Last October, the Blog for Arizona and other news outlets, especially ABC 15 News, reported on some of the questionable expenses of Empowerment Scholarship Account (E.S.A.) recipients (70,000 as of now with $665 million spent according to the JBLC) that met the approval of the Department of Education.
Among these approved expenses were:
- Hundreds of thousands of dollars for horseback riding.
- Driving lessons in Mercedes.
- $2000 for pianos.
- Funds for personal trainers.
- $3403 for purchases at a golf store.
- $20,000 for 112 passes at Arizona Snowbowl.
- $354,000 for Ninja, trampoline, and climbing training centers and parks.
Last week, at the second and apparently final meeting of the House ESA Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight and Governance, it was also revealed that purchasing a $500 Lego set met the criteria for approved expenses at the Arizona Department of Education when a parent claimed she had the right to do so because she was the best source of accountability for the monies spent for her child’s ESA scholarship.
Please check out the video below courtesy of Beth Lewis from Save Our Schools Arizona.
In the clip, this parent asserted:
“As far as accountability, parents are being accountable. I choose my daughter’s teacher. She does school Monday through Friday for three hours with a private teacher that we pay using ESA funds. If she wants a $500 Lego set, I’m going to buy her a $500 Lego set. She deserves it.”
Apparently, this has been a very good Thanksgiving for families who have taken advantage of the ESA program. How many public school children would like to ride in a Mercedes or get equestrian riding on their school’s playgrounds.
There are a few items to unpack from the quote from the homeschool parent.
First, the child goes to school three hours a day from Monday through Friday. In most traditional and charter public schools, children attend classes for at least four and a half to five hours depending on how long their recess is. It does not seem that this child is getting a lot of learning time.
Second, what are the qualifications of this private teacher? Do they have a previous background in education or instruction? What college and practicum experience have they earned? Does the teacher instruct from a secular or sectarian perspective?
Finally, on the Lego set, maybe this post shared by Agave Strategies’ Dawn Penich-Thacker, says it all:
The JBLC Reveals that ESA is NOT Saving the State Money.
One of the contentions made by ESA supporters like current Superintendent of Instruction Tom Horne is that ESA scholarships save the state money.
Not so fast, says the Arizona Joint Budget Legislative Committee.
In a report released on November 14, 2023, the JBLC findings, based in part on the meager data the Department of Education has provided, note that ESA scholarships, on average, are costing the state $700 more for elementary-age children and $900 for high school ones compared to large state aid districts’ allocations for the same populations.
Of course, it would be interesting to see what the actual figures are for what the JBLC calls “switchers”- children who go from a public school to a private/home school. The Horne Department of Education, unlike the Kathy Hoffman one, lacks the transparency to make those actual figures known.
At the House ESA hearing last week, Arizona Legislative District 18 Representative Nancy Gutierrez, a member of the committee, relayed that John Ward, the person overseeing the ESA program for the Department of Education, said that “60% of vouchers are people who have already been enrolled in private school and 40% is coming from public school.”
Unfortunately Mr. Ward, according to Representative Gutierrez, was not forthcoming with the data to support his claims.
The last reported actual numbers, from September 2022, were 75 percent of ESA scholarship recipients were previous private school attendees.
Whether it is 60 percent or 75 percent, which is the figure Texas State Representative James Talarico cited at a hearing where eventually the whole legislature voted not to go the Arizona route on ESA’s, why should the Grand Canyon state subsidize what Talarico eloquently called in the Lone Star State “welfare for the wealthy.”
The answer is it should not.
ESA scholarships are nothing more than a MAGA mechanism to make their base supporters happy: a stealth tax cut for the wealthy and a free money outlet for reactionary religious extremists to use public dollars to homeschool their children and indoctrinate them with their fringe nonsecular views.
This is a ship that can not stay afloat at its current composition and it is causing the state’s financial condition to worsen into the red side of the financial ledger.
Governor Katie Hobbs and the Legislature must act to change the criteria for who qualifies for these scholarships and what qualifies for approved expenses so parents can not use public dollars to buy Lego sets or passes to Snowbowl.
If the Republican legislators, who claim to be stewards of fiscal responsibility, do not meet the challenge, then voters in 2024 should send them into retirement in favor of public servants who will.
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100% correct. Horne will never release data that does NOT support what he supports. The incredible thing is that John Ward just left a job doing, ironically, performance audits on real public schools. He suggested, in a number cases, creating new accountability data bases not authorized by law. He made performance “suggestions” that were rigthly, local school board decisions, not impositions from the State. The “performance audit” nonsense was really a law designed to support the whole “school choice” subterfuge. It will be interesting if he tries to apply the same standards to money laundered vouchers. Unlikely.