Voucher growth may hit hurdle

Foes expected to force vote in ’18

A huge expansion of Arizona’s controversial school-voucher program is expected to be put on hold today, as a grass-roots group says it will file enough signatures to at least temporarily prevent the law from taking effect.

Four months ago, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed into law the expansion of the state’s school-voucher program in a late-night ceremony following a contentious day of armtwisting and back-room negotiations.

The expansion, which would make it possible for 30,000 of the state’s 1.1 million public-school students to join the program by 2022, was scheduled to take effect Wednesday. In anticipation, families have been preparing applications to receive tax dollars they can spend on private school tuition or other education services.

But Save Our Schools Arizona, the parent group trying to halt the expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, has collected more than 100,000 signatures, a spokeswoman told The Arizona Republic.

That’s enough to put the law on hold while the secretary of state determines whether the group has the 75,321 valid signatures needed to force a public vote on the law in November 2018. The signature-vetting process will take nearly two months.

“Upon filing that with us late in the day Tuesday, then the law will be suspended at that moment,” said state Elections Director Eric Spencer. “Based on the committee’s forecast of how many signatures it has turned into the secretary of state, that is normally going to be sufficient to suspend the operation of the law.”

The group opposes the use of public money

to help families pay for private and parochial schools. Group members argue that the funds should instead stay in public district schools, which they believe are underfunded and undervalued by Republican state leaders.

“The power of the people is stronger than money,” said Melinda Iyer, a member of Save Our Schools. “Education is the great equalizer. It’s the bootstraps that people pull themselves up by.”

Even if the group fails to get its proposal on the ballot, spokeswoman Dawn Penich-Thacker said, it has succeeded in sending a message to lawmakers: Many Arizonans oppose using public money for private schools.

Save Our Schools Arizona had hoped to turn in as many of 150,000 signatures to make certain that the law would go to voters in November 2018.

It’s unclear whether an estimated 100,000 signatures will yield enough valid signatures to get to 75,321 and enjoin the law until a public vote can be taken.

But the group, which sprouted last legislative session as members bonded at Capitol hearings on the expansion, appears to have already defied expectations.

Political consultants, lawmakers and lobbyists doubted a mostly volunteer effort could collect enough signatures to suspend the law, given their inexperience and minuscule funding compared with the monied “dark money” groups that backed the program, as well as the summer heat that makes it more difficult to find people to sign petitions.

The secretary of state will do an initial review for compliance that will eliminate signatures that aren’t in the right format. The secretary of state will then sample the remaining signatures to determine the rate of valid signatures.

Drew Chavez, owner of Petition Partners, said the average validation rate in Arizona since 1980 for both paid petitioners and volunteer campaigns is 73.5 percent. Paid petitioners often have a higher rate than volunteers.

Penich-Thacker said Save Our Schools’ signatures have been about 80 percent valid.

Joe Kanefield, a partner with the law firm Ballard Spahr and a former Arizona elections director, said a typical error rate would be 20 percent to 30 percent.

“I’ve never seen a petition drive filed that didn’t have an error rate of at least 20 percent,” he said.

With Save Our Schools turning in an estimated 100,000 signatures, Kanefield said, “that’s going to be pretty close.”

Arizona’s ESA program began in 2011 as a way to help students with special needs.

Since then, lawmakers have steadily expanded it to foster children, children from poor-performing schools, children of military families, those living on Native American reservations and siblings of children already in the ESA program.

Many Republicans hail the program as a novel way to give students greater access to the schools they want. But Democrats and some moderate Republicans say it will take millions of dollars from public schools to subsidize private and religious education for some families that might already be able to afford it.

Opponents have said conservatives’ longrange plan is to gut public schools. And they claimed to have evidence to sup- port that when, within an hour of lawmakers’ approving the latest expansion in March, one of ESA’s key backers, the libertarian Goldwater Institute, sent an email to donors vowing to remove the enrollment caps that were crucial to winning the bill’s passage.

