The head of the House Education Committee said Wednesday that any plan to ask voters to increase pay of public school teachers also must include inserting a right to vouchers for private schools into the Arizona Constitution — a proposal that could blow up the whole plan.
Rep. Matt Gress (R-Phoenix) said he believes that House and Senate Republicans are supportive of finding the dollars to raise teacher pay.
Republican lawmakers have long supported a plan to provide $4,000 across-the-board pay increases to teachers via an extension of Proposition 123. Approved by voters in 2015, it has provided close to $3.5 billion since then in additional dollars for K-12 education by making additional withdrawals from the state land trust.
But Gress said his GOP colleagues want something else: protecting school choice.
Both state and federal courts have affirmed the legality of vouchers, rejecting various challenges that it amounts to the improper use of state funds for private and religious education.
Gress said what's missing, however, is a guarantee that the program will continue — and without interference.
“You've seen repeated assaults, particularly by Gov. Hobbs, in trying to eradicate one of the school choice options that we have,” he said, referring to the state’s voucher program, also known as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.
“She is not going to give up until she has ripped out school choice by root and branch,” Gress said. “And I think that worries a lot of Arizona families.”
Hobbs, for her part, says what Gress and the GOP are proposing is “a complete and total nonstarter.”
“Business and education leaders are opposed to that shamelessly partisan plan,” she said in a statement. “The reckless partisan games from politicians in the Legislature need to come to an end before they endanger pay raises for teachers in order to gut public education.”
Senate Minority Leader Priya Sundareshan said the disclosure of the new GOP demand comes even as Democrats have been trying to work with Republicans to craft a deal to extend Proposition 123, which expires this year.
Both Republicans and Hobbs have proposed asking voters to extend that extra funding, though there are differences.
Republicans want all the dollars for teacher pay. Hobbs has her own plan — one that would take even more money out of the trust — to finance not just teacher salaries but also support staff, general school funding as well as cash for school capital and safety improvement.
Those talks, Sundareshan said, have broken down.
“That would explain why they have walked away from the table for so long,” the Tucson Democrat said Wednesday on being told of the GOP interest in now adding voucher protection to the mix.
“We have been waiting for over a month with the Republicans to come back with a proposal,” Sundareshan said.
And what if Republicans insist that higher pay for public school teachers has to be linked to constitutional protections for vouchers?
“I hesitate to say 'non-starter,'” Sundareshan said. “But, yes, as we know, vouchers are not a good policy in our view.”
In the end, however, it may not matter what Democrats — or the governor — think.
Any extension of Prop. 123 would be crafted as a constitutional amendment. And that means if Republicans who control the House and Senate can line up the votes among their own members, it would go directly to the ballot, bypassing the governor.
The fight is the latest dust-up over vouchers that actually began more than a decade ago.
At that time they were limited to students with certain disabilities who could not get their needs met in public schools. Over the years, however, GOP lawmakers gradually expanded eligibility to include foster children, those on reservations and students attending schools rated D or F.
In 2022, however, all the limits came off as Doug Ducey, Hobbs' predecessor, signed legislation for “universal vouchers,” that allow any student in the state to use public dollars for private or homeschooling.
Following universal expansion, the cost of the program has ballooned to more than $770 million a year, at least in part because the vouchers are now being used by parents who, until now, were sending their children to private schools on their own dime.
Democrats first tried to roll back the program when Hobbs took office in 2023, but faced stiff opposition from the Republican-controlled Legislature. They later tried to push voucher reforms and restrictions they said would control ballooning costs and combat fraud but have had little success.
“She may portray her policies as not getting rid of them,” Gress said. “But the effective operational practice of her policy would be gutting the ESA program.”
While Republicans may have the ability to advance their plan linking teacher pay with protecting vouchers, there is a potential danger of voter rejection.
A decade ago, the original Prop. 123 barely skated by with a 51%-49% margin. And that was despite bipartisan support and the backing of both business interests and the education community.
Geneva Fuentes, communications director for the Arizona Education Association, said her members already were unhappy with the initial Republican plan to restrict in the Prop. 123 extension how schools could use the dollars only for teacher pay. She said that leaves out things like facilities maintenance “to make sure that if the AC breaks in a school that kids can continue to learn safely there.”
But even if those issues can be resolved, Fuentes said AEA is unlikely to support anything that enshrines the right of parents to vouchers in the Arizona Constitution.
“There have been significant issues with waste, fraud and abuse with the current voucher program,” she said, particularly high-dollar purchases made by parents of home-schooled children. “Constitutional protections for the voucher program would make it very difficult for lawmakers to implement future reforms to the program,” Fuentes said.
Gress, for his part, said he does not see adding a constitutional right to vouchers to a Prop. 123 extension as a poison pill that would kill the entire package when it goes to voters.
Part of what he is counting on is support from the parents of all the youngsters now taking advantage of vouchers.
“We've seen the Empowerment Scholarship Account program grow tremendously from 13,000 or 14,000 to nearly 90,000,” he said, with close to half of that growth being students who had been enrolled in public schools but are using the vouchers to go to a private or parochial school.
“They're overwhelmingly popular,” Gress said.