Editorial Note: This article and its series are part of a collaborative project with 13 Arizona newsrooms covering two important topics in education. Funded by the Arizona Local News Foundation and Report for America, all stories in the project can be found here.
When AJ’s family was getting ready to enroll him in preschool, their first choice was private — a school his older sister, Alexa, attended and loved. But they got a call that they couldn’t accommodate him.
AJ’s mother, Alexis Liggett, explained he’s medically complex and has profound disabilities. They weren’t asking for special accommodations. Rather, his nurse would’ve gone to school with him and taken care of his needs.
“But I got a call and I was told, ‘Sorry, we can't accommodate your student,’” Liggett said. “I tucked my tail between my legs and I cried because it was so upsetting to me.”
So her family enrolled him into a public preschool with a half-day program, and there, they offered him services, but they weren’t out of the woods yet.
“Some of his hurdles are just accessibility and accommodation because, at the time, we were trying to help him traverse, be mobile, in his gait trainer, his mobility device,” Liggett said. “And there wasn’t a lot of room in the classroom to move around. Physical therapy was tough.”
At the school, AJ was able to have his nurse with him and he had access to physical, occupational and speech therapies.
“He did, though, only get one hour per month [for each],” Liggett said. “And so you think about a child who is non-speaking, nonambulatory on his own. I was like, ‘Oh my God, like, one hour a month?’ And some children, they do get more hours, but I feel like some of the times, it is dependent on what's available, and that's not what it should be based on.”
Liggett explained the school struggled to provide services because they were limited in class sizes and availability.
“So [the therapist] would kind of try and make it work in the library, but then other kids would come in, so that was hard, too.” she said. “If he missed that therapy, it wouldn’t be made up.”
AJ also had access to home-based therapy services through Arizona’s Division of Developmental Disabilities (DDD), but Liggett noted they were short on providers as well, and on top of that, AJ needed to be available when they were. If he was in school when the DDD provider was available, he’d miss that therapy.
And so, Liggett decided to homeschool her children and became an Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) parent.
“I don't want 18 years to go by and then end up with an adult child who, I don't really know what their strengths are,” she said. “And so I said, ‘It kind of seems like I either do the work right now, like the hard work and get in there right now to help him become as independent as possible, or I'm going to have to figure things out when he's 18 and he gets graduated.”
Accessibility in Education
The Liggett family’s challenges are not unique. For one, federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding currently amounts to about 10% of the national average per-pupil expenditure, far below the 40% benchmark associated with full federal funding of the law.
This leaves states and localities picking up the difference. In a 2025 article on the topic, the National Education Association identified a $440.5 million funding gap for Arizona alone.
Funding aside, however, research has also documented disability discrimination in public education.
Vanessa Monteon, a DDD physical therapist assistant and ESA vendor in Yuma, has observed this in her career firsthand.
“I was once called off for ‘You can't play on the stairs,’ and I said, ‘I'm not playing. I'm teaching this child to be in public spaces and tolerate going through stairs and doing these things to have that independence and socialize,’” she said.
Some of her other observations have been more common.
“Sadly, I have seen kids be kind of put in the corner just because they have higher disabilities, per se, in a wheelchair and just have them there existing,” she said.
AJ himself experienced this while learning to use his gait trainer in preschool.
“Is there supposed to be accessibility? Yes,” said Liggett. “But a lot of places just don’t know that, and so it was just easier to park him and have him in his—even during breaks when all the kids were running around. It was just difficult.”
“I have seen a lot of neglect in the sense of — kids can do, even if they're in a wheelchair, they can do so much,” Monteon said. “And I've also had the pleasure of seeing kids once they leave high school, and even with just a year of working with them, I've been able to accomplish so much more than what I saw that they were able to do at school because there wasn't the right approach to the way that we speak or humanize this these kids at times.
“I truly believe a lot of people go into this for the right reasons, but it's so easy to lose their passions in a system that constantly just puts red tape all over.”
Limitations and inequities like these are what the ESA program was initially designed for in 2011.
Today, award amounts vary considerably depending on the types of disabilities a student might have and the range of those disabilities. The highest award amount available in 2026, for example, is $47,725 for students with multiple disabilities, including severe intellectual disabilities, autism and severe sensory impairments.
