Senate attaches school voucher expansion to budget at last minute
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the Arizona Senate voted by party line to attach a large expansion of Arizona’s school voucher program to the state’s annual budget.
The vote sets up a potential fight in the House of Representatives, where a group of moderate Republicans have blocked earlier attempts this year to expand the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program to cover most of the students in the state.
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts allow eligible parents to take funds from public schools and spend them on private school. Students who qualify get 90% of the funding that would have gone to their school districts, with money loaded onto debit cards that can be used for private school, tutoring and therapy.
The amendment to the budget as part of SB 1826 would expand the ESA voucher program, which currently serves about 10,000 students, making it available to an exponentially larger group.
Under the expansion plan passed by the Senate, the Department of Education and the Joint Legislative Budget Committee estimated the number of eligible students would jump to between 716,000 and 720,000 students.
The ESA expansion was tucked into a 195-page amendment sponsored by Senate President Karen Fann, R-Prescott.
In 2018, Arizona voters decisively repealed a similar expansion of school vouchers to all students by a 65% to 35% margin.
The move shines a huge spotlight on two Republicans who have opposed voucher expansion in the past: Rep. Michelle Udall, of Mesa and Rep. Joel John of Buckeye.
Inclusion as part of the budget could be a power move to try to force their votes on the ESA expansion or be blamed for the failure of the budget in the waning days of the Legislature that is pushing up against a constitutionally mandated June 30 budget deadline.
But the author of this year’s expansion bill, Sen. Paul Boyer, R-Phoenix, said he felt that Udall and John would both vote against the budget if it contained the ESA expansion.
Boyer said Udall told him Tuesday that she was “dug in” on opposition to the ESA expansion.
“She told me she’s not voting for the K-12 BRB (budget bill) if ESAs are in it,” Boyer said. “But there’s so much more in there that she supports.”
Boyer pointed to Udall’s bill that was also added to the budget that would penalize schools if they had classroom lessons that held up any race, ethnic group or sex as superior to any other. It is widely seen as a way to prevent instruction that puts racism and sexism in a wider historical context.
Udall didn’t respond to calls and texts for comment. John declined to comment, but previous indications point to him being a no vote on the voucher bill.
Boyer, a public charter school teacher, said the bill was primarily about helping mainly minority students from low-income and high-poverty areas that are stuck in failing schools. But students who attend failing schools can already use the ESA program.
Currently, only students from six narrow categories can access ESAs, including those in failing schools, along with foster children, special needs children, children on Indian reservations, children of military families and siblings of students in the ESA program.
The expansion bill would add any student who receives free or reducedprice lunch and any whose parent is a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces.
In addition to expanding the pool of those applicable, the expansion waives the requirement that a student spend the first 100 days of the previous school year in public school. Now they would only need to spend any 30 day period in a public school and could then move to a private school.
Dawn Penich-Thacker, spokeswoman for Save Our Schools Arizona, called the expansion part of the Legislature’s “egregious and blatant gutting of public education at the a time when the state has over a billion dollars of surplus.”