Time for Ducey to support our Ariz. schools

On Monday afternoon, Gov. Doug Ducey will deliver his State of the State address, explaining once again how he’s a big, big supporter of public education. Big.

Just not big enough, sadly, to stop cutting taxes and instead make the needed investment in the schools attended by 95 percent of Arizona’s children.

I hope I’m wrong about that.

I hope this governor will listen to the business leaders he tapped in 2015 to sit on his Classrooms First Initiative Council, asking them to propose changes to the school funding formula to get more money into the classroom.

After more than a year of study, the council’s chairman, Kitchell Corp. CEO Jim Swanson, concluded that there’s no way to grow out of the financial hole in which our schools currently reside.

Twenty-five years of budget cuts — cuts that total $4 billion in lost revenue, according to ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business — have left the state simply unable to properly fund the schools. Swanson proposed asking voters in November to extend the 0.6 percent education sales tax that expires in 2021 and increase it to 1.5 percent to raise an extra $1 billion.

“From a business perspective, properly funding education is probably the greatest economic development thing we can do in our state,” Swanson said in September.

I hope this governor will listen to Phil Francis, former chairman and CEO of PetSmart, Reg Ballantyne, past president of the state Board of Education, and other business leaders who laud Ducey’s ideas but note that we can’t afford to implement any of them because we rank in the bottom 10 percent of states when it comes to per-student spending.

“We support his commitments to increasing teacher pay, full-day kindergarten, restoring capital funding, preparing teachers, and investing in construction trade workforce development,” they wrote in a December op-ed. “In order to fully fund these goals we need to identify new revenue, 100 percent dedicated to education.”

They, too, have proposed a sales-tax increase, though curiously they want to delay taking it to voters until 2020.

I hope this governor will listen to Arizona voters. Public opinion polls have shown time and again that education is their highest priority — that teacher salaries are too low and that the state is not spending enough on public education.

I hope this governor will listen to … me. OK, so that’s a pipe dream.

But I’ve talked to plenty of teachers who have given everything they’ve got to their students and now are losing hope that they can hang on, as classes get bigger, demands grow heavier and bills pile up on the kitchen table.

Teachers like, Deidre, who has a master’s degree and 20 years in the classroom.

“I teach my heart out all day and need a second job,” she told me.

Teachers like John, who responded to my recent column about the 866 teachers who already have quit this year — the one noting that more than six out of every 10 vacancies either remain unfilled or were filled with people who couldn’t qualify for a standard teaching certificate.

“867 if you count me,” John replied. “I’m done in May. I’ll still teach ESS/ Special Education just not in Arizona.” Teachers like Sue. “After 11 years teaching in AZ, this will be my last year. I’m exhausted,” she wrote. “It’s terribly sad. I believe in public education. But being a public school teacher in this state is an exercise in self-flagellation.”

Mostly, I hope Ducey will listen to himself.

To all of the right things he will say on Monday. About the value of teachers and the need to raise their pay, about the importance of full-day kindergarten and the absolute imperative that every child have access to a quality education, no matter the size of his or her parents’ pocketbook.

Here is Ducey during last year’s State of the State address: “I want the teachers of our state to know: You make the difference. …. I value your work, and it’s time we return the favor.”

It is time — to do the hard thing finally and fix

it.

The inescapable fact — the one you can’t bury beneath a speech full of pretty promises — is this: the state is now spending $749 less to educate an Arizona child than it did a decade ago, when adjusted for inflation.

The cuts to our schools, we were told at the time of the Great Recession, were regrettable but unavoidable.

Well, the economy came back. Our leaders’ commitment to public education didn’t.