Arizona Senate Republicans are refusing to let a parental rights bill die under Gov. Katie Hobbs’ heavily-used veto pen.
Senate Republican leadership revived the legislation through a concurrent resolution, passed out of committee on Wednesday. This legislative pathway allows the slim Republican majority to avoid another inevitable veto from the governor.
SCR 1006 from Senate Majority Leader John Kavanagh (R-LD3) directly challenges the supremacy of transgender-affirming policies and practices within schools.
“Parents have a fundamental right to know what’s happening with their kids at school, and students deserve privacy and safety. No 14-year-old girl should be forced to stand naked in a shower with an 18-year-old man who thinks he’s a girl,” said Kavanagh. “Families shouldn’t be sidelined, and schools shouldn’t be forced into confusion. This reflects what most Arizonans already believe, and it gives them the final say.”
If passed, the resolution would have voters decide whether to require schools to obtain parental permission prior to engaging in transgender-affirming behaviors: referring to a minor student by a name other than the one listed on school records, or referring to a minor student using pronouns that differ from that student’s biological sex.
Voters would also decide whether public schools must provide reasonable accommodations: access to a single-occupancy or employee restroom or changing facility for any individual unwilling to use the facility designated for their biological sex.
Lastly, voters would decide whether individuals could sue public schools for subjecting them to transgender-affirming policies, such as encountering an individual of the opposite sex in a restroom or changing facility designated for their biological sex, or being required to share sleeping quarters with a person of the opposite sex.
Gov. Hobbs vetoed two bills that contained these legislative provisions last year (SB 1002 and SB 1003). In identical letters, Hobbs said the state had more pressing matters than asserting parental rights over transgenderism within schools.
“[These] bill[s] will not increase opportunity, security, or freedom for Arizonans. I encourage the legislature to join with me in prioritizing legislation that will lower costs, protect the border, create jobs, and secure our water future,” said Hobbs.
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Republican state lawmakers want to improve accountability for school superintendents.
Several packages of bills released Thursday would reform superintendent contracts and duties, school board governments, and school district leasing and financial arrangements.
The bill package was a result of the Tolleson Union High School District (TUHSD) scandal that emerged last year. TUHSD entered a controversial $25 million leaseback agreement with a failing school district, which began without an appraisal and in which TUHSD Superintendent Jeremy Calles operated as a consultant for the deal.
The lawmaker behind the proposed reforms, State Representative Matt Gress, said in a press release that some districts have strayed from their intended purpose of educating students.
“Public schools exist to serve students, not administrators or board members who disregard their responsibilities,” said Gress. “This legislative package sets clear rules and ensures education dollars stay focused where they belong — on instruction and students.”
Gress also stated that the events at TUHSD made it clear that additional oversight was needed.
“When school leaders control large public budgets with little oversight, taxpayers and classrooms pay the price,” said Gress. “Arizona families deserve confidence that education dollars are managed responsibly and that those in authority are held to clear, enforceable standards.”
Arizona lawmakers unanimously approved an audit of the district.
15/ 🚨MUST WATCH! Rep. @MatthewGress’ final comments summed it up well: “You are figuring out every possible loophole that you can legally finagle in order to advance your consulting company…this warrants further legislation…and I also believe it warrants further review by the… pic.twitter.com/yCeLD0Qcrc
— Arizona House Republicans (@AZHouseGOP) July 24, 2025
TUHSD has delayed sending its financial transaction records despite repeated legislative requests. The district insisted the legislature pay over $26,000 for the records.
During a hearing by the Joint Legislative Audit Committee over the summer, TUHSD Superintendent Calles admitted to using his superintendent office to conduct the business of his private consulting firm. Several district staff or governing board members also work for Calles’ consulting business.
Calles is the highest-paid superintendent in the state.
Tick-tock, Tolleson Union.
We’re not paying $26,000 for public financial records that the Legislature is entitled to. https://t.co/WhWbz4VAhd
This conflict between the district and legislature over the leaseback agreement and Calles’ conduct was a major influence on voters. They rejected two key funding measures proposed by TUHSD in this recent election.
The district faces a shortfall of $95 million at minimum, $200 million minimum more likely.
In 2024, TUHSD was busted for arranging “luxury vacations” for school board members and administrators.
The first bill package to reform superintendent contracts and duties contains House Bills 2387, 2386, 2381, 2382, 2377, and 2385. Reforms include limiting secondary employment for school district officials, raising standards for superintendents’ performance based-pay, limiting benefits and other perks given to superintendents like cell phone and vehicle allowances, and reducing the employment term for first-time superintendents to one year.
