Arizona’s charter schools are about to receive a fresh infusion of taxpayer dollars in a federal grant from the United States Department of Education. The grant is expected to fund the establishment of two dozen new charter schools and bolster another 23 already in operation.
As reported by The Center Square, the state of Arizona has received approximately 24% of the $143 million awarded across the nation by the Expanding Opportunities Through Quality Charter Schools Program, a total of about $34.8 million. The outlet noted that although the funding originates from fiscal 2024 it will be distributed in annual disbursements through 2029.
— Arizona Department of Education (@azedschools) December 4, 2024
In a press release from the Arizona Department of Education (ADE), Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said, “I am extremely pleased that we have received this federal grant that will create 24 new high-quality charter schools and help another 23 existing schools with models and practices that result in academic growth. I want to commend the department staff who competed for this funding. Their work has resulted in the state receiving the largest recipient of this grant, per capita, in the country.”
Horne added, “Arizona is the leader in the country on school choice and charters are a major component of that. These dollars will serve a vital purpose in making sure that an estimated 10,000 students in traditionally underserved areas will have a chance to select a high-quality charter school. Every student in every part of our state, urban or rural, rich or poor, deserves this opportunity and I am very pleased to be a part of this effort.”
Speaking with AZ Capitol Times, Horne explained Arizona’s long-term history of fostering charter schools saying, “The charter schools in Arizona go back to the 1990s.” Then, he noted that as a state legislator, he championed charter schools and their purpose. “Even a good district school may not necessarily meet the needs of all the students,” Horne told the outlet. “And so the parents should have the ability to find a school that does meet those needs.”
In the release, ADE stated that it has already begun work on the upcoming project “which aims to increase the number of high-quality charter schools focusing on educationally disadvantaged students.” It added that such students are identified by their economic disadvantage, disability status, as non-English speakers, and as “other demographic groups.”
The statement outlined the grant’s purpose stating:
“The grant also seeks to close achievement gaps in academic scores, provide technical assistance to educators to improve teaching and learning and encourage dual or concurrent enrollment in college level courses. The expectation is that students will experience at least one year of academic growth on state tests for math, reading and language arts with a long-term measurement of cumulative three-year growth.”
At present, approximately 560 charter schools are in operation throughout Arizona serving about 231,000 students. The Center Square report cited the Arizona Charter Schools Association. Under Arizona law, all charter schools are open enrollment and as a result enjoy wide adoption. The outlet reported that the California Department of Education, Colorado League of Charter Schools, New York State Education Department, Utah Association of Public Charter Schools, and Rhode Island Department of Education also received 2024 grant funding as well.
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’s most recent Republican governor is cheering on his state’s latest ranking in a key education report.
This week, Governor Doug Ducey shared a new report from the Reason Foundation on the “K-12 open enrollment laws of all 50 states.” Ducey said, “Another new report shows that Arizona’s education system is one of the best in the nation. Arizona ranks number 3 among all 50 states for our expansive open enrollment policies that ensure every Arizona family has access to a good, high-quality education.”
Another new report shows that Arizona's education system is one of the best in the nation. Arizona ranks number 3 among all 50 states for our expansive open enrollment policies that ensure every Arizona family has access to a good, high-quality education.https://t.co/y88EOVhJjo
Jude Schwalbach, a Senior Policy Analyst for Reason, said, “K-12 open enrollment lets students transfer to public schools other than their residentially assigned one so long as space is available. School parents widely support this policy. Public polling from October 2023 by yes. every kid. and YouGov showed that 84% of school parents supported it, while EdChoice’s July 2024 polling showed that 73% of school parents supported open enrollment.”
Schwalbach added, “Students participating in Arizona’s, Colorado’s, and Florida’s open enrollment programs tended to transfer to school districts that were ranked higher by the state, according to Reason Foundation research… On average, 10% of students in Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin used open enrollment during the 2021-22 school year, totaling more than 450,000 students. Nearly 177,000 of these transferred to schools in other districts. In Wisconsin, open enrollment was the most popular form of school choice and the second most popular in Arizona and Florida during that time, according to data published by Education Next.”
