Three new voucher bills appear despite voters

The original school voucher system was launched in 2011 as a way to help children get services not offered by their local district schools. More than 11,000 students receive vouchers, which can total $40,000 for disabled students needing special services. Arizona taxpayers spend some $380 million annually in support for private schools.

The vouchers average about $15,000 each and several studies have suggested most of the money is going to upper income families in upper-income urban areas, since the vouchers don’t normally cover the full cost of private tuition.

The senate approved three bills that would make an additional roughly 700,000 students eligible for the private school tuition subsidy. Arizona has roughly 1.1 public school students.

State Sen. Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff) sponsored SB 1131, which would expand voucher eligibility to children of military veterans, first responders and health care workers.

The bill was ultimately incorporated into Rep. Paul Boyer’s (R-Glendale)SB 1657, which allows the vouchers for any student who qualifies for federal school lunch programs or receives food stamp assistance. In most rural areas, that would cover perhaps two-thirds of students.

Boyer said the expansion of the voucher system would empower parents to seek the best education for their children. He said the pandemic — where public schools but not most private schools shifted to distance learning for months at a time — underscored the need to give parents choice.

However, public school advocates said the massive expansion of vouchers would cripple public schools, which Census Bureau information suggest already rank 48th in per-student funding — despite big increases in federal pandemic funding in the past two years.

A third bill would extend voucher eligibility to any student who benefitted from Gov. Doug Ducey’s program that used federal relief money to leave district schools — especially those with mask mandates or distance learning programs after the state ended mandatory school shutdowns.

All three voucher expansion bills passed the senate on a straight party-line vote. The House will consider the bills this week. The House has already voted to raise the spending limit for district schools. However, several House Republicans have expressed doubts about the expansion — saying they would favor an expansion only if it came with greater accountability for how the money’s spent. House Democrats have almost all said they would oppose the measure — which means the Republicans would need almost every single vote in the House to approve the Senate expansion.

Rep. Brenda Burton and Rep. Walt Blackman — Republicans who represent Rim Country and the White Mountains in the House — did not reply to an email about how they would vote on the proposed voucher expansion.

Save our Schools, a coalition of education advocates, criticized the proposed voucher expansion.