After Universal Expansion
Since universal expansion in 2022, enrollment in the ESA program has skyrocketed. In 2026, 70% of ESA participants qualify under universal eligibility. But that doesn’t necessarily detract from participants like AJ and his sister.
“It has affected us going universal because there are so many more options,” Liggett said. “There are so many more people that are becoming aware of the program. More vendor options out there is kind of the biggest thing that has helped, and I hear this from families as well.”
Monteon is one of those recent vendors, and she explained that what drew her was “having a little bit more flexibility with everything that I know and everything that I've learned to do throughout my entire life. So it gives one a little bit of freedom to play around with something outside of the curriculum of a public school per se.”
As a vendor, she offers physical therapy but she also offers psychological support to her clients.
“I help and support families and children to really identify themselves and be confident, and that comes with the physical aspect as well,” she said. “Having the background with a lot of kids with disabilities, I don't treat them like anything outside of this planet, but rather really hug who they are and see how far they can go.”
On the client side, Liggett shared that she uses ESA funds to get her son more physical therapy sessions. Anything that public schools can spend educational dollars on, families can for ESA students too, she explained.
“It’s just amazing to see the growth,” she said. “So we did that. I have hired a tutor to come in. I have hired and used the funds for a paraprofessional to come in and work one-on-one with him. I have bought different styles of curriculum for them [both of her children].”
Since leftover funding can roll over to the next year, Liggett tries to save.
“I just kind of think, well, once we get into job training and vocational and things like that, those things can get a lot more expensive,” she said.
Liggett is also part of a homeschool co-op, and those can vary in style, but the one she’s been part of has each family commit to teaching a subject.
“There are some co-ops where it's kind of like a drop off, and there are some co-ops where somebody teaches it, but you as a parent — because there's a lot of involvement and you do stay there with your student and kind of learn alongside them,” she said. “But that has probably been my favorite part is just getting to see really what my kids strengths and interests are.”
That co-op is where she met Tanya Wright, a fellow ESA parent.
Choosing the Right Fit
Wright comes from another background that has been traditionally represented in the ESA program: military families. In 2012, eligibility was extended to military families, but they initially had to meet additional eligibility requirements.
Wright said she initially looked into ESAs while her husband — U.S. Army Special Forces — was active duty, but recalled learning that his E-7 rank placed the family just above the eligibility cutoff. KAWC could not independently verify a rank-based restriction in the program’s legislative history, but there were various requirements up till 2014.
At the time when she looked into it and realized she couldn’t qualify, Wright let it go and forgot about it until 2022 when universal eligibility became a category.
“I was a little leery because, as you know, anything new comes up and you have both sides like, ‘Oh, this is so great. This is so good. We support it.’ and then there's the other side, ‘Oh, it's government overreach, and we don't want them telling us how to homeschool our children or educate our children,’” she said. “And so I kind of let it lie.”
But by that point, Wright had been working hard to be able to homeschool her children. She explained that she started two online businesses.
“Because of two reasons: One, my husband is active duty,” she said. “We were living off of one income, but two, I wanted to contribute to our family in some way, and I didn't want to ever have to tell my children, ‘I'm sorry, you can't take this class or you can't take this course. You can't follow this passion that you have because we can't afford it.’
“I said, ‘If we're going to do the homeschooling thing, we're going to do it right, and I will do whatever it takes to make it happen for our children.’”
When universal ESAs became an option, she took a while to consider it and weigh the pros and cons.
“It almost sounded too good to be true,” she said. “You mean that we get money to pay for our children's education? … When universal came in and we signed up for it, that weight came right off my shoulders.”
But why homeschool in the first place? Wright explained it was for a confluence of reasons: she had an education background; her family couldn’t afford private tuition; her son was advanced for his age; and they felt it was best for them as a family.
“That was important to us because we got to pick and choose his pace, how quickly he learned,” she said. “When he was ready for the next thing, we were ready. We didn't want him to be stuck with a group and then fall through the cracks because he was bored or he was getting in trouble, and so that made all the difference.”
She also appreciated that homeschooling has allowed her son, whom she described as an incredible pianist, to follow his passion.
“He's the kind of kid that he would eat, sleep, do all his work by the piano if I let him, and obviously if he was enrolled in school, he would not be able to do that,” she said. “So I see all the benefits, and that's just one example. I can tell you about my daughter as well, but it has been really the best thing for us all around for many reasons, not just one.”