The second bill package to reform school governance contains House Bills 2318, 2380, and 2379. Reforms include establishing governing board member term limits, requiring convenient public venues for school board meetings, and requiring more training for school board members on governance, finances, policymaking, legal and ethical responsibilities, stakeholder and community engagement, and relevant professional development topics.
The third bill package to reform school district leasing and financial arrangements contains House Bills 2384, 2376, and 2383. Reforms include limiting allowed circumstances of leasing school property; excluding lease-purchase agreements for sites where charter or private schools operate; and limiting leases to 10 years without voter approval or 20 years with voter approval.
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In a previous op-ed, I argued that Arizona’s district school system is no longer failing quietly or at the margins; it is failing in concrete, measurable ways that any citizen can see. Districts are sitting atop tens of millions of square feet of unused facilities, fleets of underutilized buses, and continued academic declines, even as families vote with their feet for charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. I suggested that this mismatch between assets and enrollment is not primarily a failure of effort by teachers or even of management by principals and superintendents. It is, rather, a structural failure—a failure of the political governance model that was built for a different age and has now grown badly out of step with a landscape defined by choice and specialization.
That first piece only sketched the deeper questions. If Arizona’s district schools are governed by locally elected boards precisely so that they can respond to the public interest, why do they so consistently struggle to respond to the public itself? Why do boards that are supposed to safeguard public funds preside over billions of dollars in underutilized assets? Why does a structure designed to protect the common good now preside over persistent scandal, fiscal mismanagement, declining enrollment, and widespread frustration among teachers, administrators, and parents alike? To answer those questions, we must look beyond current headlines and follow the longer arc of how we came to equate “public” with “politically governed” in the first place.
A Short History
The political governance model that structures Arizona’s districts did not descend from heaven fully formed. It emerged in the early twentieth century as a particular way—one way—of securing community oversight of local schools. The assumption was simple: if citizens chose board members at the ballot box, then “the public interest” would be represented in school decisions. Over time, that prudential, albeit contingent, arrangement hardened into dogma. Political representation came to be treated not only as a means of protection, but as the necessary and exclusive guardian of the public good, public funds, and the formation of the next generation. To question the structure itself began to sound, in some ears, like questioning public education altogether.
Yet a careful look at both history and experience suggests that this is far too narrow a view. Arizonans know as well as anybody we must distinguish between the health of a society and the reach of the state. Our southwestern culture has long insisted that families, churches, associations, and voluntary institutions represent the public and serve the common good, often more effectively than formal political bodies. We know that political power is not the sole guardian of the public interest; it is one instrument among many and must be judged by its fruits. Therefore, we also know that if a particular form of political governance routinely frustrates educational excellence, wastes public resources, and subjects schools to the whiplash of partisan cycles, it is not sacrilege to reconsider it. It is an act of enlightened stewardship.
Arizona did not begin with today’s sprawling unified districts and five-member boards. In the territorial period, the basic unit of public education was the local school district, often consisting of a single schoolhouse serving one community. Territorial law in the late 1860s and 1870s required each district to elect a small board of three trustees, who oversaw the teacher, maintained the building, levied modest local taxes when necessary, and kept a simple census of school-age children. Early political governance of schools in Arizona was rudimentary and intensely local. The trustees were neighbors, the school was usually the only option for miles, and the questions before the board were concrete: hire a teacher, repair the roof, stretch a short budget a little further. And parents were close and connected to every operation of the school.
With statehood in 1912, the picture began to change. The Arizona Constitution established a State Board of Education and charged the new state with maintaining a system of common schools, while statutory law gradually formalized local districts as political subdivisions of the state. Over time, those simple boards of trustees evolved into today’s “governing boards,” recognized in Title 15 of the Arizona Revised Statutes as the governing body of each school district, typically consisting of three or five members serving staggered four-year terms and elected on the regular general-election ballot. What began as lay oversight of a single schoolhouse was thus absorbed into the broader machinery of state and county elections and invested with a much wider portfolio of powers.
