{"id":44,"date":"2026-08-18T17:12:47","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T17:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shoeleathermagazine.com\/2026\/?p=44"},"modified":"2026-09-09T21:33:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T21:33:34","slug":"in-arizona-a-rift-over-the-nations-broadest-school-choice-program-may-be-headed-to-the-ballot-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shoeleathermagazine.com\/2026\/in-arizona-a-rift-over-the-nations-broadest-school-choice-program-may-be-headed-to-the-ballot-box\/","title":{"rendered":"In Arizona, a rift over the nation\u2019s broadest school choice program may be headed to the ballot box"},"content":{"rendered":"

A universal school voucher program has been transformative for some families in the Grand Canyon State. But are voters wondering if it\u2019s gone too far?<\/em><\/p>\n

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Titus Eichelberger, a student on Arizona\u2019s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, attended a summer program at \u200e\u2068Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University\u2069 in \u2068Prescott\u2069, AZ in 2019. Courtesy of Tonya Reiner<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Tonya Reiner and her two sons, Arizona\u2019s public schools just weren\u2019t working out.<\/p>\n

When Titus and Judah Eichelberger were in first grade and kindergarten respectively at their rural Prescott Valley school, the eldest was already seeing a multidisciplinary Individualized Education Program (IEP) team, a panel of specialists, educators, and administrators working to accommodate his disabilities, later diagnosed as a seizure disorder, an autism disorder, double vision and nonverbal communication.<\/p>\n

They were \u201cas creative as possible,\u201d Reiner said, but the complexity of her son\u2019s accommodation needs reached a level that forced Reiner to look elsewhere for help.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s unfair to expect everyone to know everything about how to intervene or work with a child who has very, very complex needs,\u201d she said, at the same time acknowledging the school\u2019s recommendation to place her older son in a \u201cself-contained autism classroom\u201d was disappointing. That\u2019s when Reiner heard about another path forward \u2014 a newly-passed scholarship program for students like her sons.<\/p>\n

Just a few days ahead of the deadline in the summer of 2011, Reiner applied to have her sons join the first-ever batch of students on the state\u2019s novel Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program.<\/p>\n

The program was designed to provide families with funds to spend on educational expenses equal to up to 90% of the per-pupil dollars that would be earmarked for their students in traditional publics, differing slightly from true voucher programs which fund non-public schools directly, which the state\u2019s top court\u00a0ruled unconstitutional<\/a>\u00a0in 2009.<\/p>\n

The flexibility in receiving the funds directly enabled Reiner to cater to Titus and Judah\u2019s individual needs herself, she said. With the voucher funds, she could bring in tutors, purchase supplies and curriculum and enroll them in specialized programs.<\/p>\n

A few years after they joined ESA, Reiner signed Titus up to join a summer program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University\u2019s Prescott campus. \u201cThey graciously allowed us to accommodate it for him,\u201d Reiner said. \u201cThe first year he really learned the cafeteria \u2014 he had a one-to-one [aide] the whole time \u2014 and he learned the flow of how things worked, he tracked with the professors.\u201d In the year that followed, Titus continued to improve, participating in a balloon launch class.<\/p>\n

In his last year of attendance, Titus was taking courses on drones and rocket propulsion and thriving. Building a working, flying drone, even the professor \u2014 an \u201cold-school military guy, someone who doesn\u2019t dole out a compliment,\u201d Reiner said \u2014 praised Titus\u2019s work, she recalled.<\/p>\n

\u201cESA allowed my son to go from a recommendation of a self-contained autism classroom with children who were working on toileting to, he\u2019s doing fantastic now,\u201d Reiner said. \u201cHe does college level in this particular area of engineering and science, and has learned coping skills and is verbal.\u201d<\/p>\n

But year after year, as her sons found more effective education options on the program, Reiner noticed something else, too. The group of eligible students \u2014 and permitted expenses \u2014 got wider and wider as the state legislature gradually expanded the program, eventually culminating in the most sweeping expansion in the country: the ESA program went universal in 2022, enabling any student in the state to exit the public schooling system and take thousands of dollars with them on the way out.<\/p>\n

The model has gained attention beyond the Grand Canyon State: since 2022,\u00a0Arkansas<\/a>,\u00a0Iowa<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Utah<\/a>\u00a0have adopted their own universal ESA program. Arizona\u2019s ESAs are cited as a national model in the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025 guidebook for the second Trump term, too.<\/p>\n

Since then, Reiner said the program has strayed too far from its roots \u2014 and hurt the very students it was designed to protect.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bigger the program grew, the more challenging it was for the parents of the students with disabilities to access,\u201d Reiner said.<\/p>\n

