Grand Canyon Times

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs' recently proposed budget includes repeal of the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program, but Steve Smith, Arizona state director of the American Federation for Children, says rolling back ESA's could affect school choices and aid extended to low-income students.

“The ESA program is designed to provide education equality to all students as they receive the same amount of funding,” Smith said in an interview. “This is a dream come true to so many low-income and minority families [who] have typically been those disenfranchised the most."

ESA, according to Smith, allows many low-income students to attend schools they normally could not attend otherwise, creating “equality.”

Smith also noted that a Cygnal polling from schoolchoicepolling.com found that 74% of African Americans support school choice, while 73% of Latinos and 79% of Democrats expressed support for school choice.

Moreover, Smith noted that a 2022 Public Opinion Strategies poll found that 74% of Arizonans support low-income ESA’s, including 78% of minorities. He added that if the program were rolled back, it would affect thousands of families across the state.

“If the ESA program were to be eliminated, nearly 50,000 families would have their education of choice ripped away from them, including special needs and disadvantaged families,” Smith said. “Not only that but in the wake of COVID-19, which has robbed children of their learning due to school closures, now more than ever parents need choices to help them to recover from the learning loss their children experienced.”

"46,787 Arizona students benefit from an Empowerment Scholarship Account (as of 02/06/23)," according to the Arizona Department of Education website.

Hobbs says that the program funnels funds away from public schooling, but the Common Sense Institute maintains ESA's actually will save the state money.

“The fact is the ESA only provides 90% of the state portion of education funding that the child would have received if they attended a public school, so it is a 10% savings to the system,” Smith said. 

“Additionally, when a student leaves a public school to use an ESA, some of their allocated education dollars actually are retained by the school district and now that school has one less child to educate.”

Smith pointed out that the state not only saves money on the ESA program, but the school will receive a slide of the student’s funding even though they no longer are enrolled in the school.

“Also, the per pupil funding in Arizona is approximately $14,000 per year yet, the ESA funding is half of that at $7,000,” Smith concluded. “The ESA students are being educated at literally half of the cost that district students receive.”