Arizona sent nearly $29 million in funding for low-achieving K-12 schools back to the federal government after schools missed deadlines to spend the money.
The Arizona Republic first reported the state Department of Education had to return a portion of school improvement funds from 2021 and 2022, because schools missed a September 2023 deadline to obligate all of the money, or assign the funds for specific expenses.
Republican and Democratic officials are now engaged in finger pointing over who is to blame for losing the money.
Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs blamed Republican state Superintendent Tom Horne for failing to help schools meet the obligation deadline.
“The bottom line is that it’s unconscionable that students that are struggling are now missing out on additional assistance, because we just, like, forfeited these funds,” Hobbs said.
The governor said her office is “looking at options right now, including the possibility of an investigation into what happened,” but did not say who or what office would carry out that investigation.
But Horne said he is not to blame.
“The mishandling and failure to notify districts of correct allocations with time for them to properly plan and spend the money resulted from an error by an employee of my predecessor before I took office,” Horne said in a statement. “This person told the schools they had smaller allocations than they had. We were constantly on the phone urging districts to spend as much of the money properly as they could.”
That former staffer, who now works for the Pima County School Superintendent’s Office, did not respond to a request for comment.
Horne’s administration put the onus on former Superintendent Kathy Hoffman, a Democrat who left office in January 2023 after Horne defeated her in the 2022 election. Horne’s administration said the money in question had to be awarded to individual schools by July 2022, when Hoffman was still in office.
A spokesman claimed the former Hoffman staffer, who briefly served under Horne, failed to notify superiors about the impending deadline before leaving the office in March 2023.
That issue then went unnoticed by Horne’s department for nearly a year, well after the September deadline had passed.
The Republic reported that Michelle Udall, an associate superintendent under Horne, told the Arizona Charter Schools Association the department did not realize the money had expired until March 2024.
Hoffman, the former Democratic superintendent, said that’s on Horne.
“It was their choice to bring in their own leadership, so those people needed to figure out all the grant funding. It's as simple as that," Hoffman told the Republic.
The story took a new twist on Tuesday, when Horne sent the Republic a letter asking it to retract the story, alleging it withheld pertinent information provided by the department.
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