By Zachery Schmidt
The Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program has surpassed the 100,000-participant threshold.
The school choice program, launched in 2011, was initially created for Arizona students with special needs. When the program became universal in 2022, it only had 12,127 students.
This shows the program has seen a 725% increase in participants since 2022.
Matt Beienburg, director of education policy at the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, called the ESA program’s 100,000 participants an “extraordinary achievement.”
He said he thinks the number proves “ESAs are offering educational opportunity to kids [and] families” by “meeting the needs in ways often that the public school system is not.”
The program allows the money that would have paid for a student’s education at a neighborhood school to follow the student to another school of the parents’ choice. The money can also go for home schooling, according to the Arizona Department of Education.
Tens of thousands of students have switched from public school to the ESA program, Beienburg told The Center Square this week.
When the ESA program expanded, there was a lot of “pent-up demand,” said Katie Ratlief, executive director of Common Sense Institute Arizona.
“Parents wanted to try something new [and] different,” Ratlief told The Center Square.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said Arizona parents “are learning that if the local public school is not meeting their child’s needs, they have choices.”
“I am a big defender of their right to find a school that meets their child’s needs,” Horne told The Center Square.
Going forward, Ratlief said the number of ESA program participants will grow at 1% to 2% per year, similar to the state’s K-12 education system’s population growth.
Students entering the ESA program “will come from students leaving public schools,” she said.
Arizona public school enrollment has “been flat” since 2008, Ratlief told The Center Square.
With all these new ESA participants, Arizona faces a staffing problem, Horne said. He noted the program has the same number of administrators as it did when it had 11,000 participants.
Last year, the state House included in its budget funding to increase the Arizona Department of Education’s budget to hire administrators for the ESA program, but Gov. Katie Hobbs, who has veto power, told the chamber to remove it, Horne explained.
When a person reads about the ESA auditing problems, that is due to a lack of staff, he said.
Horne said the department is discussing with Class Wallet, the vendor for the ESA program, the ability for Arizona to audit accounts through automated processing.
On top of this, Beienburg said there’s an effort to “reduce administrative burdens on families” and “those who are charged with administering the program in state government.”
The Goldwater Institute currently has a lawsuit that is attempting to stop an “illegal mandate on families who are using the program,” Beienburg said.
He explained the illegal mandate is state Attorney General Kris Mayes’ rule that directed families using the ESA program to document their purchases and explain why they made them.
This requirement is nowhere in Arizona law, Beienburg noted, adding, “It does nothing to improve the efficiency of the program.”
“All it does is burden families and the administrators who then have to review this content,” he explained.
The Goldwater Institute filed the lawsuit against Arizona in 2024, challenging the requirement.
The nonprofit is providing legal representation for two mothers who were prevented from using their ESA funds for educational items for home schooling such as books, pencils and erasers due to “the curricula they use don’t explicitly list these items.”
The court case is still ongoing.