Activists reported that they have turned in more than 420,00 signatures for a ballot initiative that would end the universality of Arizona’s school choice program.
Supporters wearing red shirts reading “Public School Proud” affiliated with Save Our Schools Arizona (SOSA) gathered outside the secretary of state’s office to watch the box truck delivery of the boxes containing the signatures for the ballot initiative. Both SOSA and the Arizona Education Association (AEA) were behind the initiative.
SOSA and the AEA contend the universality of the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program diverts far too much in funding away from public schools. Families within the program don’t have to depart their public schools; however, since the expansion of the ESA program to all students in 2022, enrollment in public schools has declined. Defenders of the ESA program counter that per-pupil spending in the program costs less than in public schooling.
ESA program funds may be used for private school tuition, tutoring, online courses, homeschool curriculum, educational therapies, textbooks, educational software, testing fees, and college courses.
The Protect Education Act (PEA) would impose income restrictions on the ESA program.
Estimates show that approximately 20,300 current students in the ESA program would be disqualified under the PEA initially, though that number would grow to exclude more than half of Arizona’s families with school-aged children due to inflationary impact on incomes outpacing the income cap adjustment.
The act would also impose accreditation requirements and further restrictions on spending.
The ESA program has reported the enrollment of more than 100,000 students. More than 8,200 were listed as new students enrolled for the next school year.
Those who support keeping the universality of the ESA program have been maneuvering to preserve protections for some member families.
The Republican majority in the state legislature passed a ballot measure of their own last month: HCR 2048, the “Military Families College Savings and Scholarship Protection Act,” which would amend the Arizona Constitution to prohibit the confiscation of ESA program funds from students belonging to military families.
Should voters approve both the lawmakers’ measure and PEA, it is likely the latter would be voided under language included in the former.
In addition, Doug Ducey, the former governor who signed universal school choice into Arizona law, made an announcement Thursday of a political action committee dedicated to securing school choice protections for military families. Ducey was announced as the chairman of the Protect Military Families PAC.
“Out-of-state special interests and their union allies are trying to take educational scholarships away from the children of Arizona’s military families,” said Ducey.
Serving alongside Ducey on the political action committee is Ashley Ragan, president of InCompliance AZ.
Out-of-state special interests and their union allies are trying to take educational scholarships away from the children of Arizona’s military families.
That is why today, we are proud to launch Protect Military Families PAC @ProtectMilFam.
The Goldwater Institute, a public policy think tank and litigation organization, filed a motion in the Maricopa County Superior Court earlier this week on behalf of two military families involved in the ESA program.
The organization said that about 1,000 other military families stand to be disqualified from the ESA program should the universalization end.
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Andrew Costanzo, a Republican candidate for the 7th legislative district, still believes public education is key to Arizona’s future. But Costanzo says Arizona has serious need for reform — and that’s why public schools continue to decline.
Costanzo has proposed remedying low student proficiency rates by increasing school choice competition, mirroring Mississippi law, and implementing merit-based bonuses for educators.
He has also proposed growing the state’s universal school choice program by allowing property taxes to follow the child rather than according to the geographical predeterminations that fund school districts.
Costanzo is also very much against the proposed ballot initiative to end universal school choice. He said opportunity for educational freedom should be afforded to all, regardless of economic status. He also said educators would benefit from greater competition because they would be marketable on merit.
“How will these children reach their full potential as adults if they can’t read? We’re causing them a lifetime of pain,” said Costanzo in an interview last month. “The schools need something that benefits all businesses, and that’s competition.”
Costanzo also proposed enacting legislation similar to Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act in Arizona, which policy experts have credited with a dramatic turnaround in student outcomes.
The lifelong Republican, who operates a family business near Payson, views freedom as the result of individuals taking on personal responsibilities and risks.
“Security, which is typically imagined, requires minimal personal responsibility and risk,” stated Costanzo’s website. “The alleged security is always provided at the loss of freedom.”
Beyond those philosophical takes on political matters, Costanzo presented a platform heavy on reducing government regulations through serious bureaucratic downsizing and greater deference to local governments, while increasing election security measures, resisting increased gun restrictions and abortion freedoms, retaining protections for law enforcement, and rolling back renewable energies.
Costanzo said in an interview last month that the legislature must “economically strangle” cartels and further scrutinize state agencies to recover what he says are sizable amounts of taxpayer funds being lost.
“It is so evident that there is waste, fraud, and abuse [in Arizona],” said Costanzo.
