Arizona’s bet on universal school choice is already paying off. At the same time that enrollment in the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program is surging, the state’s revenue surplus has gone through the roof.
In the first four months of 2023 alone, enrollment in Arizona’s ESA program has soared by 7,000 students, bringing the total number of children served to over 51,000. And now, new data released this past week by the nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC) show that over a similar period, the state’s estimated revenue surplus has surged by an extra $750 million, putting the total state budget surplus this year at $2.5 billion.
Before Arizona’s historic universal ESA expansion took effect, just 12,000 students were participating in the program. This means that during the first school year where every family in the state can use their child’s public education dollars to customize that student’s schooling, nearly 40,000 new students have received ESA support for private or at-home learning opportunities. And all this is happening as state coffers have overflown with over $1 billion dollars more in revenue than originally forecast.
Indeed, this extraordinary economic momentum comes in the wake of Arizona enacting the nation’s first fully universal ESA program. Sponsored by state Representative Ben Toma and signed into law by former Governor Doug Ducey last summer, the new legislation took effect in September 2022.
Since then, leftwing activist organizations such as Save Our Schools (SOS) Arizona have attempted to portray the program as financially ruinous. Yet this same organization—whose leaders were forced to admit that they had miscounted the number of signatures they collected in opposition to the program last fall by more than 50,000—has again opted for partisan wish-fulfillment rather than numerical reality.
With a typical ESA scholarship award around $7,000 per student—that is, about half of the roughly $14,000 spent on average per student in a public district school—the ESA program now serves roughly two kids for the cost of each one in a traditional public school district.
Unsurprisingly, when compared to the roughly $15 billion now spent each year on Arizona public schools, the ESA program makes up only a sliver of total K-12 spending. Scholarship awards for students who’ve joined the program under the universal ESA expansion amount to roughly 2% of the total spending on public school students. In fact, despite claims by SOS and other opponents of school choice that ESAs have drained public schools of funding, state lawmakers increased ongoing public school funding by more than $600 million in the same year that the universal ESA expansion took effect.
In short, the ESA program makes up only a small share of the state’s spending on education, but with over 50,000 participants and growing, it will continue to provide a lifeline for all students in need. It’s already done just that for students with special needs and other vulnerable populations ever since Goldwater created the nation’s first ESA program in Arizona more than a decade ago—delivering life-changing results at lower costs than public school offerings.
Despite such real-world impacts on families, critics have doubled down to suggest that the program’s success is a sign of failure and financial unsustainability. Indeed, teachers union-aligned groups have suggested that because more students have opted into the ESA program than originally estimated, it must be too expensive. (Note the sharp contrast to their usual take on education spending, which is only ever portrayed as an investment, rather than a cost.)
It is true that demand for ESAs has already beaten initial estimates, and it is true that the expansion, which passed in the final days of last year’s legislative session, was enacted separately from the state budget—meaning ESA awards were not incorporated into the projected costs of the original budget. But ESA award amounts have already been factored into the state’s updated budget projections released this January for the current and upcoming fiscal year. In fact, it’s the very same state budget analysts who assume that the program will grow even further to 57,000 students by the end of this school year who also report the state is now sitting on a $2.5 billion cash surplus for next year. (Of note, that surplus is in addition to the state’s $1.4 billion rainy day fund, which former Governor Ducey and conservative lawmakers also accumulated to cushion the state from any future economic turbulence.)
The state budget analysts were characteristically cautious in their recommendations to spread out the massive war chest. They suggested that if all $2.5 billion were spent this year, the state budget would simply break even next year, before the balance increases again to an estimated $600 million surplus by 2026. But in any case, their projections make clear that the same Arizona lawmakers who unleashed universal school choice have helped steward robust economic vitality and have created a situation where Arizona lawmakers are again weighing how best to spend or return excess tax revenues. Indeed, as the JLBC analysts reported in January—even before the latest upward revisions—the state has enjoyed “an increase of $1.06 billion over the original revenue estimate included in the FY 2023 budget enacted in June 2022” due to “significantly stronger revenue growth than originally projected.”
There is no doubt that global financial uncertainty, the risk of fiscal and monetary mismanagement from Washington D.C., and warnings of mild or severe recessions should perennially weigh on the minds of state legislators. But when it comes to ESAs and the state’s financial solvency, one thing is clear: universal school choice and successful economic stewardship easily go hand in hand.
Arizona has just proven it.
Matt Beienburg is the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as director of the institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
It’s been just over a month since new Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, was sworn into office, and his hire to run the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program has been delivering significant results for Arizona families.
