An influential Arizona Republican lawmaker is combating arguments from an anti-school choice organization.
This week, Senate President Warren Petersen responded to a post from Save Our Schools AZ, which highlighted a local media report about school closures in town. Save Our Schools AZ wrote, “Last night, the Roosevelt school board voted to shutter 5 neighborhood public schools due to major budget deficits caused by chronic lack of funding from the state legislature and universal ESA vouchers.”
Petersen retorted, “First of all it is mostly a declining student population not ESAs or the funding which has doubled over the last 12 years (now 15k/student). Second if someone who receives half your funding is putting you out of business you might want to make some changes.”
First of all it is mostly a declining student population not ESAs or the funding which has doubled over the last 12 years(now 15k/student). Second if someone who receives half your funding is putting you out of business you might want to make some changes. https://t.co/zssk7u6rlZ
The east valley lawmaker then reposted one of his earlier communications about ESA funding to help bolster his point. He stated, “District vs. Charter vs. ESA Funding from all sources. District = $14,857 per student. Charter = $12,510 per student. ESA = $7,700 per student.”
District vs. Charter vs. ESA Funding from all sources
District = $14,857 per student Charter = $12,510 per student ESA = $7,700 per student
Continuing with this education theme, Petersen stated, “The Republican-led Legislature has always supported K-12 public education. We have dramatically increased funding over the last decade and are now at $14,857 total funding per student. We support empowering parents to make the best educational choices for their kids, whether sending them to public, charter, or private schools.”
The Republican-led Legislature has always supported K-12 public education. We have dramatically increased funding over the last decade and are now at $14,857 total funding per student. We support empowering parents to make the best educational choices for their kids, whether…
Petersen added, “The statement being pushed that ESAs are taking money from district schools is false. The reason some districts are closing a handful of public schools represents a decline in the number of students attending these schools and a decline in enrollment. Public schools thrive based on how they’re administering programs and curriculum. Failure in this area results in families seeking schools that are excelling in these areas to meet their families’ needs.”
Save Our Schools also shared a report of more potential school closures – this time in the Cave Creek Unified School District. The account wrote, “The Cave Creek district is considering shuttering schools. ‘Cave Creek officials are blaming the expansion of AZ’s voucher program, which allows all school-aged kids across AZ to use public money for private school tuition or homeschool expenses, for part of their hardships.’”
The Cave Creek district is considering shuttering schools. "Cave Creek officials are blaming the expansion of AZ’s voucher program, which allows all school-aged kids across AZ to use public money for private school tuition or homeschool expenses, for part of their hardships." pic.twitter.com/u5IaEzXWy7
The escalating debate between the Republican leader and the anti-school choice organization comes just weeks before the start of the new legislative session, where the issue will surely be discussed increasingly between the opposing sides. In the two years of Arizona’s divided government, Republicans have held the line when it comes to safeguarding school choice, while Democrats, led by Governor Katie Hobbs, have unsuccessfully tried to whittle away at the state’s historic opportunities for families. Petersen has managed to force Hobbs to back off of her repeated promises to reduce Arizona school choice freedoms on a number of occasions, including in both of the past budgets negotiated between the Governor’s Office and Republican legislative leadership. He will continue to engage in this role over the next two years as he returns as his chamber’s leader.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Two Utah residents have been indicted for defrauding Arizona’s school choice program.
The alleged culprits, Johnny Lee Bowers and Ashley Meredith Hewitt (aka “Ashley Hopkins”), were indicted for the theft of about $110,000 from December 2022 through this May, Attorney General Mayes announced on Monday.
Bowers and Hewitt allegedly used the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program funds for their personal living expenses in Colorado. The pair are now believed to be living in Utah, per Mayes’ office.
Bowers and Hewitt allegedly submitted applications to the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) for seven real and 43 fictitious children using false, forged, or fraudulent documents such as birth certificates, utility bills, and lease agreements. Bowers and Hewitt applied under their own names as well as under fake identities, called “ghost parents.”
The pair put the false identities under fictitious “families” with the surnames Gil, Cole, Diaz, and Dobbs, as well as another “family” going by Hewitt’s surname.
Bowers and Hewitt were indicted on counts of the class two felonies of conspiracy (one count) and fraudulent schemes and artifices $100,000 or more (one count), as well as the class four felony of forgery (58 counts).
In a statement on the indictments, Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne said that the fraud was found out thanks to the auditor he hired to oversee the ESA Program, a position he noted was not previously established under his predecessor, Kathy Hoffman. Horne clarified that it was his office who referred the findings of fraud to Mayes’ team.
“As a former Arizona Attorney General, I am determined as Superintendent to eliminate any fraud within the ESA program. Upon taking office, I hired an auditor who had been in the Auditor General’s office for 15 years, and who is now in charge of the ESA program as well as an investigator. Those two positions had not existed under my predecessor,” said Horne. “I am pleased that prosecutions are following in the cases we sent to The Attorney General’s office.”