Costanzo’s platform also addressed at length the ongoing consequences of mass illegal immigration.
He described opposition to the present government handling of the illegal immigration crisis. According to Costanzo, the status quo victimizes both the illegal aliens and Americans. Illegal aliens face exploitation due to their vulnerable status as noncitizens, while Americans face the burdens of increased crime and strained public resources.
“Illegal aliens are often exploited financially, physically, or sexually. These people become part of an underclass of humans, a new form of slavery,” said Costanzo. “Whomever the victim, law enforcement resources must be implemented, the legal system is burdened, and incarcerations are applied. All paid for by the American taxpayer. […] [And t]he children of illegal aliens only put more pressure on an already failing [public school] system. Children who do not speak English must receive additional attention and resources, depriving the same from American students.”
Costanzo has been involved with the Arizona Republican Party, Gila County Republican Committee, Maricopa County Republican Committee, and Arizona Law Enforcement Emerald Society. He served as a precinct committeeman as well as a chairman, first vice chairman, and secretary for his legislative district.
This year marks Costanzo’s second time running for this office. He failed to secure the nomination in the 2024 Republican primary, which proved to be more crowded than this year’s primary: six candidates fought for two seats.
The 7th legislative district has fewer contenders in the Republican primary this time around.
State Rep. Walt Blackman is running to retain his seat, the other vacated by the April resignation of former lawmaker David Marshall. Three candidates are fighting for that spot vacated by a would-be incumbent: Costanzo and fellow 2024 primary candidate, Barby Ingle, and former state representative David Cook.
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Arizona lawmakers may soon be summoned back to the Capitol for a special session to consider a “grand bargain” on Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). If so, they should put the interests of ESA families first.
Under one version of the deal, the Arizona Education Association (AEA) and its allies would drop their ballot initiative restricting ESAs. In exchange, the legislature would abandon three measures it referred to the ballot this session — protections for military families’ scholarships, payroll reform for teachers’ unions, and a mandate that districts spend 60 percent of their budgets on instruction — and would enact most of the ESA provisions debated this session in House Bill 2142. (There’s one important exception: the unnecessary testing mandate would be dropped.)
A much better deal, proposed by Republican gubernatorial candidate Andy Biggs, would offer “one for one,” with the legislature dropping the payroll ballot measure in return for the AEA dropping its ballot measure. The legislative GOP caucus is behind the Biggs deal—the question is just how desperate the AEA is to avoid going to the ballot. But if the “grand bargain” requires some reforms to the ESA program, legislators should hold out for a better deal than the original proposal.
The AEA-backed initiative is not a modest accountability measure; it is a serious threat to the ESA program, imposing a host of harmful regulations, including a restrictive income cap that would kick tens of thousands of students off the program, blocking parents from buying basic school supplies, and confiscating funds that families had saved for their children’s education. If Democrats balk at the Biggs proposal, trading away three referred measures and a handful of program restrictions to make that threat disappear is a defensible trade.
But as Arizona’s ESA defenders take yes for an answer, they should be honest about what they’re doing and minimize harm to ESA families. The HB2142-based “grand bargain” is not, as the American Federation for Children (AFC) has suggested, a set of “commonsense reforms” that simply tidy up the program. It is a series of concessions — real costs imposed on real families — that ESA supporters are accepting because the alternative is worse. Calling it “commonsense” or a “fix” obscures this. It allows the organization to claim credit for “saving” the ESA program without ever having to explain to the families of more than 100,000 students who rely on it what its own proposed changes will actually do to their accounts.
In the wake of the HB2142-based proposal, I solicited feedback about it on a social network page for ESA families. I received nearly 400 comments from ESA parents who overwhelmingly opposed the proposed regulations. They explained in detail how the supposedly “commonsense” restrictions would hamper their ability to provide their children with an education that works best for them.
Here is what the three central provisions of the HB2142-based proposal would actually do — and why each of them, even if ultimately worth swallowing in some form, makes the program worse for the families it serves.
Capping Rollover Funds
A key feature of ESAs that distinguishes them from a traditional voucher is that families can save unspent funds from year to year rather than being forced to spend a lump sum on a single school by a single deadline. This matters because families spend their own money more efficiently than bureaucrats spend other people’s money. The ability to save and re-deploy funds gives families both the incentive to economize and the flexibility to plan for expenses that don’t arrive on a tidy nine-month school-year schedule. A voucher must be spent now, at one school, or it will be lost. ESA funds can be banked for next year’s therapy bill, a multi-year curriculum purchase, or a future tuition increase.
