Arizona residents have extra 15 days to apply for school vouchers

By Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
PHOENIX -- Arizona education officials are giving parents who want to seek immediate voucher payments an extra 15 days to apply.
The announcement came Friday as the Department of Education said it was inundated with last-minute requests to get funding for the first quarter of the school year. That crush came after Secretary of State Katie Hobbs confirmed that Save Our Schools had failed to submit enough signatures to give voters the last word on the universal voucher plan approved earlier this year by the Republican-controlled legislature.
And that, said agency spokesman Richie Taylor, made Friday the first day the law was in effect.
The Department of Education had allowed people to start applying ahead of time, while the fate of the referendum was still unknown, promising retroactive funding for the first quarter if and when vouchers became legal. But Taylor said Friday's announcement by Hobbs created a crush for those dollars, overwhelming the web site his agency had set up.
So now anyone who gets in an application by Oct. 15 will be eligible for that first-quarter funding.
The formal enactment of the law -- and the rush of applications -- marks the end of a decade-long legal and political battle to allow any of the 1.1 million students in Arizona public schools to attend private or parochial schools with vouchers of state funds. The program, formally known as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, also allows those vouchers which average about $7,000 to be used by parents who home school their children.
Until now, the vouchers had been reserved for students with special needs, foster children, those in schools rated D or F, or children on reservations. There are currently about 12,100 students getting the state dollars.
As of Friday, with the formal announcement that the referendum failed, all those conditions are now gone. And all signs point to a rapid expansion.
Taylor said his agency, which had been accepting applications before Friday on a conditional basis, already had received another more than 12,100. And that doesn't count the crush of requests Friday created following the statement from Hobbs.
There are really only two conditions to apply.
First, the student must be an Arizona resident.
Second, the student cannot be enrolled in a public school when the voucher funding starts. That would result in the state paying twice for the same child, something prohibited under the law.
Taylor noted, though, there is no waiting period, meaning a student could be in public school on one day and immediately get a voucher to go to a private school the next.
Aside from the issue of parental choice, voucher supporters say the program actually can save money for the state. That's because the vouchers are supposed to be equal to 90% of what the state would otherwise pay, coming out to about $7,000 for a student without disabilities or special needs.
But foes noted that the plan also makes vouchers available to children whose families already were paying their way in private schools. And Taylor said about three-quarters of the applications already received fit that category.
That translates so far to close to $65 million in obligations being moved from parents to taxpayers, something that Taylor's boss, state schools chief Kathy Hoffman, previously called "a taxpayer funded coupon for the wealthy.''
But state Rep. Ben Toma, R-Peoria, who pushed the measure through the legislature, has said there is no reason that any parent who pays taxes to the state should be denied the benefit.
Gov. Doug Ducey has argued that nothing in the plan will harm public schools, saying lawmakers have added to funding. That includes the immediate addition of $526 to base education funding for K-12 schools in the budget adopted for this fiscal year, an 8.8% increase.
Only thing is, those additional dollars would put total school funding above the "aggregate expenditure limit,'' a figure put into the Arizona Constitution by voters in 1980. It is adjusted annually for student growth and inflation.
Lawmakers can approve an exemption on an annual basis.
But they haven't done that for the current school year. And local education officials said if they don't act, schools would need to actually cut their budgets by about 17%.
Legislative leaders have urged calm, saying there is plenty of time to deal with the issue when lawmakers come back to the Capitol in January.
That, however, is far from a certainty.
The current crop of legislative leaders will be gone. And some lawmakers, angry at public school advocates for trying to derail universal vouchers, have suggested they may be unwilling to approve an annual waiver.
Why the referendum failed -- and so spectacularly -- remains under debate.
Backers needed 118,823 valid signatures to send the issue to the 2024 ballot. They claimed last week to have submitted more than 141,000.
Hobbs has yet to release a final count. But the Goldwater Institute, which got copies of the petitions, said it counted just 88,866 signatures.
Beth Lewis, president of Save Our Schools, had previously said there were last-minute issues with things like picking up petitions. But in a statement Friday, the organization said part of the fault lies with Ducey.
The Arizona Constitution gives those seeking to refer measures to the ballot 90 days after the end of the session to gather the necessary signatures. That was Sept. 23.
But the governor also has 10 days after a session to act on all bills on his desk.
Ducey waited the full time. And the law precludes signature gathering until that happened.
"We are confident we would have succeeded had Gov. Ducey not waited 10 days to sign the bill, robbing Arizona voters of crucial time to sign the petition,'' the statement said. "Arizona's forefathers wisely included the fundamental right to referendum in our state constitution, yet Ducey played cynical games with that right in service of his donors and greedy special interests.''
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