Arizona's K-12 education budget will remain relatively flat this year, with a slight inflation adjustment, according to lawmakers who passed a $16.1 billion state budget last month.
That's something worth celebrating amid a $1.4 billion deficit that required sweeping cuts, according to Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma, R-Glendale.
"We still prioritized K-12 spending," Toma said. "It just looked different from the past. It wasn't about new money, but it was about protecting what they already have."
Even so, Arizona, which ranks 49th in the country for per pupil spending, will likely remain near last for another year. And despite holding steady overall, there are a few key budgetary exceptions that parents and teachers should know before the 2024-25 school year starts.
Legislature rejects Democrats' education voucher reform proposals
Democrats point to the estimated $900 million spent on education vouchers last fiscal year as the primary deficit driver and have called for tightened regulation since the program expanded. Once designed for select groups like special needs students, the Empowerment Scholarship Account program was expanded in 2022 to all Arizona kids, allowing all families to use public money for education expenses like private school tuition, supplies and tutoring.
Lawmakers drafted multiple reform bills this session attempting to curb education voucher spending and add new oversight, said Nancy Gutierrez, D-Tucson, a high school teacher and member of the Legislature's four-person teacher caucus.
One bill would have required a review of the voucher program's efficiency, effectiveness and necessity. Another would have barred parents from selling items purchased with voucher money and required pre-approval for transactions over $500. A third would have required schools that take voucher dollars to follow fingerprinting practices equal to public schools.
Those bills failed to get picked up by a committee for consideration.
"They were pretty darn moderate bills this session," Gutierrez said. "And they just went nowhere."
Toma said legislators pushing for such reforms don't understand how the program works. He sponsored the legislation that led to the universal expansion of education vouchers.
"Every single dollar is reviewed already by the Department of Education, and every charge that is found to be for a nonpermissible item is reversed, or the parent is charged for it," Toma said.
Another member of the teacher caucus, Jennifer Pawlik, D-Chandler, said reforms faced an uphill battle because Republicans would have had to subvert the will of the speaker during an election year. Democrats had only 29 votes in the House; they needed 31.
"We're definitely not seeing eye-to-eye, the speaker and the Democrats, but I think we are trying to use taxpayer money in a responsible manner," Pawlik said. "I'm certainly a pragmatic person, and I'm grateful for anything we got."
Toma said he supports "common sense" education voucher reforms, such as those that were incorporated into this year's budget.
How have Arizona's universal education vouchers changed this year?
Legislators did enact several changes to the education voucher program this year.
One reform closed a loophole that Toma said allowed parents to use voucher dollars contrary to the program's intent, costing the state about $2.5 million in the process.
Voucher holders had been able to enter the program after the public school year ended, receive six months of funding, and then return to public school by the start of the next school year. Families, then, were raking in voucher dollars strictly for summer use without ever missing a day of class in a public school.
Other reforms require the Arizona Department of Education to maintain an online database of allowable and disallowed expenses and bar service providers and teachers from being paid through the voucher program if the State Board of Education has reprimanded them for "immoral or unprofessional conduct." Another change requires the Empowerment Scholarship Account program to reimburse families for qualified purchases, a practice of the Education Department but not written into the law.
"They have improved the program overall," Toma said of the reforms. "Because it's so incredibly popular for parents, I don't have a problem with us making improvements to it."
The budget also calls for schools accepting voucher money to take the fingerprints of all teaching staff and personnel who have unsupervised contact with students, which Pawlik said is a promising step in the right direction.
However, Gutierrez said that the change is a watered-down version of the Democrats' proposed bill: Unlike public schools, the language does not require voucher-recipient private schools to cross-check those prints with law enforcement agencies and issue clearance cards.
"So they could say that they were fingerprinted, they could throw the fingerprints away, and that counts," Gutierrez said. "That's not going to keep any students safe. … The reforms were not reforms."
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State poverty funds for schools, established in 2022, to be cut in 2025
At the conclusion of the 2024-25 school year, Arizona will eliminate funding that gives extra support to schools with large populations of students living in poverty.
Known as "opportunity weight funding," those dollars required a decade of advocacy work before they were established in 2022, according to Beth Lewis, a former educator who now leads public education advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona. Arizona was one of few states that didn't have poverty weight for school funding at the time.
The state had used a results-based "carrot approach" to education, Lewis said, by which schools that performed well on standardized tests were rewarded with more funding without consideration for socioeconomic status.
The poverty weight reversed that. The state allocated $67 million annually to schools in low-income communities to purchase backpacks, school supplies, shoes, reading specialists, interventionists and other resources.
"It was chopped," Lewis said. "And so we're going to have to go back next year and fight for that to be reinstated and hope that there's more dollars."
Lawmakers made a promise of legislative intent to reinstate the funds in fiscal year 2028, Gutierrez said. She has little faith that will happen.
"We know that that literally is not binding, and we also have seen that if you want to add something to the budget, you have to negotiate it," Gutierrez said. "We have nothing to negotiate in public schools."
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Burden on kindergarten teachers will ease
The budget removed a requirement that public school kindergarten teachers evaluate each student's skill level within a 45-day period through a time-intensive process called the Kindergarten Entry Assessment.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne praised the Legislature for removing the assessment, which he said many educators considered a waste of classroom time. Since taking office in 2023, Horne pledged to reduce unnecessary paperwork for teachers. He said he had already reduced the assessment's burden by 80% but lacked legal authority to eliminate it altogether.
"Over time, the KEA had ballooned into an endless morass of paperwork that meant teachers had to spend too much time on bureaucratic requirements versus time with students," Horne said.
Lewis, a vocal critic of the Horne administration, said she shares his sentiments on this reform.
"Kindergarten teachers are leaving kindergarten classrooms in droves because of that assessment," Lewis said. "You can just imagine having 27 5-year-olds in your class and having to pull each one out for three to five hours for testing in a given time window. It was a nightmare."
Deaf and blind education loses $900,000
Most state agencies were cut by about 3.45% to reduce the deficit, including the agency tasked with educating deaf and blind students.
The Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and Blind was cut nearly $900,000, which Superintendent Annette Reichman said has huge implications for its ability to transport roughly 2,200 students on two campuses.
Phoenix Day School for the Deaf transports students who live within a 50-mile radius to and from school each day. The Tucson campus of the Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and the Blind has dormitories and transports students from across the state, including for monthly visits home.
Reichman said she does not yet have specifics on the types of cutbacks facing transportation as her staff prepares a budget analysis.
"We are reevaluating everything," Reichman said.
The cuts will also further delay about $1.5 million in annual deferred maintenance projects. The Arizona State Schools for the Deaf and Blind receives about $300,000 from the state to address maintenance deficiencies each year, and her team typically supplements that with an additional $300,000 from its own funds. That won't be possible this year, she said, because they want to preserve dollars for student services and classroom instruction.
Reach the reporter at nicholas.sullivan@gannett.com.
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