The institute’s president apologized but added that if there’s strong demand, “I think everyone would want to re-evaluate the program.”

Ducey and state leaders pushed the expansion even though education officials cannot provide basic program information to the public, such as the amount of taxpayer money it sends to private and religious schools.

With its passage, Ducey and expansion-bill sponsor Sen. Debbie Lesko have been hailed as national leaders in the school-choice movement.

In June, the Denver Post reported that Ducey extolled the program during the billionaire Koch brothers’ retreat in Colorado Springs. The governor told those gathered, “These types of innovations are making a huge difference.” To push the legislation through, he said, “I needed the power of the (Koch) network.”

Lesko heaped praise on U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos last month for her schoolchoice advocacy work onstage at the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps advance school-choice legislation across the nation.

Lesko asked DeVos what she makes of the criticism that school vouchers benefit wealthier families over those of less means.

The billionaire DeVos said she has been working to help “those who are least empowered, those who can’t move, those who can’t afford to pay tuitions to have the same kind of choices that I have, I and my husband have had for our children. ... And frankly, some of the most vocal opponents to this, I believe, are totally hypocritical on this because they, too, have made those choices because they had the economic means ... to do so. I just dismiss that as a patently false argument.”

In the final days before Tuesday’s deadline to submit signatures, Lesko, of Peoria, was marshaling volunteers on social media to catch members of Save of Schools improperly collecting signatures.

Rep. Vince Leach of Tucson asked the attorney general to evaluate whether public money was used to help Save our Schools gather signatures, writing “time is of the essence.” The office is reviewing the complaint to determine if there is cause to move forward, a spokesman said.

And last week, attorney Kory Langhofer, on behalf of a dark-money group, accused Save Our Schools of using public resources while trying to gather signatures because it corresponded with a Glendale school district employee during work hours. The school district said on social media the complaint was “without merit.”

Lesko also recently said that if the group has enough signatures to send it to the ballot “all options are on the table.” The Legislature could repeal the law, taking away the ability to refer it to voters. Lawmakers could then later pass the same expansion bill, or a different version.

“If they get the signatures, then I’ll have to get together with other members of the Legislature and determine what we want to do,” Lesko said. “It’s way too soon for me to determine what we’re going to do. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

Referendum backers braved the steamy conditions Aug. 1 on the group’s unofficial date for petition gathers to turn in signatures.

Volunteers buzzed around the entrance of Changing Hands bookstore on Camelback Road in Phoenix, handing in petitions to be notarized and urging voters who hadn’t yet signed to add their names.

Claudia Tracht, a former teacher who works at Phoenix College, said she turned in four sheets with 15 names for a total of 60 signatures. She said she hosted a house party with her legislator to get them.

Tracht said she has two children in public schools and “didn’t want to see any more money taken from them.”

In addition, she said that ESA programs aren’t funded based on need the way they should be and instead are used by the wealthy. In March, The Republic found students using ESAs were largely abandoning higher-performing districts in moreaffluent areas and that participation in poorer districts was lacking.

“This program is really just the rich getting richer,” Tracht said.

Anne Thomas, a retired teacher from northcentral Phoenix, said she didn’t know about the petition drive before meeting Save Our Schools volunteers at Changing Hands. But Thomas, a Republican, she said she signed the petition because, she said, public schools should get more money, not less.

“I certainly don’t think our tax money should go to private schools,” Thomas said. “I really believe in public schools. I think that’s what makes America great. If a parent wants a private-school education, they should pay for it.”

Penich-Thacker, the group’s spokeswoman, said her biggest takeaway during the campaign was how many people strongly support public schools. After hearing all the rhetoric about school choice from the Legislature and private school backers, Penich-Thacker said she had internalized some of the “propaganda” that Arizona backs choice and not public schools.

“Doing this has shown me nothing is further from the truth,” she said.