Through the middle of the twentieth century, Arizona followed the national trend toward consolidation and unification. Numerous small districts were merged into larger common and unified districts, each with a single governing board responsible for K–8 and high school operations across multiple schools and neighborhoods. State law now gives these boards dozens of specific powers and duties—from hiring and evaluating the superintendent to adopting curricula and policies, issuing bonds, and managing the district’s substantial real estate portfolio. In effect, and by necessity, school boards shifted from being small committees of trustees to quasi-legislative bodies whose decisions shape complex organizations serving tens of thousands of students and stewarding hundreds of millions of public dollars. With this growth, parents became more like mere bystanders.
Political = Public?
From a legal standpoint, Arizona’s embrace of political representation as the default mode for “real” public education is baked into its constitutional and statutory architecture. Article XI of the Arizona Constitution charges the Legislature with creating a “general and uniform public school system” and vests the “general conduct and supervision” of that system in a State Board of Education, a state superintendent, county school superintendents, and locally established governing boards. District governing boards are thus conceived, from the outset, as political bodies—public offices filled by election, exercising delegated authority from the state to manage schools, steward funds, and set policy. Over the twentieth century, this framework was reinforced as boards took on larger consolidated districts, wider fiscal responsibilities, and explicit policy-making roles. In practice, “the public school system” came to mean the system supervised by these constitutionally recognized, electorally chosen officials.
Culturally and politically, this legal design was then wrapped in a powerful democratic narrative. State and national advocacy groups routinely describe elected school boards and district schools as the “cornerstone of democracy” and the essential vehicle for citizen oversight of government. In Arizona, governing-board candidates and education associations explicitly frame district schools—not charters—as the institution that embodies this democratic ideal and warn that parental-choice policies “attack public education” and threaten that cornerstone role. The result is that, in both rhetoric and policy debates, “public education” is habitually equated with electorally governed districts, while other public schooling arrangements (charters, open enrollment, and yes ESAs) are treated as exceptions or threats. Political representation by board election is no longer presented as one prudential way to secure the public interest; it is treated as the litmus test for whether a school is truly public at all.
The Results
Measured against its own stated aims, Arizona’s district governance model is not delivering. Start with the most basic metric of public confidence: whether families actually use the system they are taxed to support. Since 2011, district school enrollment in Arizona has fallen about 8 percent while charter enrollment has grown 87 percent; nearly all net growth in public-school enrollment over the past decade has come from charters, not districts. A recent analysis estimates that roughly 27 percent of Arizona’s 5- to 17-year-olds now do not attend a district school, and that close to 40 percent of incoming kindergarteners bypass their assigned district campus for charter, private, or home- and micro-school options. In other words, under the very governance structure meant to embody the “public interest,” a steadily shrinking share of the public is choosing the product offered—even before one considers the additional 7 percent (and growing) of students now educated via ESAs outside the district and charter systems altogether.
The picture is no more reassuring on fiscal stewardship. Arizona’s Auditor General recently warned that dozens of districts are on the verge of serious financial distress, and state financial investigators fielded 102 fraud-related allegations involving school districts and other public entities in 2024 alone. In the Isaac Elementary School District, mismanagement and budget overruns became so severe that the district could not meet payroll, prompting the State Board of Education to place it into formal receivership and triggering investigations by the Auditor General and Attorney General. The Nadaburg Unified School District has likewise drawn public accusations of “gross financial mismanagement” from the state treasurer, who urged an audit and potential receivership. All of this is happening in a system that, even as enrollment declines, continues to accumulate physical plant and capital costs: between 2019 and 2024, district enrollment fell 5 percent while gross square footage rose 3 percent, capital spending rose 67 percent, and square feet per student rose 9 percent, leaving districts operating at roughly two-thirds of their capacity while charter schools operate at about 95 percent. A governance model that presides over shrinking usage, growing fixed costs, and periodic fiscal crisis is, at a minimum, not obviously safeguarding public funds.
Nor is the system maintaining the confidence of its own professionals. A 2024 study from Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute found “deep dissatisfaction” among K–12 educators statewide, with nearly two-thirds reporting that they have considered leaving the profession. Separate reporting notes that more than half of Arizona’s public-school teachers say they may leave within two years if working conditions do not improve. Meanwhile, the Department of Education’s most recent survey shows the teacher shortage remains at a “catastrophic” level: since July 2025, more than 1,000 teachers have quit, over 4,000 positions are being filled by long-term substitutes or other stopgaps, and nearly 1,400 positions are entirely vacant. These are not merely human-resource headaches; they are evidence that the governance structure is failing at the elementary work of sustaining a stable, dignified professional environment for the adults on whom student learning depends.
