Group touts vouchers for migrant students
A group promoting school choice in Arizona is marketing the state’s controversial voucher program to Spanish-speaking parents by telling them immigration status isn’t a barrier to receiving public money to attend private school.
American Federation for Children’s online Spanish-language pitch states:“Arizona has a state-funded program that pays for private schools for thousands of children who live in this state. They don’t verify income or immigration status. Children don’t need to have or maintain certain grades.”
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, which give public money that would otherwise go to local public schools to parents to use for private school and other educational services, have been supported by the Arizona Legislature’s Republican majority.
Many of those same lawmakers have also opposed illegal immigration and in-state college tuition for undocumented immigrants, including “dreamers” — the young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.
Kim Martinez, Arizona communications director for American Federation for Children, said immigration status isn’t a factor when applying for an ESA.
“We care about giving children access to the K-12 education of their family’s choice, in full compliance with the law. We don’t take positions on tangential immigration issues,” Martinez said in a statement. “Immigration status does not play a factor in ESA eligibility, just like it does not affect whether or not a child can attend an Arizona public school.”
But state Sen. John Kavanagh, RFountain Hills, said he opposes marketing ESAs to people who are in the country illegally.
“We passed ESA to promote good education, not illegal immigration,” Kavanagh said. “I strongly object to someone to try to divert funding to people who are here illegally.”
Kavanagh acknowledged that undocumented immigrants can legally use ESAs because federal law forbids the state from asking about a student’s immigration status. But, he said, their participation should not be encouraged.
“The most we can do is not encourage it,” Kavanagh said. “I don’t believe in promoting illegal immigration or using taxpayers’ dollars to sustain it.”
Conservative special interests such as American Federation for Children and the Goldwater Institute, which have pushed for ESAs at the Legislature, have for years marketed them to Arizona parents, in part, to combat criticism that the voucher program isn’t as popular with the public as lawmakers have been led to believe.
Dawn Penich-Thacker, spokeswoman for Save Our Schools Arizona, said the outreach to those who are here illegally shows a disconnect between what some special-interest groups say and what they do. Save Our Schools is the group responsible for the Proposition 305 ballot initiative asking voters if they want to keep or do away with the mostrecent expansion of the state’s schoolvoucher program.
“It just kind of speaks to the level of hypocrisy that exists with some of these special-interest dark-money groups,” she said. “They’ll bang the drum of ‘rule of law’ and ‘taxpayer accountability’ and yet simultaneously be marketing to a population of families that we might speculate that some of their top donors don’t want them marketing to.”