The next lawsuit

The Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest and attorney Tim Hogan, who represented the schools in the first lawsuit, are expected to file a lawsuit on behalf of several school districts, alleging the governor and Legislature have shorted districts hundreds of millions of dollars a year for building maintenance and soft-capital needs.

School boards across the state have voted to join the lawsuit as plaintiffs, including Glendale Unified, Chino Valley Unified, Yuma’s Crane Elementary and southern Arizona’s Elfrida Elementary school districts.

“We’re still putting some details together, but we’re close,” Hogan said. “We’ll file within the next month, probably.”

Glendale Elementary School District temporarily closed two schools last fall after the district found structural deficiencies that could pose safety risks for students and teachers. About 1,450 students were moved to other locations.

District administrators had previously expressed concerns about delayed maintenance of Glendale Elementary schools.

“The situation just keeps getting worse and worse without school districts having capital funds to address deteriorating facilities and equipment,” Hogan said.

State leaders have already fought — and lost — this legal battle once.

Hogan sued the state over the same issue in 1994, successfully arguing that relying on local taxpayers to foot the bill via bonds to cover school maintenance costs put schools in low-income areas at a disadvantage, violating the state Constitution’s promise for a “general and uniform public school system.”

A settlement agreement included $1.3 billion in one-time money to bring buildings to state standards, between $100 million and $200 million annually for building maintenance and about $200 million a year to schools for soft capital such as books, buses and technology.

But since then, governors and the Legislature have whittled away the program. In 2009, Gov. Jan Brewer and the Legislature started cutting soft capital and building maintenance, blaming the Great Recession. But the cuts continued under both Brewer and Ducey, including for this school year. Currently, school districts are getting about 15 percent of what they were initially told they would get each year in what’s called District Additional Assistance; charter schools are receiving about 85 percent in Charter Additional Assistance.

“We’ve been out of the Great Recession for a number of years, and the cuts actually went up in fiscal year 2016,” said Chuck Essigs, director of governmental relations with the Arizona Association of School Business Officials. “And in fiscal year 2017, the cuts still didn’t go down. Hopefully, when they do this year’s budget, they’ll at least start to cut the reductions. But they weren’t in the governor’s budget.”

Hogan said the Legislature knows exactly what it is obligated to do under the 1998 court ruling, and lawmakers are choosing to ignore it.

“It’s shocking,” he has said. “I don’t know how responsible officials act that way. These were all known obligations. They created the problem for themselves.”

He said school districts are left to beg local voters to pass bonds to pay for infrastructure costs. And that, again, creates a disparity between districts in higher-income areas and those in low-income areas. Lower-income areas don’t have the tax base to sell as many bonds.

“If your school district went out for bonds, you are paying for things the state should be paying for,” Hogan has said. “Low-wealth school districts don’t have the money to do that.”

A lack of solutions

Ducey and the Legislature gave the School Facilities Board $15 million last year, and Ducey’s budget proposal this year suggests giving it another $15 million. School districts can apply to the board for funding for repairs to things like buildings, roofs or air-conditioners.

But Ducey’s budget includes no proposal to restore money to the Additional Assistance fund for schools to use on soft capital. “It’s nowhere near close to the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being lost in the formula,” Essigs said. “It makes it very difficult for school districts.”

The Governor’s Office did not return requests for comment.

According to data from Essigs and the teacher-advocacy group the Arizona Education Association, the governor and Legislature have underpaid schools for capital costs by more than $2 billion since 2009.

Legislative budget discussions are still in the early phases, but the topic has not been at the top of their list.

“There’s discussion about increasing salaries for teachers, increasing money for special education and stuff like that, which are all important things,” Essigs said. “But you can’t have effective instruction in buildings where the roofs are leaking and you don’t have good airconditioning and the lights are failing.”

State Rep. Heather Carter, R-Cave Creek, has introduced legislation to incrementally increase the amount of money the state puts into the Additional Assistance fund.

“This lawsuit is a huge concern. It’s $2 billion,” she said.

Under House Bill 2374, school districts, starting in fiscal year 2019, would incrementally get more Additional Assistance funds until they reached the full allocation by 2024. That first fiscal year, district schools would get about $150 million more.

The House Judiciary Committee allowed the bill an informational hearing but refused to hold an official committee vote on the bill — essentially killing it.

“I’m going to keep advocating for it in the budget,” Carter said, adding she didn’t yet know if it has a chance. “I don’t know what they’re going to do with this. But when this lawsuit drops, I can say, ‘Hey, I tried.’ ”

Rep. David Livingston, R-Peoria, suggested the schools should have saved so they had a cushion during the recession.

Carter bristled, saying the recession has ended and the governor and Legislature haven’t resumed the funding.

“Districts did float themselves through the crisis, like many families did,” she said. “We have looked under every seat cushion we have in our schools. They have done everything they possibly can to be good stewards of our public buildings.”

issues and building deficiencies in our schools.”

Lost funding, closed schools

Glendale Elementary School District Assistant Superintendent Mike Barragan said district schools are supposed to receive about $450 for every elementary-school student and $490 for every high-school student for capital expenses.

“In reality, we are looking at $40,” he said. “Since 2009, Glendale has been reduced by $29 million in capital funding.”

Barragan said the district has found ways to maximize available capital, but he said there are many issues they have not been able to fix — resulting in the temporary closure of Landmark and Challenger elementary schools.

“There’s an elephant in the room, and we haven’t talked about it,” he said. “We can no longer ignore capital issues and building deficiencies in our schools. We can’t cut $2 billion and expect there are no consequences.”