The deal under discussion would cap how much families can carry forward — $50,000 for students with disabilities, $24,000 for everyone else — with the excess confiscated and deposited into the state general fund each year. That won’t matter for most families who spend close to their full allotment annually. But for the families who most need the flexibility ESAs were designed to provide, particularly families of students with special needs, it will be a bitter pill to swallow.
Families saving toward a multi-year placement at a specialized school, parents stockpiling funds for a major piece of assistive technology, or families anticipating a more expensive placement as a child with a disability ages into more intensive services — these are exactly the families a cap punishes.
The rollover cap is a “solution” in search of a problem. The rollover cap creates a perverse “use it or lose it” incentive that won’t save money; it will only encourage wasteful spending. If lawmakers proceed with a cap, the least they should do is exempt students with disabilities entirely. The case for forced spend-down is weakest exactly where the case for flexibility is strongest: students whose educational and therapeutic needs are least predictable and most expensive over time.
Fingerprinting Mandate
The deal would require fingerprint clearance cards — the same background-check credential used for school district and charter school employees — for individuals providing tutoring or teaching services paid for with ESA funds, as well as for staff at qualified private schools. For an institution — a school, a learning center, a tutoring company with a storefront and rotating staff — this is a reasonable extension of an existing framework, as schools are already required to fingerprint their teachers.
But the bill does not stop at institutions. As drafted, it would also sweep in independent tutors — the retired teacher down the street who tutors a handful of children at a family’s kitchen table, the local college student who helps with algebra twice a week. This is a fundamentally different relationship from a teacher supervising a classroom of other people’s children at an institution. A tutor working in a family’s own home, under that family’s direct supervision and invited in by that family’s own judgment, is not analogous to a stranger left alone with a building full of students.
Parents already vet who comes into their homes; that is what parental choice means. Mandating a state-administered background-check bureaucracy on top of that judgment does not make children safer — it makes it harder and more expensive to find a tutor at all, particularly in the specialized subjects and therapeutic disciplines where the pool of qualified providers is already thin.
The fix here is narrow and obvious: limit the fingerprinting requirement to qualified schools and institutional tutoring providers, and exempt individual tutors providing services in a student’s own home. That preserves the child-safety rationale where it actually applies — institutional settings with unsupervised access to multiple children — without taxing the much more common, much more easily supervised arrangement of one family hiring one tutor.
Spending Restrictions
The deal under consideration also adds a long, explicit list of disallowed expenses. Most of this list is theater. Jewelry, lingerie, hot tubs, bounce houses, and gift cards were never allowable ESA expenses in the first place. Codifying their prohibition changes nothing about what families can actually buy. It exists to give legislators something to point to — a list that sounds tough — rather than to solve an actual problem in the program. That is itself a tell about how this provision came to be.
But a few items on the list are genuinely new restrictions, and those deserve scrutiny on the merits. Barring out-of-state and international museums and excursions, for instance, would forbid spending ESA funds on precisely the kind of experiential, field-based learning that homeschooling and hybrid-schooling families have used for years — a trip to a Civil War battlefield, a national museum in Washington, D.C., a language-immersion excursion across the border. These are not luxuries dressed up as education — for many families building a curriculum outside a traditional classroom, they are the curriculum. Banning them doesn’t close a loophole. It closes off a category of legitimate, well-documented educational practice that happens to be easy to caricature in a press release.
Hotel stays, meals, plane tickets and other travel expenses are already properly forbidden, but there’s no good reason to prevent families from purchasing tickets to a museum outside Arizona that would be allowed if it were in Arizona. Any grand bargain should restore legitimate educational purchases to the allowable-uses list.
Why AFC Is Getting This Wrong
None of these three provisions emerged from a serious conversation with ESA families about what they need. They emerged from a desire to manage headlines. Rather than designing ESA policy in the best interests of ESA families, AFC’s strategy would let school-choice opponents dictate the policy agenda. Chief among them is school-choice opponent Craig Harris at Channel 12, who has spent the better part of a year manufacturing alarm about ESA account balances and fraud rates that bear little resemblance to reality. The Arizona Department of Education has confirmed that flagged fraudulent or egregious spending amounts to roughly 0.3 percent of total ESA spending — a rate that would be the envy of nearly any government program. Harris has claimed fraud rates many times higher, and signature gatherers for the AEA-backed and AFC-backed ballot campaigns alike have been caught on camera spreading those falsehoods to voters.