Earlier this year, five others were indicted in a similar $600,000 “ghost children” scheme to defraud the ESA program. 17 children were used in those applications — five of whom were discovered to be fake — associated with false birth certificates and false disability documents to obtain more funding. Those indicted were Dolores Sweet, Dorrian Jones, Jennifer Lopez, Jadakah Johnson, and Raymond Johnson, Jr.
Sweet allegedly approved applications for three fictitious children she claimed as her own while working as an ESA account specialist from 2019 to 2023. Both Johnsons are Sweet’s real adult children.
Lopez allegedly approved applications for two fictitious children she also claimed as her own while working as an ESA program lead specialist from 2019 to 2023.
Jones worked with the ADE as an administrative services officer.
As with these most recent indictments, the five indicted earlier this year were hired by Horne’s predecessor and later caught by Horne’s auditor.
In an October meeting, Horne announced that ESA reimbursements have proved to be “an overwhelming problem” for ADE due to low staffing, resulting in long wait times and a growing backlog.
Prior to last year, the ESA program paid through ClassWallet. The legislature approved tuition payments through reimbursement last year, something Horne says is the root of the problem.
Horne explained that efforts to combat the backlog have allowed for fraud to enter, citing an attempt to streamline reimbursements earlier this year by automatically reimbursing purchases at $75 or less leading to an instance of seven account holders discovered to have bought $13,000 of Amazon gift cards.
The ESA program has over 83,000 students enrolled as of mid-November.
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
Since the results of the 2024 election came in, much of the focus has been on President-elect Donald Trump’s historic win—and rightfully so. Trump won every single swing state in a massive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, and he beat her in the popular vote too.
But Kamala Harris wasn’t the only significant loser to come out of November’s election.
Here in Arizona, teachers’ unions and other anti-school choice groups, like Save Our Schools Arizona (SOSAZ), made the 2024 election a referendum on school choice. And they lost big!
Much of their work began earlier this year, when Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs came into legislative session (just like she did in 2023) with her top priority being to regulate the wildly popular Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program out of existence. But it didn’t work. Despite the noise from Hobbs, legislative Democrats, the legacy media, the teachers’ unions, and other anti-school choice groups, only minor changes were made to the ESA program through the budget, with most of it remaining untouched.
This failure fell on the heels of other similar failures…
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is facing serious criticism after legal threats issued to families using the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The threats slammed the brakes on purchasing “supplementary materials” considered self-evident in need by the State Board of Education.
As reported by the AZ Mirror, a July notice from Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office told the director of the ESA program that they may be in violation of Arizona law by issuing reimbursements to families for supplementary education materials, (i.e. flash-cards, periodic tables of the elements, early books for new readers) without requiring that parents provide documentation that it is required under a curriculum.
In the six-page letter, Assistant Attorney General Kathryn Boughton wrote, “Approving ESA funds for materials that have no nexus to the student’s actual curricular needs contradicts the intent of the program and constitutes a payment of funds made without authorization of law.” She went on to claim that doing so, “may enable account holders or vendors to engage in fraudulent behavior, such as purchasing items with ESA funds solely for the purpose of resale.”
She advised that director, John Ward stop authorizing the reimbursements immediately.
Faced with a potentially damaging legal battle, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne told parents in a statement that he would have to concede the point for now. “When I received the attorney general’s message, I sent it to the most knowledgeable people in my department,” Horne wrote.
“I asked them to look at it, not as an advocate, because we all disagree with the Attorney General, but in a neutral way, as though they were judges to determine if they could give me a reasonable assurance of success. They analyzed the statutes on which the attorney general relied, and indicated to me that as a neutral judge, they would rule against me if I made a fight out of it and refused to comply. Getting into a fight and losing, would be much more damaging.”
However, the tune from Mayes’ office changed sharply just one day after the Goldwater Institute filed lawsuit challenging the blatantly partisan determination. Attorneys from Goldwater representing two Arizona mothers wrote, “Following …unsuccessful legislative attempts, the office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes initiated a new effort in July 2024 to dramatically limit the use of ESA funds, calling for a prohibition on the purchase of basic educational materials, including books, workbooks, and other ‘supplementary materials’ unless parents could provide an explicit ‘curricular’ document justifying the use of each specific book title or material for their child.”
“Arizona law expressly allows the purchase of such materials with ESA funds, however. In fact, state lawmakers added clarifying language in 2020 with the explicit purpose of ensuring that such purchases would not be denied, following the actions by former State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman that had restricted the purchase of many such items. The State Board of Education has likewise approved rules for the program explicitly permitting the purchase of these materials without additional documentation.”
The AG’s Office then began a campaign of feverishly walking back their determination with a statement responding to the suit. “The Attorney General has simply stated what is required by law,” adding, “The law doesn’t prevent parents from purchasing paper and pencils, but it does require that materials purchased with ESA funds be used for a child’s education.”