Finally, academic results under this model are stubbornly mediocre. On Arizona’s 2024 statewide assessments, close to 60 percent of students were not proficient in English Language Arts and 67 percent weren’t proficient in math, essentially unchanged from the prior year despite significant pandemic recovery spending. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Arizona’s eighth-grade math score in 2022 was lower than in 2019 and not significantly different from its score in 2000; barely 18 percent of students reached “proficient,” and the share below “basic” was alarmingly high. Reading scores for fourth and eighth graders declined again in 2024, with only about a quarter of students proficient. After more than a century of elected-board oversight, the system is educating barely one in three students to grade-level standards in core subjects.
Taken together, these facts are not the story of a governance model quietly doing its job in a difficult environment. They are the record of a structure that has failed to retain families, failed to steward assets, failed to sustain its workforce, and failed to secure strong academic outcomes—even as alternative, non-political public models have expanded alongside it.
Beyond the Political Governance Model
The political cycle all but guarantees that Arizona’s district schools cannot build the kind of stable, long-horizon strategy that genuine educational excellence requires. Board elections, party primaries, and shifting legislative coalitions continually reset priorities, rewarding short term gestures that energize a partisan base rather than quiet, steady investment in students, families, and faculty. The incentives are clear: politicians and would-be board members gain more by fighting over the latest cultural controversy or signaling loyalty to party talking points than by aligning curriculum, staffing, facilities, and budgeting to a coherent, decades-long vision for student formation. In this environment, strategic plans are drafted to placate interest groups, messaging is crafted to survive the next news cycle, and superintendents are hired and fired according to political winds rather than educational competence. The result is a political strategic governance model, in which schools are treated as stages for ideological contest, rather than an educational governance model, in which decisions are anchored to evidence about what helps children learn, what sustains excellent teachers, and what builds strong, enduring school communities.
It is therefore time, not out of hostility to public education but out of love for it, that we rethink the political governance model that currently defines Arizona’s district schools. The interests of students, families, faculty, and staff are too precious to be chained to a structure that persistently frustrates their flourishing. If public education is truly a public good, then it must be governed in a way that safeguards that good by honoring scarce resources, attracting and retaining excellent educators, and treating children as persons to be formed rather than as data points in a political contest. Structures exist for the sake of these ends, not the other way around. To ask whether elected boards and partisan incentives remain the best guardians of our schools is not an act of heresy; it is an act of stewardship and, in a self-governing republic, a moral duty. A people that refuses to examine its institutions when they fail to serve their purpose is not defending the common good. It is neglecting it.
Erik Twist is the Principal Partner and President of Arcadia Education. He served as President of Great Hearts Arizona from 2017 to 2022.
A Deer Valley USD (DVUSD) parent, referred to as “Amy,” contacted my organization to report that her children were questioned about their morning and bedtime routines. It turns out Stetson Hills School administrators had engaged students in an “Attendance Reflection Activity” during lunch on November 6, 2025. Parents weren’t notified about the event until the end of the school day.
“Our school utilizes a system called CUTS (Chronically Absent and Truant Students) to proactively identify students who are missing more than 10% of instructional days by the end of the quarter…During the session, students participated in fun discussions about:
Their current nighttime routines,
Their current morning routines [and]
Developing a goal or plan for one small, positive change they could make to improve their attendance moving forward.”
Walter ended the communication by thanking parents for their “partnership and support in encouraging consistent daily attendance.” In her zealousness to combat chronic absenteeism, I think Walter forgot that elementary students are not responsible for transporting themselves to school.
Stetson’s attendance survey can be viewed here. Note that in addition to answering questions about sleep schedules and household activities, students were required to sign the document as if it were a contract between them and the school district.
Amy said her kids were probed about their eating habits and family relationships, but those questions were not included on the survey. She also said her children described feeling anxious and “targeted” during the attendance reflection session.
According to Amy, her children haven’t missed more than a few days since the 2025 school year began, and every absence was excused due to illness or doctor’s appointments. Assistant Principal Walter confirmed that parents only need to notify the school, and doctors’ notes are not required in these instances.
Amy emailed her concerns about the district’s lack of transparency to DVUSD Superintendent Curtis Finch. Instead of responding to Amy, Finch forwarded her email to the School Operations and Safety Coordinator, Valerie Bullis. Bullis claimed the truancy probe was intended to be a “proactive approach in addressing student attendance patterns” and that school administrators were now “reviewing the process.” Meanwhile, Amy insisted that she and other parents she talked to were never informed about the student interrogation “process” to begin with. Amy also believes most parents are not aware of the CUTS program.