The right response to false claims is to correct them. Instead, AFC has chosen to give ESA opponents a say in how to regulate the program — an approach that has repeatedly proven disastrous for ESA families. Instead of proposing rollover caps because Harris made an issue of high account balances, school-choice proponents should explain to Arizona voters why families save those balances in the first place — often precisely because they have a child with disabilities whose needs are expensive and unpredictable.
AFC’s approach sets a dangerous precedent: when an activist-journalist manufactures a talking point, AFC’s policy response is to regulate around it rather than to defend the program based on the facts.
Arizona’s ESA families were not asked whether they would trade their ability to save for a child’s future needs, or their ability to hire a trusted neighbor as a tutor, for a quieter news cycle. They deserve a coalition that designs policy around what actually serves them — not one that lets their loudest opponents write the rules by proxy, then dresses up the result as “commonsense.”
The next time AFC or any other organization in this space asks Arizona families to accept a “commonsense reform,” someone should ask the obvious question: commonsense according to whom, and at whose expense? If the goal is just to keep Craig Harris’s headlines at bay, it’s a fool’s errand — he and his ilk will continue manufacturing anti-ESA headlines so long as there’s an ESA program.
“Avoiding bad headlines” is not a serious approach to policymaking and certainly not in the interests of ESA families. Arizona’s ESA families deserve better.
Consider the Deal — With Open Eyes
None of this is an argument against the special-session deal. The AEA-backed initiative would do far more damage to far more families than a rollover cap or a fingerprinting mandate ever could, and trading three referred ballot measures plus some unnecessary or even harmful ESA restrictions to take that threat off the table is a trade worth considering. Dropping the testing mandate from the deal is itself a meaningful win, preserving the central insight of school choice: families, not state-mandated exams, are the accountability mechanism.
Taking the HB2142-based deal might be a necessary evil, but it’s certainly not a victory. At best, it would be a retreat to a more politically defensible position, not a “commonsense” fix or policy advance. If there is a special session, lawmakers who support the ESA should do everything in their power to minimize the harm to ESA families. That would entail supporting the Biggs proposal or, at the very least, holding out for revisions to HB2142 that seriously consider the impact on ESA families.
Jason Bedrick is a Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
The town of Gilbert’s vice mayor is one of the biggest individual donors to an effort to end universal school choice in the state.
Councilman Charles “Chuck” Bongiovanni was one of a small number to provide funding to Protect Education, Accountability Now (PEAN), the political action committee behind a ballot initiative to limit access to the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program.
A majority of PEAN’s funds have come from national and local teachers’ unions: the D.C.-based National Education Association gave $2.5 million, and the Arizona Education Association gave $10,000.
As of this report, only three others donated more to PEAN than Bongiovanni: former PetSmart CEO Phil Francis and his wife, former Valleywise Health Foundation board member Nita Francis, donated $25,000; and a retired Avondale computer software author and frequent donor to Democrats, Roxton Baker, donated $1,000.
Bongiovanni donated $500 to the cause. Excluding Bongiovanni and the other top three individual donors, the median of total donations from individual donors reported so far — about 100 in total — was about $20.
After Bongiovanni, the next-highest donation was in the amount of $250 from Linda Thor, at-large member of the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board.
Bongiovanni has also laid claim to being the largest donor for the LD14 Democrats, though he has donated to some Republicans.
Bongiovanni, who is running for reelection to the council, is the CEO of Majestic Residences: claimed as the second-largest franchised residential assisted living provider in the country and the largest in its main state of operations, North Carolina.
Bongiovanni’s reelection platform focused on the likelihood of increasing costs to residents in order to address aging infrastructure, which he defined as water, sewer, and road.
However, Bongiovanni has taken a less strict approach to defining infrastructure for the purposes of justifying increased costs and taxes.
In October 2024, Bongiovanni and other council members voted to raise sales taxes on all goods and services sold in Gilbert. The tax raise was controversial beyond the increased financial burden to property owners and businesses: it earned the nickname “the pickleball tax” because the revenue would go to projects not traditionally defined as critical infrastructure, but so defined by the council, like pickleball courts, splash pads, a ropes course, and a statement bridge.
The Goldwater Institute sued the town over the tax in December 2024. The lawsuit accused the council of pushing an illegal tax hike on services. That lawsuit is still active.
