Arizona lawmakers wrapped up their 2026 session early Saturday morning; adjournment came about a day after they approved a budget for the new fiscal year, but not before a lot of back-and-forth over Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs — school vouchers.
Howard Fischer was at the capitol for all of it, and after catching up on some sleep, he joined The Show to talk about what happened in the waning hours of the session.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Howie. Hopefully you’re well-caffeinated.
HOWARD FISCHER: Well-caffeinated, all caught up on my sleep, just trying to keep my microphone from melting in the heat.
MARK BRODIE: Oh, well that would be a good thing to do.
So, OK, so the Legislature wrapped up about 4, almost 5 o'clock Saturday morning. But in the hours leading up to it, there were these reports that the House speaker and the Arizona Education Association, the teachers’ union, were working on some kind of deal over ESAs.
What was that about?
HOWARD FISCHER: Well, the House Speaker, Steve Montenegro, is, I think, terrified that the initiative that’s being placed on the ballot by the Arizona Education Association, Save Our Schools, will pass. And while he recognizes that perhaps there need to be things to curb some of the more bizarre purchases, the things that have been reported on like lingerie and jewelry and trips to Disneyland, what he didn’t want were things like an absolute $150,000 cap on parents. These are the folks who probably were sending their kids already to private and parochial schools and now can get $7,400 vouchers.
So he said, as you point out, "Let’s make a deal." The problem became, and we can get into some of the specifics, that he worked with the Arizona Education Association, apparently not with Save Our Schools, which is part of the initiative.
And all of this was occurring without the Democrats, who, while they’re in the minority of the Legislature, are the key supporters of some of these things, and knowing that all the Republicans probably wouldn’t go along.
And it blew up on him. And all of this comes down to the fact that we’re still fighting what started out in 2012 as a nice idea for students and has just ballooned.
MARK BRODIE: Right, well it started off, as we’ve talked about, for a particular group of students, and sort of over time, it has evolved to include more students, and now it involves all students.
HOWARD FISCHER: Exactly. Remember, in 2012, the whole purpose was there are some students who had some special needs that probably couldn’t be met in public schools. So it would tell parents, "Tell you what, we’re going to give you some money. You can take that money and send your kid to a certain school who might be able to deal with issues like autism or something else that’s harder for a school district."
Well, we all knew at the time that this was the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent, and it has been that way. It now includes the students of military families, it now includes foster children, it now includes children on reservations, it now includes students who are going to schools rated D and F. And then in 2022, under Doug Ducey, they said, "We’re going to have universal vouchers." And then anybody can get a voucher. They’re about $7,400, $7,500 a year now. And they can take them where they want. They can use them for private schools, they can use them for parochial schools.
And what’s been problematic in terms of the spending is they can use it for homeschooling. And at this point, I think the Education Association said, "Look, this is taking now $1 billion a year out of the budget." Remember, this started in 2022 with 12,000 students. Now we’ve got over 100,000 in there. And the fear was that somehow this was going to continue to drain public education. So hence the initiative, and hence the efforts to kill it.
MARK BRODIE: So Howie, what was actually in the deal that Steve Montenegro, the House speaker and the AEA came up with before the Senate defeated it?
HOWARD FISCHER: Well, it started off with the issue of that, "Well, maybe we do need some constraints. Maybe we do need an actual list of what can’t be purchased." Now, it’s important to remember that wasn’t much of an offer given that, theoretically, if you look at the actual laws, you can only use this for legitimate education expenses.
Now what’s happened is people have decided, "Well, I need to take my kid to that trip to Tokyo to teach them about international law. I need to go ahead and get a nice car so they can do driver training." And then there were the things that, again, the lingerie. I’m not sure where the lingerie fitted in. Perhaps there was some home ec program that somebody said that they needed.
And all of that, so Speaker Montenegro said, "We’ll make a list. You can’t have that kind of stuff." We’ll also put a limit on how much kids can carry forward going to college. Because one of the issues that has come up is, while this was meant for helping the kids to go to school now, there’s a little loophole in there that says if you’re not using it all, you can bank it. And this is particularly important for homeschooled children because they can say, "Well, we’ll just buy our curriculum on our own and we will take our $7,400, $7,500, or larger for students with special needs, and we’ll bank it for 12 years and then we can pay for college." And so he agreed to put in a cap in there of $24,000, basically, of how much you can carry forward.
The AEA said, "OK, that’s fine," because they also knew that while they probably have enough signatures right now to get the ballot, it’s going to be a very expensive campaign going forward. They would have to fight against another, I would call a sort of a sham reform by a group called Fortify Arizona that Betsy DeVos is sponsoring. And there’s no guarantee that it would be approved. And I think they thought it was a decent deal.
Obviously, it would have been nice for the Democrats to say, "If you’d included us." And also there’s a belief, I think, by a lot of the folks in the Save Our Schools, which is the grassroots organization, "You could have done better. Perhaps some money for Proposition 123. Perhaps, why did you even put in that they can carry cash forward?"
And so the whole thing just started to fall apart in the late hours. And then what happened was this poison pill, and that’s really crucial. ... Because the lawmakers said, "OK, if you don’t take our deal, we’re going to find a way to kill your whole initiative without even having to go to the ballot."
So they put something on the ballot that says if the children of military families who are, again, eligible, lose some of their benefits, like the ability to carry that cash forward in any future initiative, anything past after Nov. 1, the entire measure that does that, not just that part, the entire measure is constitutionally voided.
And remember, they were doing this as a constitutional measure and the AEA initiative was statutory. Constitution in general trumps statutory. And so what they ended up putting on the ballot is a poison pill, that if you find this nice-sounding thing to go ahead and help the children of military families — nobody wants to hurt the children of military families — you go ahead and you effectively kill the entire initiative reform and we’re back to ground zero.
MARK BRODIE: So Howie, very briefly before we let you go, does it seem as though that provision, that ballot measure, might be subject to a legal challenge before November?
HOWARD FISCHER: Well, this is a little trickier because of the fact that people could say, "Well, it’s not constitutional to kill something else." But again, they crafted it as a constitutional amendment. So does the Supreme Court say, "No, you can’t do that kind of two-step for lack of a better word"?
I think there will be a challenge to it. What the court will do, you can lose a lot of money betting on what the Supreme Court will do with any particular ballot measure. I have seen them go from the extreme position of things don’t have more than one subject because there are two things some people would want, some people don’t want, to is it part of a larger whole and therefore we’ll let it go to the ballot.
A lot of lawyers are going to be spending a lot of time and a lot of money on this.
MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, we’ll see what happens. That is Howie Fischer with Capital Media Services. Howie, thanks as always.
HOWARD FISCHER: Glad to be here.
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