The Republican leaders of the Arizona Legislature joined the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in a joint press release on Wednesday in response to a recent social media post by Governor Katie Hobbs (D). In her post, the governor claimed Arizona’s popular Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program was unsustainable and called for it to be restricted.
Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne (R), Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma (R-Peoria), and Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen (R-Gilbert) issued a press release defending the state’s education voucher program after Hobbs called it “unaccountable and unsustainable” in a statement posted to X.
Hobbs claimed ESAs “are funding ski resort passes, luxury car driving lessons, and pianos “due to a lack of “real limits on the program,” and indicated ESA funding could prevent state troopers from investigating drug crimes, social workers from protecting children, and doctors from treating veterans unless Horne, Toma, and Petersen “bring an end to this wasteful, runaway spending.”
In his statement, Horne said Hobbs is guilty of an accounting error by “counting the $7,200 paid for each ESA student without offsetting the $13,000 paid per student that would otherwise be spent for that student to attend a public school,” adding that “expenditures for all public school spending, including the ESA program are $72 million below budget.”
Toma seemed to accuse Hobbs of politicizing ESAs, saying “she ought to propose serious policies, not tweet vague threats.” He added that the “State Legislature has yet to see any policy proposals from her office.”
Petersen explained that the Arizona Legislature “budgeted for the 68,000 kids currently enrolled” and planned for future increases to the program. Instead of the ESA program, Petersen said “the immediate crisis negatively impacting our budget is the skyrocketing inflation caused by reckless policies being pushed by Democrats at the federal level.”
“This is crushing Arizonans’ ability to have discretionary income,” said Petersen, who said this is why Arizona “is limited in the tax revenues we’re able to generate.” Petersen said the Senate will “evaluate ways to cut spending to accommodate any budget shortfall, but our school choice program will not be on the chopping block.”
Toma last defended the ESA program in late August, when he acknowledged “[it] is a partisan issue” in Phoenix’s “Capitol complex, but it is not a partisan issue largely with parents.” He said that “Democrat parents want school choice overwhelmingly just like Republican parents and independent parents.”
ESA Executive Director John Ward recently said he intends to use artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline student enrollment and purchase order turnaround, explaining that “we’re not gonna be able to hire enough people to keep up” with the program’s demand.
– – –
Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Georgia Star News and a reporter for the Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Katie Hobbs” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