What’s more, just last year, the town council approved its third water rate hike since 2024.
The backlash incited the ire of some Gilbert residents, and even one man who was arrested for threatening violence against council members in retaliation over the rate increase.
Bongiovanni also took credit for establishing the town’s hiring of a police officer dedicated to preventing teen violence, and the establishment of the Dementia-Friendly City Program.
In the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce candidate forum in April, Bongiovanni proposed expanding the size of town government to expedite the town’s turnaround times, specifically citing the permitting department.
Bongiovanni didn’t look to accomplish that this year. In the fiscal year 2027 budget passed earlier this month, Bongiovanni and the council approved $2.7 billion representing a commitment to maintenance of present operations, not expansion.
Bongiovanni also hinted at inviting a greater corporate presence into Gilbert, though he declined to elaborate on which entities he has been courting.
“I’m also looking for Disneyland — I don’t mean Disneyland itself, I’m looking for a big project,” said Bongiovanni. “[S]ome very huge projects that bring in, like, $200 million into our tax base. That’s all we’re going to need forever.”
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I have sat at the desk where the reimbursement requests come in. I have reviewed the accounts flagged for misuse. I have personally picked up the phone and called parents when something did not look right. I ran Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program as its Executive Director, and I am here to tell you that the public conversation about this program is missing something critical: the truth about how it actually works.
You have heard the complaints. Fraud. Waste. No accountability. What you have not heard, because no one is saying it, is that robust accountability mechanisms already exist in this program and they are working. There have been plenty of op-eds, news reports, and counter-claims about ESA fraud. But very few of them come from someone who managed the program from the inside, day to day, and watched those guardrails operate in real time. I did. And this is what they look like.
Every parent who receives an ESA signs a legally binding contract. They must verify their child’s identity and their own Arizona residency before a single dollar is approved. Every purchase requires documentation: an invoice or a receipt. No documentation, no payment. If misuse is suspected, the account is immediately suspended and reviewed. If a parent attempts to bypass that suspension by going directly to the digital wallet vendor, that act is classified as fraud and results in immediate termination. Confirmed fraud is referred to the Attorney General for investigation and potential prosecution. And critically, all of that account holder’s ESA contracts may be terminated, not just the one in question. Misused funds must be repaid. Offenders can be permanently barred from the program.
The contract also prohibits account holders from concurrently accepting ESA funds and a School Tuition Organization scholarship in the same contract year. Reselling any item purchased with ESA funds is strictly prohibited. Tutors and instructional providers must have no disciplinary action pending before the State Board of Education for immoral or unprofessional conduct. These are not suggestions. They are enforceable contract terms with real consequences.
Every morning, an automated report runs at the Arizona Department of Education, cross-referencing every ESA student against public school enrollment rosters. Any student found enrolled in both loses their ESA account that same day. No warnings, no exceptions. Parents agree to cover core subjects: reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies, and science. All school staff with unsupervised access to students must be fingerprinted. Cash withdrawals are prohibited. Televisions, video game consoles, and non-educational equipment are explicitly unallowable. Incomplete documentation triggers a formal audit. And any unused funds that roll over may only be used after graduation for post-secondary tuition, textbooks, and fees. Nothing else.
When I personally called parents about suspicious requests, the answer was the same every time: they had made an honest mistake. They did not know the rule. They were informed, they returned the funds, and they continued in the program. The guardrails caught it. The system worked.
The fraud rate in this program is among the lowest of any government program in Arizona. Every confirmed case of fraud has been referred for investigation or prosecution. The fact that you can find those cases in the news is not evidence the program is broken; it is proof the oversight is doing its job.
And beyond all of the formal protections sits the most powerful accountability of all: these are parents who chose to be here. They made a deliberate decision to take responsibility for their child’s education. There is no bureaucrat, no administrator, and no government program that will ever advocate for a child the way their own parent will. That is not a weakness in the program’s accountability. That is its greatest strength.
Arizona’s ESA students are thriving. The program is accountable, it is lawful, and it is working. Before you accept the narrative that it isn’t, ask yourself why you have never heard any of this before, and who benefits from you not knowing.
Christine Accurso is the State of Arizona’s former ESA executive director, a long time school choice advocate, and the leader of the very successful Decline to Sign movement when the parents won the ESA fight in 2022 ushering in the Universal ESA program for all AZ students.