Christine Accurso, the new ESA Executive Director, has been a longtime pro-life and school choice advocate in the East Valley. Her family has benefited from the ESA program for years – well before the Arizona Legislature expanded its scope in 2022. After the bill was signed into law by former-Governor Doug Ducey, Accurso singlehandedly led a grassroots army of moms and dads from around Arizona to defeat a campaign meant to refer ESA expansion to the ballot and delay the implementation of school choice and freedom for tens of thousands of children in our state.
Since coming on with the Arizona Department of Education, Accurso has been hard at work to save the expanded ESA program a second time, bringing staffing up to the levels intended by the legislature, handling the huge backlog of funding and reimbursement requests, vetting and approving new applications for the program, and ensuring that parents are receiving timely and relevant information from her office.
To that end, Accurso has been extremely diligent in sending out weekly emails to account holders, explaining what her program is working on, clarifying any previous misconceptions about ESAs, and giving updates on the number of students benefiting from school choice in Arizona. Her first email, sent January 3 (which was her inaugural day leading the program), alerted parents and guardians that there were 45,170 students receiving an ESA. In her email this week, that number was up to 46,971 – and Accurso briefed readers that the program is “receiving a minimum of 150 new applications a day.”
Accurso’s latest email also gave an update on her processing que, which is very helpful for account holders to realize the reasons behind some delays in payment processing or approval of desired resources for students. The Marketplace has a backlog of 4,578; Direct Pay of 4,032; Reimbursements of 24,409; and pre-paid debit cards of 63,125 – and there are 4,000 orders coming in each day to be processed. These numbers are significantly down from the original backlog Accurso inherited from the previous administration (and shared in her January 13 email), which was 171,575 orders.
The ESA Executive Director has also been planning and executing the formation of a parent advisory committee – an action she forecasted in her January 13 email to account holders. Accurso announced in her January 25 email that the application process for this committee was open – with 15 to 30 members selected to serve in a volunteer capacity. There were 140 applications received by the ESA Program for this committee, per Accurso’s February 8 email, and she informed interested readers that “we will be finalizing the candidates and communicating with them soon.”
The February 8 email to account holders was lengthy, which Accurso apologized for, but it was filled with necessary information. Accurso explained that she had “spent her first month as the executive director adjusting our office’s approach to everything in the ESA program to align with the state law.” She clarified the law and requirements for an “individual vs facility/business offering tutoring or teaching services,” and she gave an update on “accessing your ESA funds.” She gave a lot of information on the four ways account holders could access their ESA funds, including some new directives on using the pre-paid debit card. Accurso warned that her office “does plan to cancel the use of debit cards for all accounts that have not submitted the appropriate receipts by the (required) deadline or have purchased unallowable items with the card (For example: Chevron, Chick-Fil-A, Taco Bell and Dillard’s).”
Accurso realizes that one of the deadliest attacks toward ESA programs is the lack of oversight by those entrusted to distribute and steward the funds, and the propensity of some account holders to misuse funds that have been earmarked for specific educational purposes – whether intentionally or unintentionally. This is why she appears to be laser focused on bringing the Arizona ESA program into conformity with the law and the original intent of the legislature. Her weekly updates will continue to provide much-needed guiderails for parents and guardians as the program moves forward under the watchful eyes of Superintendent Horne.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
The people of Arizona do not want to turn our state into the next California. But just a few weeks into her reign as governor, Katie Hobbs has made it clear—that’s exactly what she intends to do. Last week, Hobbs released her first budget plan, and it’s nothing more than a liberal wish list of big spending, extreme proposals, and corporate welfare designed to reward her special interest friends.
Her first target is education, and she wasted no time going after Arizona’s expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). Yes, the program that is so popular that it overwhelmed the Department of Education’s website immediately after launch—the one that even some Democrats have openly supported. Despite being a private schooler herself, Hobbs wants to dismantle school choice for all with a full repeal of universal ESAs. And that’s just the start…
I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. I went to high school, and college, and started my business there. We were the fourth generation of our family to live in West Seattle where we founded and operated local businesses. Over the last 80 years, my family has founded four companies, employed hundreds of people, and created opportunities for many others to grow and succeed.
On August 5, 2020, we made the gut-wrenching decision to leave. That was the day that Washington’s Governor, Jay Inslee, proclaimed that it was “unsafe” for children to attend school in the state, extending our school closures indefinitely. Our school reopening guidelines were the among the strictest in the nation, and even most private schools (including our son’s) remained closed until further notice. Our boys were three and six at the time, and we expected another lockdown through the winter would do far more damage to our collective mental and physical health than COVID ever would.
