As I see it, Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program (ESA’s) has gotten out of control! What started out in 2011 as a way to help students with disabilities find better fitting services with approximately 2,200 narrowly defined eligible participants has grown to serve any and all students regardless of need with more than 85,000 students currently enrolled. The program started with guardrails and good intentions and was a leader nationally for progressive ways to help special needs students, but it has become a leader nationally for a no-holds-barred-free-for-all that is costing Arizona taxpayers close to $1 billion with virtually no accountability!
How this happened was that in 2022 our state legislature adopted a new version of the ESA program under House Bill 2853. At the time, a fiscal analysis provided by the nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee (JLBC) estimated that in Fiscal Year 2023 the program changes would cost a total of $33.4 million, then grow in FY 2024 to $64.5 million, and for current FY2025 grow to $125.4 million. Wow, the difference between the program costing taxpayers $125.4 million this year and it actually costing us close to $1 billion is a HUGE miscalculation!
On top of that HB 2853 created 26 new full-time positions in the Arizona Department of Education, cut in half the required hours of instruction for all K-12 students, plus none of the teachers need to be trained and none of the schools need to be certified. Clearly, HB2853 gives us less for our tax dollars in educating our youth. Why shouldn’t parents and schools receiving these tax dollars to educate our kids have the same teacher standards and accountability standards that our public school systems do?…