Senate passes school voucher expansion; bill goes to House

The Arizona Senate approved a massive expansion of Arizona’s school voucher program Monday, just two years after voters decisively repealed a similar expansion of school vouchers to all students.

The Senate passed the bill on a 16-14 party-line vote, with all 16 Republicans voting for the measure.

It will now be sent to the House of Representatives.

Empowerment Scholarship Accounts allow parents eligible to take funds from public schools and spend them on private school. The bill would expand the program, which currently serves only 9,700 students, making it available to an exponentially larger group.

Bill sponsors contend the voucher expansion will benefit only low-in

come students from so-called Title I schools, which receive funding for disadvantaged students to close educational gaps.

But SB 1452 would also allow any student who lives in the boundary of a Title I school to be eligible for an empowerment scholarship account. The students would merely have to attend the school and would not need to be low-income themselves to qualify.

More than 1,300 of the 2,000 district schools in Arizona — about 65% — are Title I schools, and even wealthy districts include some Title I schools.

Under the bill, two thirds of Arizona’s 1.1 million public-school students — 650,000 to 700,000 children — would become eligible for private-school vouchers, according to the Arizona Department of Education.

In 2018, Arizonans considered a ballot measure to block legislation that would have allowed all 1.1 million public school students to apply for ESAs. Voters rejected those universal vouchers by a 65% to 35% margin.

This year’s bill is even larger than the expansion that was repealed by voters. The previous expansion measure had a cap on enrollment, which limited the number of students who could be accepted to the tens of thousands — at least for a while.

In addition to expanding the pool of those applicable, SB1452 waives the requirement that a student spend 100 days of the previous school year in public school.

Instead, students would only have to spend 30 days in public school in the current school year and then could immediately head to private school. This could make nearly every student in the state eligible get an ESA by using open enrollment to attend a Title I school and then leaving for private school after only 30 days.

Currently, only students from six narrow categories can access ESAs, including students at D or F schools, foster children, special needs students, children on Indian Reservations and others.

Students who qualify get 90% of the funding that would have gone to their school districts. Those public dollars are loaded onto debit cards that can be used for private school, tutoring and therapy.

Already, the ESA program has grown to more than $145 million a year, even as questions persist about state oversight, misspending and fraud. This expansion could make the cost to state taxpayers exponentially higher to more than $300 million a year, opponents estimate.

Sen. Paul Boyer, a Phoenix Republican who authored the bill, said the bill was primarily about helping students who are stuck in failing schools. But students who attend failing schools can already use the ESA program.

Many don’t take advantage of the program because they can’t afford the portion of private school education that isn’t covered by the state. The Arizona Republic has found several times that children using the program are leaving wealthier, higher-performing school districts at a higher rate than low-income schools, even though far more low-income students qualify to use the program.

Democrats sharply criticized the program as an attempt to defund public education, an affront to voters who had just rejected the voucher program and an attempt to re-segregate schools.

Lela Alston, D-Phoenix, called the measure a “down payment for better off families to go to private school” because “individuals who are low-income can’t make up the difference of what a private school is charging.”

Rebecca Rios, D-Phoenix, called the measure a calculated movement to resegregate schools done under the “guise of helping poor children and people of color.”

“If we really wanted to help poor children there would be an income cap,” Rios said.

She said the bill was a massive transfer of resources from rural Arizona to urban Arizona, because there are few private schools in rural Arizona. That means rural Arizonans are paying for well-off children to go to private schools in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and Tucson, she said, questioning, “How in the world is that right?”

Boyer said he was fighting for low-income, high poverty, primarily minority students who are stuck in failing schools. “That’s who I’m fighting for,” he said.

“To say that this bill somehow promotes segregation is preposterous,” Boyer said. “A family choosing for themselves any school that works best for their own child? That’s not segregation, that’s freedom. Assigning families to inferior schools based upon on their home address is fundamentally the true segregation problem that we face today.”

Dawn Penich-Thacker, spokesperson for Save Our Schools Arizona, the organization that successfully repealed the previous voucher expansion in 2018, said the organization would take any step necessary to stop the law, including another referendum, a citizen’s initiative or legal action.

“Despite Arizona voters repeatedly voting to reject private school voucher expansion and fund public schools, out-of-state lobbyists and anti-public education politicians have once again shown they have no regard for the will of voters and taxpayers,” Penich-Thacker said. “SOSAZ reiterates our vow to take all steps necessary to stop this attack on our public schools, whether by citizen’s initiative, referral to the 2022 ballot, or litigation.”

In addition to allowing far more students to be eligible, SB 1452 would make changes to how ESA and public schools are funded, some of the biggest education funding changes made in any bill in recent years. SB 1452 would also:

● Take funds from the extension of Prop. 301 — which is earmarked sales tax money for class size reduction, teacher salary increases and dropout prevention programs — and send that money to the student going to private school as well. The bill allows parents of incoming kindergarteners to take that classroom site fund money to private school too.

● Allow ESA students to pay for public or commercial transportation to private school as well. Previously parents were unable to use the accounts for transportation.

● Allow parents to use ESAs to pay for the portion of education therapies not covered by health insurance.

● Previously, those using vouchers were prohibited from also getting funds from School Tuition Organizations, which get donations funded by tax credits and then donate those funds to pay for private school. Under SB 1452, students in high school could double dip and get funding from both sources up to the amount of the perpupil spending in their school district.

● Prevent parents from losing money they misspent on items not allowed, unless the Arizona Attorney General determines an account holder committed fraud. Currently, misspent money is forfeited rather than returned.

A portion of the bill that would have required school districts that do not get state funding to pick up the costs for students who leave their schools to go to private schools was cut out of the bill because the Senate Rules committee said it needed a 2/3 vote to pass.