Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne is applauding the Goldwater Institute and two homeschool moms who are suing Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes over the issue of Empowerment Scholarship Account curricula approval requests.
“The Department of Education concedes the argument of the Goldwater Institute. When this issue first arose in July, my concern was that the Attorney General could force Empowerment Scholarship Account holders to return funds if they did not comply with her office’s interpretation of the law,” said Horne. “This lawsuit will settle the issue in court and my sincere hope is that the arguments made by Goldwater will prevail.”
The Goldwater Institute is suing Mayes on behalf of two mothers, Velia Aguirre and Rosemary McAtee, arguing that Mayes has imposed overly-stringent restrictions on universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program purchases.
ESAs allow parents to use a portion of their children’s allotted state funding to purchase books, school supplies, and other curriculum materials that they can use to educate their children. Under the law, parents can then submit their expenses to the state for reimbursement. But over the summer, Goldwater alleges that Mayes “conjured up an illegal new rule requiring that to qualify for reimbursement, each of those purchases must be explicitly called for in a curriculum. For Velia and Rosemary, that meant no pencils, no erasers, no poster of the periodic table of elements, no flashcards, and no classic educational books like “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”—unless they could sink hours into tracking down or coming up with various “curricula” that explicitly call for each and every book title or material’s use.”
“The law is clear: ESA families have the right to use these educational materials without being forced to justify to the Attorney General or state bureaucrats why they’re buying pencils or picking individual books for their children,” said Goldwater Institute Staff Attorney John Thorpe. “Unfortunately, AG Mayes’ arbitrary action is now having a detrimental impact on thousands of Arizona’s ESA parents and their children.”
“The government is changing the rules and putting impossible burdens on me,” says Velia, whose three sons have special needs. In a new Goldwater Institute video, Velia explains that she is “individualizing my child’s educational needs from minute to minute throughout the day,” meaning her curriculum is ever-changing. “It’s been really challenging and hard having to meet the expectations that the AG wants with a curriculum,” Velia says.
“All of a sudden, we have a government telling us, ‘Here’s one more thing for the list,’” adds Rosemary, who has nine children, seven of them on the ESA program. “I feel like the AG clearly doesn’t have any interest in what an education looks like for a homeschool child.”
The Goldwater Institute believes that the new mandate “simply ignores state law and violates the Department of Education’s own handbook, which safeguards the ESA program by requiring documentation for unusual purchases, but not for common-sense purchases of items that are “generally known to be educational.”
Goldwater Institute attorneys says that Attorney General Mayes’ “contrived “curriculum” requirement is a cynical, illegal attack on the ESA program, and it’s making life harder for parents and children alike.
“She just wants to shut down and eliminate this program,” Rosemary says. “The government should actually be supporting ESA parents and children so they can get the education they deserve.”
One state lawmaker who agrees with both mothers is Republican Steve Montenegro, a longtime supporter of school choice and ESAs. “AG Mayes is trying to use her position to change the law when her job is to enforce the law as written,” Montenegro told ADI. “It is something the Legislature is getting used to from her, and we understand she is trying to build a relationship with her left-wing base, but she took an oath to defend our laws, not to make up new ones to score political points. These parents are following the law as the Legislature wrote it, and the AG needs to support them, not attack them.”