While speaking to the press Monday morning, Gov. Katie Hobbs criticized a legislative committee charged with providing oversight and accountability to the state’s expanded school voucher program.
Democratic and Republican members of the Arizona House of Representatives agreed to create the House Ad Hoc Committee on Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Governance in Oversight during budget negotiations in 2022. They pitched it as a way to provide transparency and ensure the right mechanisms were in place to manage the expanded program.
But after the committee wrapped up its second and final meeting last month, House Speaker Ben Toma (R-Peoria) said he heard nothing in the meetings that should prompt changes to the program.
“So far, I haven’t seen any proposals on anything specific that we haven’t already talked about,” he said.
Hobbs, in turn, accused Toma of using the committee to further his own agenda.
“I think the committee did what most people thought it would do, which was absolutely nothing but serve to validate Speaker Toma’s position on not taking any action on this,” she said.
Both ESA critics and proponents agree the program’s popularity is exceeding expectations and that the program itself is over budget.
The Arizona Department of Education projects it will spend $780 million on ESAs by the end of this fiscal year, well above the $624 million legislators budgeted for the program. But at the last oversight committee’s meeting, John Ward, the program’s executive director, said the department could absorb that increase within its larger budget and still show a $57 million surplus this year.
Ward, like his boss, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, is a vocal ESA supporter.
“As the executive director of Arizona’s ESA program, I believe passionately in the concept of school choice, and I believe in Arizona’s ESA program in particular, because it provides for the greatest educational freedom of any school choice program in the nation,” Ward said.
The Governor’s Office released its own projection in July, estimating the program could cost $940 million this fiscal year.
The Department of Education said the program could grow from around 70,000 students this year to up to 100,000 students next year.
Critics said the committee failed to deliver on the promise to increase the program’s transparency, including by failing to discuss a high-profile data breach that exposed student information.
The committee and Department of Education also failed to collect the data needed to determine where students enrolling in the universal voucher program are coming from. That’s a key metric needed to examine the financial implications of the ESA program.
Without that data, assessing the net financial impact of the program is complicated.
Ward, the program’s executive director, told the committee that it cost $13,400 to educate a public school student in 2022 versus $9,800 to educate an average ESA student in 2024. But that calculation also included federal dollars that do not factor into ESA awards.
According to data from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee at the Arizona Legislature, the net impact of the ESA program depends on whether students are switching from public schools to ESAs or were already enrolled in private schools or homeschooled, meaning they are new costs. Which public schools the ESA student switched from is also a factor.
For example, JLBC analyst Patrick Moran told the committee that it actually costs the state $700 less to educate a K-8 student at a large school district that receives state aid than it would to educate that student via the ESA program.
But Moran said JLBC can’t determine the overall impact of those “switcher” students due to a lack of data.
“At this time, we can’t determine the impact of switchers in real time, because we don’t know of those 70,000 how many were in public school in FY2024 and FY2023,” he said, adding that the Department of Education is working to collect that data.
Ward promised the committee that ADE will set up an online dashboard with additional information about the program, including the number of ESA participants, the number of students previously in public school, the number of applications coming in, and the average and median award amounts.
Hobbs and legislative Democrats have repeatedly called for changes to the program to rein in spending as the state faces a $400 million budget shortfall.
“I think [Toma is] putting his head in the sand. … This is a program that’s unaccountable; it’s unsustainable; and if we don’t make changes, it’s going to break our budget,” Hobbs said.
But, during his closing remarks at the oversight committee’s last meeting on Nov. 14, Toma sent a very different message.
“My colleagues and I support your right to school choice and will defend it,” he told ESA parents at the meeting. “And don’t be discouraged by the detractors … follow the rules, ignore the noise.”
