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.
Yuma Catholic High School had its first day of classes Wednesday, Aug. 5, but some parents, like Brittani Ibarra, are still waiting to learn if their child’s tuition is completely covered.
“My son graduated now two years ago — all four years I got 100% of the tuition covered, so it's very possible to have the STOs pay the whole thing,” Ibarra said. “My son, who's a freshman this year, I don't know yet because you don't find out until mid-July or mid-August.”
Like most families at Yuma Catholic, Ibarra relies on aid from Student Tuition Organizations (STOs) to pay for tuition. These organizations are nonprofits that receive income tax credit contributions that fund scholarships for students to attend qualified Arizona private schools.
“They're getting what we call low-income corporate tax money,” said YCHS President Rhett Stallworth. “That's where corporations that have a tax debt to the state, they can actually donate it to private schools and use that to help fund kids that fall under a certain range economically.”
Tax credit tuition assistance is one of several programs Arizona has created to support school choice. Before universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs), it was the main option for low-income families in regions like Yuma to afford private schools.
The catch, however, is the yearly uncertainty, and the wait.
“You don’t find out until mid-July or mid-August,” Ibarra said. “So out of the $13,000, I still owe $3,000, but there’s still two STOs who haven’t told me how much I get, so my hope is those two will give me the $1,500 each and then I’ll have my tuition covered, but you just don’t know until closer to.”
Ibarra, who’s also vice principal at Southwestern Christian School, uses an ESA to cover her daughter’s tuition at Southwestern.
“ESA is so nice that you just know the dollar amount and you know you’re covered,” she said. “It’s stressful with the STOs because every year, you’re sitting there going, ‘Am I going to get it? Yes or no?’ Waiting, waiting, waiting. School has already started, I don’t know if I’m going to owe $3,000 or not. I have to sit here and wait until they let me know.”
But if it’s so stressful, why not use ESAs at both schools?
Well, it comes down to numbers.
The average ESA award is $7,500 while tuition at Yuma Catholic this year is $13,500, which means a YCHS parent would still need to pay for the remaining $6,000.
Could a parent combine the ESA with an STO, then?
No, that’s against the law.
“If after signing an ESA contract, an Account Holder concurrently accepts an STO scholarship for an ESA student, the Account Holder must withdraw his or her student from the ESA program and the ESA will be closed,” reads the 2025-2026 ESA Parent Handbook.
That’s why most YCHS families take the STO route while most Southwestern Christian parents take the ESA.
The Private School Landscape in Yuma and La Paz
Across Yuma and La Paz counties, there are nine traditional private school options with only one of them in La Paz County.
In the table below, the average tuition at a Yuma private school for preschool through 8th grade is $6,780. That generally falls under the average ESA award amount, making ESAs a significant source of support for parents at these schools.
Sustaining a private school is “difficult in a community like this,” Stallworth explained.
“The misconception is it's private school — everybody there's rich, and that's not the case,” he said. “The community couldn't support a school like that, just of elite people to come in and pay and do that. That's not what it is, and it wouldn't be school. It wouldn't be fun.”
Stallworth pointed to students from agricultural families in south county as one example.
“We have a lot of students that will come from, say, south county — parents work in the fields and this and that — and here their kids are coming,” Stallworth said. “They get financial aid, they attend here, they get a high school diploma and they wind up getting associate's degree, which basically follows them wherever they go to their four year institutions.”
But making private school affordable for families doesn’t eliminate the financial pressures on the schools themselves.
“The unique situation is that we are a school, but at the same time, we're a private business as well, so if we don't operate fiscally responsible, we're not going to keep our doors open,” Stallworth said.
He explained that everything comes from private funds.
“So we have to get it from the community at large, but from private people,” he said. “We have businesses, private individuals, and there's some times that we get money from outside of the community with people that have an affinity to Catholic education or something like that.”
What Universal ESAs Changed Locally
At Southwestern Christian School, the financial aid landscape looked much like Yuma Catholic's before ESAs became universally available in 2022.
“And then when ESA became universal a few years ago, that's when everybody switched over,” Ibarra said.
She believes that shift may have also freed up more STO scholarship money for students at schools with higher tuition.
“I think once we stopped using STO here and everyone got on ESA, then they had more money to give to other schools who needed it, like Yuma Catholic, so then the STO all went over there,” Ibarra said.
Yuma Catholic saw an initial increase in applications after ESAs became universal, Stallworth said, but that growth has since leveled off. At Southwestern, meanwhile, ESAs have become the dominant source of tuition assistance.
Ibarra said nearly every Southwestern family receives some form of tuition assistance, a reality the school considers when setting tuition.