Since legislators voted to take the program universal, the very DNA of the program has changed. The program \u2014 created to serve students with disabilities \u2014 is now comprised less than 20% of students with disabilities, per the Arizona Education Department\u2019s\u00a0latest quarterly report.<\/a>\u00a0In the months following universalization, the amount of applications shattered anticipated figures, and the budget for the ESA program has surged to a billion dollars.<\/p>\n

The expansion has been rocked with bad headlines for school choice advocates: media reports on the alleged tens of thousands of dollars spent on trips to ski resorts and\u00a0Disneyland vacations<\/a>\u00a0have infuriated public school advocates, while the hundreds of millions spent on private school tuition have led those institutions to raise prices at rates far outpacing inflation, according to\u00a0a 2023 analysis<\/a>\u00a0from Hetchinger Report. On Facebook groups for parents with children in ESA programs, members can be seen exchanging tips on how to get horseback riding lessons, top-of-the-line DSLR cameras and 3D printers approved for purchase.<\/p>\n

But for the more than a million kids in Arizona\u2019s public schools, it\u2019s a vastly different story. Districts throughout the state are experiencing budget cuts, staff reductions and school closures that advocates say are a direct result of ESA expansion. Critics of the program argue that downstream budget concerns for public schools in the state, coupled with waste and fraud allegations, make the program\u2019s unfettered expansion an untenable situation for Arizonan students and taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Over 150,000 Arizonans<\/a>\u00a0have already signed onto a ballot initiative backed by the state\u2019s teachers\u2019 union and public school advocacy groups to implement spending reforms, introduce an income threshold and further incorporate accountability mechanisms over the ESA program. Meanwhile, the ESA program\u2019s biggest boosters are closing ranks, speaking increasingly dogmatically in parent forums and aggressively mobilizing against would-be reformers, even those in their own party.<\/p>\n

As soon as November, the deep purple state\u2019s voters could serve as a bellwether for the nation: either voting to halt the school choice movement\u2019s decade and a half of perpetual expansion in the state of Arizona and reject what\u2019s become known on the far-right as a national model for education privatization, or keep the state marching on a path critics say could reshape public education as we know it.<\/p>\n

\u270e\u270e\u270e<\/strong><\/p>\n

The promise of a free, universal public education is a central tenet of American life. But it\u2019s also a relatively recent development.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until the 20th century that the majority of states made schooling compulsory and available to most, and schools were heavily segregated for the first half of the century. By the onset of the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of Americans were enrolled in public schools, and alternatives were far from mainstream.<\/p>\n

The landmark Supreme Court ruling in\u00a0Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>\u00a0and subsequent desegregation effort should have marked a major victory for those who champion universal public schooling \u2014 but instead, it unleashed a white \u201cexodus from public schools,\u201d according to the\u00a0Southern Education Foundation.<\/a>\u00a0\u2018Segregation Academies,\u2019 as they came to be known, spread throughout the South and enrolled hundreds of thousands of white students.<\/p>\n

By 1961, the state of Georgia enacted\u00a0one of the earliest school voucher programs<\/a>, enabling white students who were fleeing recently-desegregated schools to claim \u201ca grant of state and local funds to be expended for the purpose of attending a non-sectarian private school.\u201d The law and many like it would become obsolete following the 1976 Supreme Court ruling in\u00a0Runyon v. McCrary,<\/em>\u00a0which held that private schools must desegregate too, though at least one Georgia lawmaker\u00a0tried to argue<\/a>\u00a0that the \u201961 voucher plan was technically still on the books during a resurgence in interest for school choice policies in 1993.<\/p>\n

These highly racialized migrations making up the early school choice movement were happening concurrently with another important development. In 1955, economist Milton Friedman published an essay that\u2019s become foundational to the modern school choice movement, imagining a free-market solution to education, enabling non-public schools to compete with public ones by introducing a voucher that could be spent on their tuition. It was Friedman\u2019s work, not the \u2018Segregation Academies\u2019 or state laws that support them, that seemed to catch on with the general public. But it took several decades for the idea to really take off.<\/p>\n