Screenshots from the Stetson Hills social media account show educators and other DVUSD schools engaging in attendance competitions. Amy said these activities promote unhealthy rivalry among students who are totally dependent on their parents for transportation and life decisions.
Deer Valley taxpayers are using their properties as collateral for failing schools. By passing the 15% override, constituents empowered government employees to keep pushing the boundaries of parental controls as they advance a State-sponsored agenda. “We got the override! We got your money!” was the overarching theme of the November 18 school board meeting.
The Glendale Star quoted Superintendent Finch, stating, “We’re pretty excited that we got the okay from the public to move forward.” When commenting on potential budget cuts, he said, “If it didn’t pass, I would be using a chainsaw, but now I can use the scalpel.” Finch also predicted “another explosion of enrollment in the next three to five years.” Wrapping up a discussion about DVUSD’s successful override campaign, he declared:
“The students are the winners when this happens. The community saw how far we’ve come and responded accordingly. It’s very gratifying for everyone involved.”
Cue the laugh track.
Finch’s million-dollar “scalpel” will never be used to dissect his compensation package, and most promises made during override campaigns are never kept. It’s no secret that Arizona public schools are losing students to the school choice movement. DVUSD’s decision to host intramural attendance games only proves that government education can’t compete with superior learning methods and institutions. Parents are waking up and moving on.
“The anti-public school movement is growing here in the state of Arizona, which is a crime against humanity. And it’s unfortunate that we’re caught in that web.”
— Superintendent Curtis Finch, ABC 15 News
For the record, there’s nothing inherently negative about finding creative and fun ways to encourage classroom attendance. The CUTS program mentioned in Assistant Principal Walter’s email may have attracted some families back to the district. Alas, the planning and execution were botched, and the interrogation activities left some parents feeling gaslighted.
I will never understand why school districts are so opposed to (or ignorant of) parental rights legislation. If you want students to enroll and attend, why wouldn’t you appeal to and listen to parents? If parents want a safe, academic-focused environment that’s free from politics, why not invest in that instead of engaging in a power struggle over their kids? In other industries, when a company loses business, board members and directors will research competitors and come up with ways to recapture the market by providing quality products and services.
This concept is simple when applied to education: If public schools don’t want parents to withdraw their children and go to private schools, then they should do what private schools do. Adopt their academic model and offer it at a lower cost. Stop waving rainbow flags and talking about gender and skin color. Stop asking intrusive questions and forming inappropriate bonds with other people’s kids. Give parents a reason to trust you. Or is that too much common sense for government folk?
School board elections are not magic. Ideally, we’d like to “get our guy in office,” trust that they have our best interests in mind, and carry on with our lives. This is not reality. More often than not, time reveals that “our guy” will say whatever needs to be said to gain our support and then turn on the dime of sleazy administrators, radical union leaders, and leftist community members. Unfortunately, this pattern emerges even in school districts that many consider as having a “conservative majority.”
Despite all the online drama that erupted over those attendance surveys, I was the only one who attended and spoke about it at the last Deer Valley school board meeting. Digital outrage accomplishes absolutely nothing in real time, and virtual group therapy has no power to shift this situation. DVUSD is corrupt. The school board is dysfunctional, the superintendent is shady, and educators are lacking real leadership. Now that they have your money, what’s their incentive to do right by your children? Who will hold them accountable, if not you?
Tiffany Benson is the Founder of Restore Parental Rights in Education. Her commentaries on education, politics, and Christian faith can be viewed at Parentspayattention.com and Bigviewsmallwindow.com. Follow her on socials @realtiffanyb.
“From the data on the class of 2025, college admissions officers and future employers can reasonably conclude that if the applicant is a graduate of Arizona schools, more likely than not, they cannot proficiently read, write, perform math, or understand science in comparison to their peers.”
A Legal Process also noted that a majority of Arizona’s 2025 graduates failed to meet one core academic benchmark. “55% of Arizona’s students can graduate high school and still not demonstrate college-ready level competency in a single core academic subject matter,” the publication said.
World Population Review published Public School Rankings by State 2025, which shows Arizona dead last overall in four categories: K-12 performance, school funding and resources, higher education quality, and safety. This is corroborated by Consumer Affairs, which rated Arizona number one on its list entitled, “Which states rank poorly for education?”