“We do keep ours [tuition] as close to the dollar amount of ESA because we don't want to price parents out,” Ibarra said. “So we want to make sure that parents are able to actually afford to be able to send their kids here using ESA, and so if we raise our tuition too much more, then some parents would have to pay out of pocket and some of our families can't do that.”
With universal ESAs offering a steady source of funding for private school tuition, one might expect to see a growth in private offerings in places like Yuma or La Paz.
Since expansion, Yuma’s seen a boost in offerings like microschools and other nontraditional alternatives, but not really so much for accredited brick-and-mortar private schools.
But even where ESAs can cover tuition, other limitations persist.
“We're maxed out here pretty much on our capacity to grow,” Ibarra said. “We don't have the space to continue to grow further than this, but the biggest one is the high school.”
“We've grown quite a bit — started out with just one freshman class, and then we've grown year by year and then trying to grow each class,” Stallworth said. “And we're to the point now to where we think we need to expand and start building some more classrooms around here.”
But as a YCHS parent, Ibarra pointed out the school’s been saying that for a while.
“When my son — he graduated two years ago — was a senior, they said the freshman will be in the building by the time they're seniors,” she said. “And I mean, so hopefully they do eventually, but my daughter's going into 8th grade, and so the plan was that for two years from now, it would be open.”
She asked KAWC if we’d visited the school recently. We had — that morning, in fact.
“Do you see any building?” she asked, to which we replied no. “No, not yet. Not yet. It hasn't happened. Can they build it in two years? Maybe; I mean that was what they said. But will it happen? I don't know.”
Stallworth said that same day that Yuma Catholic is currently working on a capital campaign to raise the private funds needed to expand and add classrooms.
The Limits of Private School Choice in Yuma
Ibarra pointed to Yuma Catholic as effectively the region’s only private option for families seeking a traditional, full-scale high school experience.
“If you're wanting a school where your child can do all the activities and the sports, all of the other smaller options don't have that,” she said. “Their classes are what? Six kids per grade? You don't get the high school experience that you want, and that's what I wanted. My children play football and sports, and so they wanted to go to a school where they can play football and still be in a small class setting.”
Ibarra said the shortage of private high school options is a recurring topic among Southwestern families and local churches.
“Over the years, all of the churches have kind of talked about, ‘You open a high school, you open a high school, you open a high school,’” she said. “It's a lot more work than just let's do it. And so getting somebody to step in, it would really need to be a huge undertaking.
“But we do, we need more options … We're growing in Yuma and we don't have enough buildings to fill the needs of just the current students.”
Having money available for private education, however, does not mean families participate in school choice equally.
An exclusive analysis on the school privatization boom from the Associated Press (AP) this year examined the entire state of Arizona — among others — by ZIP code and found that wealthier students were the most likely to benefit.
ESA participation in high-income zip codes in 2026 was nearly three times higher than in low-income neighborhoods: 11.2% of students in neighborhoods where the median income is roughly $153,000 or higher participated, compared with 4% in neighborhoods where the median income is less than $35,000.
Isolating just Yuma, most ZIP codes in AP's data are classified as lower-middle income, with only three — in Somerton, Wellton and Yuma — classified as middle income.
For Yuma County, ESA participation generally tracks with AP's statewide findings, but not cleanly.
When Yuma ZIP codes are grouped using AP's income classifications, about 13.1% of school-age residents in middle-income ZIP codes participate in the ESA program, compared with about 5.6% in lower-middle-income ZIP codes.
But there are significant exceptions. Yuma's 85367 ZIP code, which includes the Foothills, had the county's highest calculated participation rate at 18.1% despite being classified as lower-middle income.
Yuma’s lower-income profile also makes its private-school landscape different from wealthier parts of Arizona.
At Yuma Catholic, Stallworth said about 70% of students are low-income and receive low-income corporate tax-credit scholarships. Before universal ESAs, Ibarra said most Southwestern families also relied on STOs.
Universal ESAs, then, didn't introduce public support for private education to Yuma. For many families, they replaced one form of assistance with another — and a more predictable one.
But that predictability lasts only as long as the program does.
If Universal ESAs Go Away
Ibarra said local families talk about that possibility.
“We do talk about, let's say it does get taken away next year … will we lose families?” she said. “There probably will be some people who can't afford it.”
If that happened, families could once again turn to STO scholarships. Arizona law specifically allows a former ESA participant who meets the income requirements to receive a low-income corporate STO scholarship.
But unlike ESA awards, those scholarships aren't guaranteed — and Ibarra doesn't know whether there would be enough for everyone.
“Will the STOs be able to cover everyone?” she said. “I don't know. But also, so many families, there is no other option. They're not going to send their children to public school. So I think they would do whatever it took.”
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This reporting is supported by a grant from the Arizona Local News Foundation.