Shortly after Governor Inslee’s press conference ended, we started packing. A few days later, we put 14 suitcases and duffle bags on an airplane and headed out to spend a year in the Sonoran Desert. As our son started in Scottsdale Public Schools, the battle between the districts, unions, and Governor Ducey were in full swing. After yet another week of “iPad school,” we began frantically looking for a private school that would guarantee an in-person education to our first grader.
We found an opening at a nearby for-profit private school and enrolled our boys on the spot. Within a few weeks, we heard from our older son’s teachers that he wasn’t learning normally. Initially, we dismissed their concerns, assuming they were caused by the impacts of Seattle’s hard lockdown and our extended school closures.
They gently pressed, and we agreed to seek a reading evaluation through a local clinic. The results were all over the place, so we were referred to a local neuropsychologist. Our son underwent two days of intensive testing which finally led us to the answer: he is gifted, has mixed dyslexia, and an ADHD (inattentive type) diagnosis would likely follow after he turned seven.
The number one recommendation was that our son would need to be in a private school long-term. The neuropsychologist described the challenges involved in getting an Individualized Education Program (IEP) and 504 plan, especially with a twice-exceptional child, where the giftedness often hides the disability. Our son would need small class sizes and individualized attention, as he would likely struggle in a public school classroom.
Our for-profit private school bent over backwards to accommodate his needs. They allowed him to continue to attend school through his eight-week, half-day intensive dyslexia treatment program so he could maintain the relationships in his class and participate in Spanish, PE, and STEM. His teacher taught his classmates about learning differences, so they’d approach our son with acceptance and curiosity instead of judgment. They approved his providers’ recommended accommodations without hesitation. They welcomed, loved, and supported our child, regardless of his learning differences.
One year later, our son is reading a grade level above his age thanks in part to the three weekly sessions with a reading specialist provided by his school. Three months into third grade, he no longer needs specialized support and is able to operate independently in an accelerated classroom environment.
Our journey was a privileged one. We had school choice, albeit across state lines. We had access to top private clinics and specialists. We used a combination of health insurance, HSA funds, and savings to cover the over $50,000 cost to remediate our son’s dyslexia and provide him with a private school education that met his unique needs. Very few families can afford this on their own.
Washington State has the exact education system that the teachers’ unions advocate for: strong and well-funded public schools. Seattle spends over $23,000 per child per year on school and teachers make around $100,000 on average. Every bond measure placed on the ballot gets approved overwhelmingly.
But choices are strictly limited – well-funded public school or very-expensive private school. Teachers’ unions have unfettered power to lobby the politicians for whatever they want. In response, over 30 percent of parents have pulled their kids out of Seattle Public Schools in neighborhoods where their families can afford to in just the past three years.
My family came to Arizona because of school choice. We stayed because our kids’ needs were met here. We’ve seen a union-first school system firsthand, and COVID revealed its shortcomings. In Arizona, we are leading the nation in building a child-first system, founded on universal ESAs.
As we hear Governor-Elect Katie Hobbs repeat her union supporters’ lines about Arizona’s school system and her criticism of the ESA program, please remember my family’s story of how a great Arizona private school and our school choice programs changed our son’s life and story for the better.
Every family should be able to choose the school that meets their kids’ unique needs, just like we did.
Kevin Gemeroy was recognized as Washington State’s Mr. Future Business Leader in 1998 and as a Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 under 40 honoree in 2018. He and his wife reside in Scottsdale during the school year with their two twice-exceptional boys. You can follow Kevin on Twitter here.
Parents attempting to call the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) helpline for the school choice program are met with an automated voice that rejects their call due to “excessive call volume” and promptly hangs up.
No indication of wait times, and no promise of a call back.
It’s just another day of Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program administration under ADE Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, who hasn’t exactly been shy about her disdain for school choice programs. Hoffman proclaims loudly and often that the ESA Program lacks accountability and remains dysfunctional, even well over three years into her administration.
AZ Free News asked ADE about the ESA Program helpline. They didn’t respond by press time.
Christine Accurso, one of the ESA parents on the frontlines advocating for universal school choice, criticized the ADE for taking in an additional $2.2 million to hire 26 new workers this summer, yet still can’t manage the universal school choice program.
Last month on her reelection campaign trail, Hoffman insisted that universal school choice doesn’t help children with unique learning needs. She declared that it was a “taxpayer-funded coupon for the wealthy.” She then advocated for voters to sign an initiative to refer universal school choice to the 2024 ballot.
Hoffman has fought consistently to eradicate the ESA Program.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.