Arizona wastes between $10,000 and $14,000 per student, depending on the source. Meanwhile, the average ESA is estimated between $6,000 and $9,000 for students in 1st through 12th grade. Current trends also reveal that K-12 families are ditching government education at an impressive rate. Even if these calculations are off by 10 decimal points, my conclusion remains the same: The A-F School Letter Grade classification system is a complete joke, and school choice is the one good thing happening in Arizona education.
“Arizona school district superintendents receive high salaries. Yet, the true scale of that pay is often obscured by a triangle of complex contract provisions that school boards, and the superintendents themselves, deliberately design to mask the full measure of compensation from taxpayers…
These same school districts go to great lengths to block access to superintendent contracts—in some cases even from their own board members—shielding from the public how tax dollars enrich those who often are their community’s highest-paid public employees.”
Goldwater requested more than 40 superintendent contracts—official records that should be accessible to the general public—only to receive the documents after four months of repeated requests and warnings of potential litigation. The following information is also sourced from their report:
Not including health insurance or pension costs, Arizona superintendents’ base salaries average $215,000 a year, while taxpayers are charged up to $490,000 per superintendent after accounting for “lucrative perks.”
In addition to pension benefits, several school districts are double-charging taxpayers for superintendents’ retirement packages.
Taxpayers are funding superintendents’ personal and vacation leave to the tune of 15 weeks off, when combined with school holidays. When vacation days are unused, superintendents receive a payout in the form of additional compensation.
Goldwater rightly called attention to Tolleson Union High School District Superintendent Jeremy Calles, who makes off with roughly $500,000 a year. Although Tolleson ranks as the 16th largest district in the state, Calles earns at least $100,000 more than any other Arizona Superintendent. Not surprisingly, he was accused of financial misconduct and, according to ABC 15, the auditor general’s investigation into Calles is expected to be completed by January 2027.
Notably, Calles also stands accused of inflating enrollment numbers, loaning $25 million to the Isaac School District, and allowing one teacher to resign with full benefits after complaints that the former employee had an inappropriate relationship with a student. Regardless, Calles appears to have an explanation for everything. And, despite the embarrassing controversy, he still finds half a million reasons to show up for work.
“There are so many good things happening [in] our district right now that it is difficult to put them all into one newsletter…Our letter grades continue to rise…Success is not without consequence. If we are going to be the best district in the state, then we cannot get there by trying to do what everyone else is doing; we have to innovate.”
He signed off by stating that how Tolleson residents respond to a bond and override this November will “reveal how the community feels about the direction of the district.” I know how I would vote if I lived in Tolleson—it’s the same way I’m voting in Peoria.
If you’re anything like me, you’re a fish out of water when it comes to district finance. Simple is the only way I know how to be. Thus, maintenance and overrides (M&O) allow school districts to exceed their budget for salaries and daily operations by 15% in most cases. M&Os are marketed to the public as a means to “enhance student safety and special education programs.” Districts sell educators on increased pay, so (radical) teachers’ unions generally support overrides as well.
Tax increases are presented to homeowners in fractions and decimals and crumbs, rather than the sum total. Consequently, landowners must research their property value before they can know the full size of their “fraction.” Note that since overrides have literally been in place for decades, district representatives automatically expect taxpayers to honor the tradition of compliance as they’ve done in previous elections.
“Despite a 5% drop in district school enrollment since 2019, Arizona’s public-school districts have continued to expand facilities, increase capital spending by 67% to $8.9 billion, and boost transportation costs by 11.3% to $561.2 million, even as eligible bus riders plummeted by 45%…The fastest-shrinking districts have increased capital spending the most, with 20% of districts (serving 73% of students) receiving 81% of capital funding.”
Let’s be real. Taxpayers are not investing in gifted programs or sponsoring all-day kindergarten. This, my fellow proletariats, is what you call a bailout.
Rather than telling Arizonans how to vote in this election, I will instead refer you back to the information covered in this post. I encourage parents, property owners, and slighted educators to use sound judgment at the ballot box. Remember, the most basic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
Again, I’m no mathematician. But I’m willing to believe that at least a significant portion of the funds required to increase teacher salaries, enhance special needs programs, and implement cutting-edge safety plans can be found in the bank accounts of every district’s highest-paid employee.
Tiffany Benson is the Founder of Restore Parental Rights in Education. Her commentaries on education, politics, and Christian faith can be viewed at Parentspayattention.com and Bigviewsmallwindow.com. Follow her on socials @realtiffanyb.