But this isn’t what Mayes’ office said in July when they demanded Superintendent Tom Horne’s department “promptly cease approving supplementary material expenses without the requisite documentation of a curriculum nexus,” no matter how self-evidently educational the materials are, as Matt Beienburg,the Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute pointed out in an Arizona Daily Independent op-ed.
As Beienburg notes, Mayes’ office, far from simply targeting extravagant spending, threatened ESA administrators with legal liability unless they applied the same requirements on the list of obviously educational materials approved in the State Board of Education’s ESA Handbook: things like “books,” “workbooks,” “writing utensils,” “atlases/maps/globes,” “calculators,” “flash cards”, etc.
“Thesematerials are what Attorney General Mayes’ intervention is now blocking en masse—unless parents can cite a specific pre-established curriculum calling for the individual book title or resource,” Beienburg explained.
“In other words, the Attorney General’s office still demands that flashcards and other self-evidently educational materials be allowed only if a parent can produce an arbitrary piece of paper calling for their specific use.
The Attorney General’s attempted public deflection away from this fact demonstrates the absurdity of her summer demands. Perhaps she really does believe that families should have to justify their purchases of books like ‘Brown Bear Brown Bear, What do You See?’ and ‘Little People Who Became Great’ to wiser government bureaucrats. But for the rest of us, such restrictions are clearly nonsensical and—under state law, illegal.
The Attorney General is supposed to uphold state law, not torture it to impose her policy preferences. We encourage the Attorney General to withdraw her summer demand letter, or else acknowledge flatly that her position is that families should have to justify why they picked ‘Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See?’ to read to their own children.”
The Common Sense Institute of Arizona (CSI) has released a comprehensive report setting facts versus myths surrounding Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program.
According to the CSI, the full eleven page report, “dispels misconceptions and presents data-driven insights into the fiscal and educational impacts of the ESA program on Arizona’s public education system and state budget—an issue of growing interest for states considering ESA expansion.”
Although it follows an argumentative “claim/fact” format, the primary findings of the report can be broken down into five key area: K-12 Funding Growth, Per-Pupil Spending, Public School Enrollment Decline, ESA Program Costs, and Accountability and Oversight.
According to the release, during the nine year-span from Fiscal Year 2016 to 2025, the K-12 funding for Arizona Public Schools exploded by approximately 60 percent, jumping up by over $6.3 billion. Conversely, the funding allocated to ESAs only increased by $792 million over the same period, amounting to barely 11% of the budget’s overall growth. This simple fact torpedoes the popular online fiction that legislators are making cuts to public school funding to pay for the ESA.
Arizona's K-12 funding has outpaced inflation and enrollment. Public school funding increased by $6.3B from FY2016-FY2025, including $2B in just the last three years.
— Common Sense Institute Arizona (@CSInstituteAZ) October 9, 2024
As previously reported by AZ Free News, the report aligns well with a statement from Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne as well as a report from the Arizona Legislative Budget Committee and the Goldwater Institute.
Answering concerns on per-pupil spending, the CSI found, “Arizona now spends over $15,100 per public school student, a 30% increase since FY2016 (adjusted for inflation). Despite a decrease of over 23,500 students in public school enrollment over the past five years, overall funding has continued to grow.”
In a post on X, the CSI observed, “Traditional district public school enrollment has been steadily declining in Arizona for years. This trend, driven by demographic shifts and changing attitudes, is likely to continue regardless of the ESA program. ESA is the response not the cause.”
Traditional district public school enrollment has been steadily declining in Arizona for years. This trend, driven by demographic shifts and changing attitudes, is likely to continue regardless of the ESA program. ESA is the response not the cause.
— Common Sense Institute Arizona (@CSInstituteAZ) October 9, 2024
Easily the most divisive effort to assail ESA funding has come from the claim that it only benefits wealthy, urban students. The CSI joins the Joint Legislative Committee in dashing the notion, stating, “Since the pandemic, demand for traditional district public schools has fallen nationwide – among broad demographic groups. With the expansion of things like home schooling, Microschooling, etc., non-traditional students may look very different than you’d expect!”
Since the pandemic, demand for alternatives to traditional district public schools has grown across diverse demographic groups. With the expansion of things like home schooling, Microschooling, etc., non-traditional students may look very different than you'd expect!
— Common Sense Institute Arizona (@CSInstituteAZ) October 9, 2024
As noted in prior reporting: the Goldwater Institute, the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute, and multiple conservative outlets have repeatedly verified that families of ESA children cover the full breadth of the socio-economic strata from crushingly impoverished to blindingly wealthy, from the broken down trailer parks of South Phoenix to the most lavish homes of Paradise Valley.
The report notably cites the Black Mother’s Forum, an Arizona microschool operating two locations and serving over 150 pupils since 2021. All the students use ESAs and 90% are non-white with a wide majority classified as low-income. According to the Forum’s CEO, “Without the universal ESA program, these schools would not exist.”
