PHOENIX — Arizona’s superintendent of schools says the numbers don’t lie: the Department of Education met $9.7 billion in financial obligations this past school year with about $4 million to spare.
“Therefore, it is mathematically impossible to say ESAs are contributing to the state budget deficit,” Tom Horne said Monday, referring to the hotly debated private school voucher program, which accounts for a growing portion of the department’s overall budget.
Democratic state legislators pushed back, saying the ESA program has added to the state’s overall expenses.
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“No matter how you slice it, Republicans expanded government costs with the expanded voucher program. It’s an expansion of government to the tune of 65,000 to 68,000 kids in addition to the 11,000 or 12,000 kids with special needs,” said Arizona State Senator Mitzi Epstein (D).
The Empowerment Scholarship Program accounted for about $718 million in expenses last year -according to the most recent calculations by the nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee -amounting to $93 million more than originally projected by the JLBC last fall.
But the Department of Ed had wiggle room.
Spending for charter schools, amounting to about $2 billion, ultimately cost $87 Million less than what the JLBC projected last fall. The $6.9 billion spent on school districts ended up totaling about $7 million less than projected.
Horne said the end result, an overall surplus, proves the ESA program is not “a threat” to Arizona’s budget. He called past warnings alleging the ESA program would put a strain on the state budget “a myth.”
“It was always a myth, and that myth is utterly demolished,” Horne said.
State Democrat Minority Whip Nancy Guttierez, a public school teacher, called Horne’s statements “a wild misrepresentation of what’s actually going on.”
Gutierrez said despite coming in under budget, legislators have to make sacrifices to accommodate the cost of ESAs.
“It’s frustrating when the superintendent is saying, ‘oh we’re saving money and that’s so great,’ when in the FY ’25 budget we cut poverty weights, we cut $23 million to our state universities, and we cut a million dollars to our schools for the deaf and blind,” Gutierrez said. The state provided a 2% boost in funding for teacher salaries, but it was not enough to keep pace with inflation.
“In real dollars, from educators, to secretaries to PE teachers in the school yard, everybody’s pay will not keep up with inflation,” Epstein said.
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