School choice programs gained renewed traction in the 1990s,, when clusters of voucher schemes in the Midwest, kickstarted by Milwaukee\u2019s voucher program for low-and-middle income students often\u00a0inaccurately dubbed<\/a>\u00a0the nation\u2019s first voucher program, took off. The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank,\u00a0describes<\/a>\u00a0the waves of voucher expansion in the wake of a pair of Supreme Court cases, which expanded the ways in which taxpayer dollars could be used on causes like religious education.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Arizona passed the earliest form of its Empowerment Scholarship Account law. For parents at the time, it was a novelty, but a welcome one.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had our application on the very first day it was ever open,\u201d Kathy Visser, then the parent of a developmentally disabled 8-year-old, recalled. In fact, her 8-year-old was one of the first 75 students to participate statewide in the fall semester of 2011. \u201cThey [legislators] built this solution for me before I realized that I had a problem to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n

The program was small-scale, but Visser, a certified teacher herself, found the flexibility to be transformative. It was through the ESA program that she was able to afford to contract a vision teacher to tutor her son, who suffers from a sight disorder, and on his own schedule.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis best learning hours were from 6am to 9am in the morning\u2026 she would come, she usually would come around 7am and work with him for two or three hours, two to, you know, three days a week. And that was what he needed to get going with learning,\u201d Visser said. The program, still in its infancy, continued to grow.<\/p>\n

\u201cApplications were paper. You mailed your application in, we had this really convoluted expense report that just did not work very well,\u201d Visser recalled. Even the process for paying for qualified expenses \u2014 today handled through an online platform called ClassWallet \u2014 was different. \u201cThere was no debit card, there was no ClassWallet.\u201d But as more students enrolled, and eligibility was gradually widened, the program developed. Handbooks, specialized software and debit cards were all deployed. And by the mid-2010s, pro-school choice Arizonans were already plotting to make the program more widespread.<\/p>\n

Groups like the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, and the American Federation for Children (AFC), once chaired by President Trump\u2019s former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, championed the program and urged expansion. Republican state legislators, in the majority in both chambers, jumped on board.<\/p>\n

But for some families of students with disabilities \u2014 the program\u2019s original intended audience \u2014 the expansions beyond the program\u2019s initial vision weren\u2019t always welcome.\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cSpecial education students were used to grab what the school choice agenda really wanted,\u201d Reiner argued.<\/p>\n

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Former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos attended a school choice roundtable event in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2019. Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2018, legislators voted to strengthen the ESA program in a package backed by the state\u2019s Republican Governor Doug Ducey to gradually expand program eligibility to all students statewide.<\/p>\n

That November, Arizonans rejected the at the ballot box via veto referendum by a\u00a0two-to-one margin<\/a>, a lopsided defeat that one public school advocate called a \u201cloud and clear message\u201d in support of public education\u00a0in an interview<\/a>\u00a0with local radio outlet KJZZ at the time.<\/p>\n

But the lack of a mandate didn\u2019t bother Arizona Republicans. Less than four years later, state lawmakers passed a bill making the ESA program universal along party lines, with every Republican in both chambers voting in favor, with support from no Democrats.<\/p>\n

Former State Representative Kelli Butler, a Scottsdale-area Democrat in the chamber from 2017 to 2023, said the state GOP\u2019s decision to overturn the voters\u2019 will was hardly surprising.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery year I was in the legislature, the Republicans tried to pass their universal vouchers. And every year we had a Republican or two that would side with us\u2026 every year they would try it, and then every year we would find a stopper somehow, until finally we didn\u2019t have a stopper anymore,\u201d Butler recalled.<\/p>\n

By the fall of 2022, all Arizonan students became eligible to withdraw from public schools and effectively take their funds with them. Then-Governor Ducey, a lame duck due to the state\u2019s term limit laws,\u00a0said upon signing<\/a>\u00a0that the passage of the law \u201ccements [Arizona] as the top state for school choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following universalization, the program has experienced a groundswell of interest. Per the state Department of Education\u2019s\u00a0latest report,<\/a>\u00a0roughly 72% of ESA recipients receive funds under \u201cuniversal\u201d eligibility \u2014 and the DOE touts that roughly 60% of these universal students came immediately from a public school into the program.<\/p>\n

The number of students on ESAs has steadily increased each semester from the over 11,000 enrollees taking part just before universalization, as has the cost of the program. The annualized cost of the program is well over $1 billion in the report, a figure that advocates say doesn\u2019t even cover the total trickle-down budget shocks to public schools.<\/p>\n