State-specific analysis for Arizona revealed that “the Grand Canyon State also requires districts and schools to update their available capacity every 12 weeks by grade level on their website. The Arizona Department of Education must also provide an annual report to policymakers and the public that shows ‘the open enrollment participation rate by school district, school, and county, including the number of pupils, by student subgroup designation, in each school and school district that are open enrolled as resident pupils, resident transfer pupils, or nonresident pupils for each school district and the school districts and zip codes from which students are rejected.’”
The report gave three suggestions for Arizona to increase its standing with the open enrollment laws. Those ways were as follows:
“Require the SEA to publish the number of rejected applicants and explain why they were denied in its annual report.
“Clarify that school districts cannot reject transfer applicants based on their abilities.
“Require school districts to inform parents of rejected transfer applicants in writing the reasons for rejection.”
In the 2022 report, which was the final one of Ducey’s administration, Reason wrote of the Arizona system and subsequent ranking, “Opponents to open enrollment often object to the policy because it could lower the value of homes inside the district or attendance zones, unfairly penalizing families that ‘bought into the system.’ However, the public school choice options available to families in Arizona should allay those fears. The state’s mandatory cross-district and within-district open enrollment program operates side by side with a robust charter school system. Despite the fact that nearly one in four students enrolled in affluent Scottsdale’s public schools is assigned to different school districts, home values have not decreased. In fact, Scottsdale home prices have steadily increased in recent years. This shows that open enrollment does not damage property values; instead a robust education marketplace can actually be an attractive component to home buyers.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne issued a statement of support for a lawsuit challenging Attorney General Kris Mayes’ restrictions on the state’s school choice program.
Horne said that he maintains concerns that Mayes will demand the return of Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) funds from families based on her interpretation of the laws governing allowable expenses.
In July, Mayes advised the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) that, per her interpretation of the law, parents should no longer be reimbursed for supplementary educational materials not expressly outlined in curriculum.
Though Mayes acknowledged that the statute on which she based her interpretation didn’t offer a definition of “supplemental materials,” she argued in her letter to Associate Superintendent John Ward that the State Board of Education’s definition of the term should apply: “relevant materials directly related to the course of study for which they are being used that introduce content and instructional strategies or that enhance, complement, enrich, extend or support the curriculum.”
Mayes’ application of this definition requires explicit mention of all supplies required within a curriculum: even things like pencils and erasers. The ADE handbook doesn’t require documentation of items “generally known to be educational” in their purpose, such as pencils and erasers.
The attorney general directed Ward to provide documentation of total supplementary material expenditure from 2019 to present, as well as funds spent on curriculum materials without curriculum documentation and approved textbooks lacking proof of requirement by a qualified school or eligible postsecondary institution.
In response to Mayes’ directive, the Goldwater Institute sued on behalf of ESA mothers Velia Aguirre and Rosemary McAtee. The two mothers homeschool their children: Aguirre homeschools all three of her children, while McAtee homeschools seven of her nine children.
In their argument, the Goldwater Institute argued that Mayes’ directive was not only in violation of the law, it was a jeopardy to the existing backlog of tens of thousands of purchase orders — an issue that would inherently impact the education of many children relying on those ESA funds.
The Goldwater Institute also pointed out in a press release that not even public and private school curriculums necessarily list supplementary items such as pencils and erasers.
In a statement, Horne expressed hope that the Goldwater Institute would prevail in its lawsuit.
“The Department of Education concedes the argument of the Goldwater Institute. When this issue first arose in July, my concern was that the Attorney General could force Empowerment Scholarship Account holders to return funds if they did not comply with her office’s interpretation of the law. This lawsuit will settle the issue in court and my sincere hope is that the arguments made by Goldwater will prevail.”
Horne had issued an anticipatory show of support for a hypothetical lawsuit from the Goldwater Institute in a response on the ADE page for ESAs immediately following Mayes’ letter. Horne clarified that a prior court decision bound ADE from having the standing to file lawsuits.
The superintendent said that he doesn’t agree with Mayes’ interpretation that supplementary materials are required to be tied to curriculum. However, Horne said that Mayes’ directive was one his department advised him that he couldn’t challenge and win.
As of Monday, over 78,600 students were enrolled in the ESA Program.
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