Will GOP really hold state’s kids hostage?
The Arizona Legislature is due to return in 23 days, and already it appears that Republicans are armed to the teeth, ready, willing and absolutely able to shoot themselves smack in the foot.
This, by holding nearly a million Arizona schoolchildren hostage.
It started with Gov. Doug Ducey (thus far) reneging on a promise to call the Legislature back to the Capitol before year’s end to lift the spending limit on public schools — a cap that could force schools to have to shut down this spring.
Now, suddenly, he wants to attach conditions to offering Arizona’s children stability through the rest of the school year.
And if Ducey leaves office without taking action? Republican legislators are already talking about holding the kids hostage to their own demands in January.
Rep. Jacqueline Parker of Mesa on Wednesday called on her fellow Republicans to go slow on lifting what’s called the “aggregate expenditure limit.”
“Anyone who votes for AEL expansion in the upcoming special session WITHOUT meaningful election integrity reforms, is handing our state over to the Democrats in 2024 & then goodbye ESA’s, goodbye gun rights, goodbye freedom,” she tweeted. “That will be the @DougDucey legacy. Pictures to follow.”
Put another way, if Republicans can’t pass a bunch of new election laws aimed at restoring Republican rule ... then teachers should be laid off and the schools shut down?
There’s a winning plan.
Mark April 1 on your calendar. That’s the day Arizona’s schools will see $1.4 billion disappear from their bank accounts.
Oh, the money will still be there.
They just won’t be allowed to spend it.
The spending limit was set by voters in 1980 but recent declines in enrollment, coupled with a decision to move Proposition 301 money under the spending cap when they extended the half-cent sales tax for schools in 2018 – not to mention major expenses never contemplated 42 years ago – have brought our schools to the brink.
To avoid disaster, the Legislature must waive the aggregate spending limit by March 1 or the schools will be forced to cut their annual budgets by 17% a month later to get under the aggregate cap. This, with less than three months to go in the school year.
The spending limit doesn’t apply to charter schools because they weren’t around in 1980, when the constitutional limit was passed.
Nice legacy. Go back on a promise and hang the kids in public school out to dry unless Democrats agree to siphon off more money to the parents of kids in private school.
Ducey in July promised Democrats that he’d call a special session of the Legislature to waive the spending cap if only they’d vote for his budget — one that added both a $1 billion boost to K-12 funding and his signature universal voucher program.
So they did. The deal was prefaced on a showing that they could get the twothirds support needed to override the spending limit.
On Dec. 1, a bipartisan group of legislators said they had the votes and called on Ducey to hold up his end of the bargain.
Ducey, meanwhile, was busy moving the goalposts.
“There are things in addition to the AEL that I’d like to get done,” Ducey told reporters on Dec. 5. He wouldn’t say what things, but speculation is he wants to boost the amount of public money parents can get to send their kids to private school.
Nice legacy. Go back on a promise and hang the kids in public school out to dry unless Democrats agree to siphon off more money to the parents of kids in private school.
The days are dwindling for Ducey to follow through with his promise.
Of course, everything changes
in
January, when Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs replaces Ducey.
Thus comes Rep. Parker’s call to tie a waiver of the spending limit to the coming raft of election “reform” bills Republicans want to enact after their 2022 losses.
Never mind that those electoral losses have more to do with who they nominated than it does with how we vote. (See: Republican Kimberly Yee, the non-Trump candidate who cruised to reelection as state treasurer.)
“Anyone who votes for AEL expansion in the upcoming special session WITHOUT meaningful election integrity reforms, is handing our state over to the Democrats in 2024,” she tweeted.
Translation: She’s willing to force her home district, Mesa Unified School District, to cut its budget by $83 million. And Phoenix Union by $52 million and Scottsdale by $28 million and tiny Chino Valley by $3 million.
“The only way to manage that would be to lay people off,” Superintendent John Scholl warned earlier this month. “That $3 million (cut) in our community would be devastating.”
Michael Wright, superintendent of the Blue Ridge Unified School District, said that a $2.5 million hit to his budget, with just three months left in the school year, would require teacher layoffs and maybe even school closures.
More likely, definite school closures — or at least massive upheaval as classrooms are left empty because schools can’t use money that was appropriated to pay them.
Can you imagine the blowback? Don’t think Red for Ed.
Think Red for Ed multiplied by purple with parental rage all across the state.
Gee, and I remember once upon a time – two years ago – when Republicans worried about things like closing schools and the impact on children.
Now they’re willing to do it again to try to gain a political advantage in 2024?