Since universalization, state Democrats\u00a0have pushed<\/a>\u00a0for numerous ESA reforms \u2014 fingerprinting and background check requirements for instructors, safeguards on the rights of disabled students in private schools or creating more stringent eligibility requirements \u2014 but they\u2019ve failed to find a foothold in the Republican-majority legislature. Despite the program\u2019s massive cost, reports of potentially widespread misuse, and a lack of guardrails on spending and vendors, a will for reform has failed to materialize.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The 2022 ESA vote] was one of the darkest days in the legislature for me, because we\u2019re now seeing what we knew would happen. We\u2019re just seeing that public schools have declining enrollment for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the ESAs,\u201d Butler said. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing this lack of accountability for our tax dollars. We knew that it was just going to be a destructive, off-the-rails program.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u270e\u270e\u270e<\/strong><\/p>\n

At a board meeting in Kyrene School District, a K-8 public school district encompassing students in southern Phoenix, parent Catherine Peters was one of more than 80 parents and community members to address the board in an emotional hearing in\u00a0September<\/a>\u00a0of last year. Her cause? Speaking out against the proposed closures of several Kyrene schools important to her family.<\/p>\n

The local school board initially recommended the closure of nine schools in that September meeting. Throughout the fall, proceedings got contentious, with students, educators and parents packing the stands donning matching t-shirts in support of their campuses on the chopping block, delivering emotional remarks and urging a minimally disruptive solution to the district\u2019s budget crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1998 and 1999, two mothers made the decision to uproot their families and move them into Kyrene School District. One started at Kyrene del Norte and one started at Millenio. The Milenio student was my husband, and I was the Norte student,\u201d she said in a public comment, adding that her daughter was now in Kyrene schools, too.<\/p>\n

Peters addressed the board at least a half-dozen subsequent meetings throughout the semester, according to publicly-available meeting minutes, advocating for her kindergarten-aged daughter\u2019s Kyrene del Milenio, on the shortlist for closure, to remain open. In an interview with [outlet] in February, Peters recalled bringing a photo of her daughter during a board meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI brought those pictures and said, \u2018Just remember that you guys are dealing with kids and not just dots and numbers on a chart or a grid or a board. These are living, breathing, little humans.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Catherine Peters spoke at Kyrene Governing Board meetings more than a half dozen times advocating against closure at her daughter\u2019s school. Screenshot from Nov. 18, 2025 Meeting<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe kids are super close. They go to all their friends\u2019 birthday parties. We go to their sporting events, a couple of them showed up to my daughter\u2019s dance competition. We\u2019re kind of like a little family, a little community, and so the thought of us being separated was kind of heartbreaking,\u201d Peters said.<\/p>\n

But the sheer scale of the shortfall meant that the school board\u2019s alternatives were limited.\u00a0Save Our Schools<\/a>\u00a0(SOS), the pro-public schooling group behind the ballot initiative to reform the ESA program,\u00a0estimates<\/a>\u00a0that the program has already vacuumed more than $12 million away from Kyrene schools, with further declining enrollment projected. The board voted to close six of the district\u2019s 25 campuses in December. And though Peters\u2019 daughter\u2019s school wasn\u2019t ultimately one of those slated to close, she said the loss is still felt across the district. \u201cWe are in mourning because we\u2019re still losing schools in Kyrene,\u201d she said. \u201cI went to Kyrene, my husband went to Kyrene. Kyrene is just a big part of what shaped us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experience ultimately led Peters to run for the Kyrene Governing Board, where she hopes that, even if crises like the ESA program\u2019s budget shocks remain unavoidable for public school districts, she can help school boards like Kyrene\u2019s sound the alarm and better communicate with parents about the existential threats they face.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know that the budget was in deficit. We didn\u2019t know that we were losing enrollment for five years since Covid. We didn\u2019t know about these ESA vouchers, how many families these ESA vouchers were taking away from our public school system. And we didn\u2019t know that the ESA vouchers don\u2019t have any requirements, and that parents are buying lavish gifts and big screen TVs and trips,\u201d Peters said of Kyrene parents standing against school closures.<\/p>\n

Across the state, families are facing the same crisis. Less than 15 miles away, governing board members for the nearby Roosevelt School District were forced to make a similar decision in December of 2024, voting to shutter five of its 18 campuses, all elementary schools. It\u2019s not just school closures, either \u2014 other districts have been forced to impose other costcutting measures as funds dry up.<\/p>\n

In the East Valley, Chandler Unified School District\u2019s Governing Board\u00a0voted in January<\/a>\u00a0to eliminate 123 positions, including librarians, special education staffers and media specialists, \u201cto address a $12 million budget reduction and a projected 3% enrollment decline.\u201d Similar reduction-in-force decisions were made by Mesa Public Schools in February, Phoenix Union High School District\u00a0last December,<\/a>\u00a0and Peoria Unified School Board in April, which\u00a0eliminated<\/a>\u00a0each of its social worker positions.<\/p>\n

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