2017 in Arizona ... whoa (and wow)

2017 … whoa. I mean, really. Whoa.

It was the year that Arizona’s governor proposed giving Arizona’s teachers a four-tenths of a percent pay raise (but ultimately more than doubled it, to a whole $1 a day). The year when Arizona’s senators became the bur under the backside of America’s president.

It was the year of Joe Arpaio’s big pardon, Jeff Flake’s big re-election announcement and Kelli Ward’s big mouth, suggesting that Sen. John McCain resign and she take his seat. This, not even 48 hours of McCain finding out he had a deadly form of cancer.

In 2017, we watched ASU spend $12 million to get rid of a football coach who had a winning season and discovered that Rep. Raúl Grijalva (read: you) spent $48,000 to get rid of a congressional staffer who complained about his drunken behavior.

Then there was the breathtaking fall of Rep. Trent Franks, who apparently spent a sizable amount of his time trolling about with $5 million in hand, in search of a female staffer who would agree to have his baby — presumably the old-fashioned way.

But along with the whoa, this year brought us a few wow moments as well, stories easily overlooked or forgotten as we struggled to scrape our jaws off the floor. Stories of people stepping up, people never giving up, people … Protecting the Angels among us. Sen. Kate Brophy McGee led the way in remembering 19-month-old Angel Manuel Rodriguez. In 2014, shortly after his death, this Phoenix Republican vowed that never again would a child so easily slip through the state’s fingers. Not if she could help it.

Angel spent 14 of his 19 months on this earth with foster parents who nursed him to health after two open heart surgeries. Then the Department of Child Safety sent him to live with his mother and boyfriend. Three months later, he was beaten to death.

DCS never explained why it sent a child to live with a man awaiting trial for domestic violence or why the child remained there even after the man pleaded guilty. The only logical conclusion: the agency never checked out the boyfriend before essentially putting Angel into his arms.

Brophy McGee began working in 2015 to put a bar over the shortcut that landed Angel in a far-too-early grave. The Senate killed her first attempt, but she never gave up. This year, she and DCS Director Greg McKay succeeded, changing the law to require that DCS check the background of all adults living in a household before leaving a child there.

Senate Bill 1109 was unanimously approved and on March 31, Ducey quietly signed Angel’s Law. “Hopefully,” Brophy McGee told me, “this tips the scales and better balances the right of these defenseless children to live.”

Saving a school library. When seven volunteers who work at William T. Machan Elementary School learned in May that the school’s library would be closed due to federal cuts to Title I schools, they sprang into action. This central Phoenix school is in a poor area. Many of the parents are immigrants who never made it past the sixth grade. Their children don’t have books or internet access at home, and they certainly don’t have a way to get to the nearest public library.

So the volunteers decided to raise the $15,000 needed to keep Machan’s library open this year. No child, they told me, should go without books. Turns out many of you agreed, because donations came pouring in once readers learned about the library’s plight.

In all, $97,295 was raised to keep it open. A Creighton Elementary School District official told me the excess money will be set aside for the library’s use in future years. As one of the 500 donors, Sharon Griffith Dick of Glendale, told me, “I can’t even begin to imagine a world where school children don’t have access to books.”

Rescuing the rescuer. In the predawn hours of Jan. 12, Thomas Yoxall was headed to California when suddenly, out of the darkness, he came upon what must have been a surreal sight along the side of Interstate 10 just west of Tonopah: a man fighting with a state highway patrolman, pounding the officer’s head into the pavement.

The Department of Public Safety would later explain that Trooper Ed Andersson had stopped at the scene of an overturned car when he was ambushed by the driver of the car, Leonard Penuelas-Escobar. Andersson had been shot twice and was being pummeled into the pavement when Yoxall pulled up.

Yoxall repeatedly yelled at the attacker to stop. When he didn’t, Yoxall stopped him, shooting him in the chest and head and saving Andersson’s life.

“I’m an ordinary person,” Yoxall would later say. “I was put in extraordinary circumstances and may have acted heroically, but I don’t consider myself a hero.”