Message From The Chair
What Makes My Blood Boil about the ESA Voucher Program
For more than seven years, I served as the elected Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the City of Albany, NY. One of my key responsibilities was auditing all purchase vouchers submitted by city departments for payment. With thousands of vouchers passing through my auditors to my desk for approval, I made it a priority to train my team to flag anything that looked unusual. In a city that had been under Democratic control for seventy years, we encountered numerous questionable vouchers from favored vendors, which we closely reviewed and often denied.
That experience solidified my belief that government spending must be regularly audited to prevent fraud and abuse and to ensure that taxpayer money is not wasted. This perspective is exactly why I am so frustrated with the administration of Arizona’s ESA Voucher program. Currently, millions of dollars are being spent on fraudulent, irrelevant, and luxury items—expenses that should never be covered by taxpayer funds. The program has ballooned to a cost of $1 billion annually, yet there are no safeguards in place to protect either children or taxpayers. The Republican-controlled State Legislature has repeatedly refused to make even the most basic amendments to increase accountability in the administration of the program.
The Protect Education Act: A Solution for Accountability
The Protect Education Act citizen initiative, supported by Save Our Schools and the Arizona Education Association, is designed to address the significant lack of oversight and safeguards in this expensive program. Importantly, it does so without harming the disabled children for whom the original voucher program was intended. The Act proposes several key measures:
Mandate fingerprinting for anyone paid under the vouchers who has unsupervised access to children.
Require all voucher-funded schools to comply with basic safety standards. This includes adherence to local fire and safety codes, conducting background checks for educators and school staff, safe storage of heavy machinery and weapons on school premises, and commonsense protections to prevent youth access to drugs and alcohol.
Prohibit the use of ESA voucher funds for non-educational and luxury purchases, such as luxury appliances, lingerie, big screen TVs, jewelry, water or amusement park admission, out-of-state travel, and gift cards.
Taking Action: The Path Forward
For all these reasons, LD17 Democrats are committed to actively collecting petition signatures to qualify this citizen initiative for the ballot, while also helping to promote our candidates. To succeed, we need to gather more than 255,000 signatures by the end of June.
We invite you to join us by registering for circulator training and connecting with one of our petition hubs to receive your petitions. Together, we can reform the ESA Voucher program to ensure better protection for both students and taxpayers.