground. The path back to credibility begins with truth: Antifa’s past may have noble roots, but its present bears broken bones and burned streets. Let’s oppose fascism without becoming what we hate.