Homeschooling allows for flexibility. Wright explained that her family chose to pursue a classical education method involving learning things like Latin and cartography.
With ESAs, she’s found her options have expanded.
“You can do piano lessons with the parent that knows piano,” she said. “You can go to your church and have the worship leader teach them. You can do a group class. You can just ask a neighbor or a parent to do it, or you can pay for lessons; that is obviously more expensive. And so there's a huge range of choices that you have, which is a beautiful thing where it makes homeschooling affordable for anyone.”
Wright isn’t the only parent who’s gone to great lengths to afford an alternative education for her children. Brittani Ibarra, a fellow ESA parent and vice principal at Southwestern Christian School, was living in California when she first enrolled her children in private education.
“I worked at a private school to get the tuition discount that they offered to send my children there,” she said. “When I moved to Arizona, I was a little worried, and then I heard about school choice. And honestly, as a parent, I think we should have the choice of how we educate our children.”
Ibarra has been impressed with Arizona’s policies supporting school choice, especially since she didn’t have as many options in California.
She did find, however, that “the school systems are better there — I went to public school my whole life and it was fine — but then coming here and going, ‘Wow, this is not what I want for my child.’”
Ibarra explained that some of what she hears about public schools concerns her. She said she prefers the more structured environment she associates with private education, including uniforms, strict attendance expectations and an emphasis on grades.
“Like really, if they did a better job, then we probably wouldn't be in this position, and maybe the public schools would be a place that I would want my child to go to,” she said. “But even if they were, I want a religious option for my child, and so there are those choices — or I want to homeschool my child; that's my choice. It's my child, my choice.”
For Ibarra, the religious component of an education is most important, and she’s found ESAs meaningful for making that happen. Currently, the ESA covers her daughter’s tuition at Southwestern Christian.
“So I hope ESA doesn't go away, but if it does, I'm not going to change where my kids go to school because this is what I want for them either way,” she said. “So I will make a way. I'll make it work.”
From One Parent to Another
School choice is valued in Arizona, but many parents don’t know much about ESAs — even with all the political debate happening over it.
In Yuma, which has a strong military presence due to the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground and Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ibarra said military families often arrive already aware of ESAs. For other families, information about school choice can spread more informally.
“A lot of our parents [at Southwestern Christian] are word of mouth,” she said. “Somebody tells somebody, ‘Hey, there's this school you should check out,’ and usually they hear about it and come to us because they know somebody who knows somebody and then in that case, they would say, ‘Don't forget to apply for ESA.’”
But private schools aren’t the only places where parents exchange information about ESAs.
“We have a lot of Facebook groups for parents and a constant: ‘Can I order something like this?’ And they post a picture. ‘Can I order something like this? Is this allowed? Is this not allowed?’” said Tanya Wright.
That’s something she wishes the Arizona Department of Education would be clearer in communicating.
“It would also help to be clear in the handbook on what is allowed, what is not allowed and have a more user friendly platform where if parents are trying to find that stuff out, they can easily get that information so they're not guessing,” she said.
In the absence of that, Alexis Liggett has built a Facebook group called “Yuma Arizona ESA Hub.”
She said the group has helped parents, including one mother who had struggled to find different supports for her son.
“She saw a group that I created, the Yuma Arizona ESA Hub, and it is for vendors and families to network for that so that people can kind of learn about what Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are,” Liggett said. “And she said that she started seeing it and she talked to her husband and she said, ‘Public school just isn't working. Let's try the ESA again.’ And her husband was like, ‘No. Last time that we tried it, remember? We couldn't really find anything.’
“And she said, ‘No, but it's different now. It's different. It's growing.’”
Wright and Liggett have also spent time helping other families in the community learn about the program.
“Of course, you see children from private schools aware of it because their admin kind of tells them about it, but who tells all the other families that are kind of lost and struggling?” Liggett said.
For Liggett, helping other parents learn about their options is personal.
Her own decision to leave public school wasn’t necessarily about believing its problems could never be fixed, but about how long her son might have to wait for those fixes.
“But again, for me, it was, okay, do we wait for there to be resolution then? And at what point? How much time would AJ have wasted? Or let's make this jump and just get more involved ourselves with his education,” she said.
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This reporting is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
