Latest / Arizona Unscripted / Episode 12: 🌵 Arizona Unscripted - Let's celebrate Arizona schools!
Transcript
- Arizona Unscripted: Welcome to Arizona Unscripted. ⁓ I'm your host Bart alongside my wonderful co-hosts Diane, Jim, and Catherine. Is Catherine there today? Catherine's not here today, she's on vacation. ⁓ Catherine, can I go on vacation? Yeah, no. Anyway, from time to time we'll be joined by special pop in guests from communities and we have a couple of great ones today, so still stay tuned. But more about Arizona Unscripted. It's all about Arizona. So for those people, you know who love Arizona, live in the area. Wanna be here, wanna wanna hang out. This is the place to be, is Arizona Unscripted, because that's our goal, is to really sh ⁓ help our state sh and show people what could what a great state it is and how it shines. And our goal is celeb is simple to celebrate what makes Arizona unique. All right. So we so grab a cup of coffee or something cool, sit back and join us as we explore the people, places, and stories that make Arizona one of the greatest states in America. Welcome to Arizona Unscripted. And with that, I will Pass it over to Diane. Good morning, Bart. Yeah, you know, we were just we spent this weekend ⁓ just talking with each other and learning about civic education and how we can be more informed on what's going on in our communities and education came up. And so we wanted to do a podcast and invite some people. into this podcast to just have a conversation with us about what education looks like here in Arizona. So I mean the school is here, Finn. ⁓ sorry, Arizona's school. So Arizona's great education. But go ahead. I'm sorry I'm getting too excited. It is, it is. No, that's good. We've got Jacob George here. And Jacob can tell us a little bit about himself and also Beth Lewis. And we're super glad to have them with us. And also Monica is coming in from La Paz. ⁓ on the outside of that, we've got Daniel and Joan that are returning, as well as Sherry and Jim and Carol are here in Karate County. So Jacob and Beth, thank you for joining us. Of course. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Absolutely. Now you you guys ⁓ tell us about yourselves. So Jacob, are you an educator or how how do you how are you involved in education in the state? Yeah, no, I mean I'm a pro of Arizona's public schools and the public education system here in Arizona. But I'm also ⁓ a a school board member in the Balts Elementary School District, ⁓ which kind of covers around the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport area. Awesome. That's ⁓ that's great. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. That's that's not an easy task. I mean they wow, you your young age, I feel like I I feel like I have I missed something. No, yeah. I I ran very young I ran at age nineteen. ⁓ and so I'm really great ⁓ experience and I am just grateful for the opportunity that's cool ⁓ to serve my constituents. Yeah, I mean what a what a great what a great thank you for your for your civic for your civic ⁓ doing that civic action there. It's fantastic. And ⁓ Beth, right? Beth Beth Lewis, I guess. Yes, we've got Beth here. Hi everyone. Yeah. I ⁓ so I am also a proud product of Arizona schools. I graduated from Kingman High School, Mojave County. Cool. And yeah, and loved it. ⁓ still have wonderful teachers and best friends from that. And then I ⁓ was an educator for 12 years in Arizona in elementary school and middle school. I've got two middle schoolers at home right now who go to public school. Bless you. Yep. Send ⁓ send, you know, Amazon orders of deodorant and wine and like all the teenager supplies. ⁓ summer break. Yeah, they're home all the time. It's crazy. ⁓ so yeah, and I I am one of the proud co founders of Saber Schools Arizona. So I was in the classroom and my kids were actually in preschool when we Founded Save Our Schools. This is our 10th legislative session. We just finished up and we are fighting for strong, well-funded, equitably funded, adequately funded public schools and supports for teachers. And we have grown to 20,000 volunteers and have created this lasting movement that's one of the biggest in the entire country. So it's been really just an incredible thing to be a part of. And so, so proud. ⁓ be here and to share with you all. That's incredible. Absolutely incredible. And you went from teaching to such strong advocacy. And we're one, we're really grateful for that. And two, we're really curious about that journey. Do you want to share a little bit about that with us? Yeah, I mean it happened really organically. ⁓ I was actually teaching in Balz, which is such a cool connection with Jacob. I loved my time there. I taught at Graffitha Elementary, which was also middle school for some time. Anyhow, I, you know, I was asking a lot of questions because I just couldn't understand why we didn't have any resources for our students, why we didn't have any, you know, books and laptops and like all these things that clearly other kids in like Tempe and Chandler had where I lived. I was like, this is crazy. ⁓ it was a very low income district and So I like sat down, we were actually ⁓ helping to form a union that year, the BEA, and sat down with the district ⁓ finance guy who was great and just asked him all the questions. And he's like, look, you you guys have got to stop pointing fingers at the district because look, the legislature sets our budgets. And you know, that was really eye-opening. That was back in 2010, 2011. And ⁓ it all just kind of happened from there. And then they were the legislature was trying to pass universal vouchers and we all got involved down there. We just tried to testify as moms and teachers and students and they were so incredibly rude to us and talked over us and just were so vicious in their approach that I think they really activated a lot of people. And I think we started to realize like what a big issue it was. So yeah, I yeah. Going down to the Capitol every night after teaching, and a lot of people still are doing both. And it's just ⁓ it's sad that we have to fight so hard, but here we are. Yeah, I mean, well, tell us, I mean, tell us why you love being a teacher. I think that's the cool and especially in Arizona. What makes Arizona and your and teaching come together for you? I wish you could see me because I'm smiling a huge smile right now. I love being a teacher. and I mean, obviously it's it's the kids, it's always the students. ⁓ it's also the content. I mean, just being able to help support kids in their educational pursuits and like help motivate kids to really love to read and love math and really find learning fun. it just is the best job on the whole planet. And at the same time, teachers are leaving in Arizona because we just can't pay them ⁓ what they're worth and they're being asked to do so much more with less every day. So you know teachers love, love, love their jobs and also need so much more from the state of Arizona. So that's why we're fighting. That's fantastic. I mean, really, I mean, teaching my wife's a teacher and I always look at her and she's like the queen. Yeah. People know her. But I just walk behind her. She people bow not bow down to her, but just really enjoy ⁓ her her her work. And over the years she was a principal too. And all that's it's just I have to say you guys work really hard. People don't realize you're on stage all day, a lot of times if you're teaching, you're on stage, literally. I mean having to handle And now Arizona, I mean, it has a it has a huge range. I mean, I'm not I'm not a teacher, but it I know it has a huge range of options for people in Arizona. Like there's like I know there's voucher program, but there's you know, public schools, there's all this different things that are a big mix, right? Which gives Arizona like this incredible sort of cornucopia of educational opportunities. Is that is am I correct on that? Because it seems like it Anybody have any thoughts on that? Well, I will say one of the things when I start my classes is I talk to people about how important education is. And it's one thing that nobody can ever take away from you. Right. When you get that education, that stays with you, and you take that into the community and into your life. And by the end of the semester, I'll have students saying, This is more than just that. That was powerful. But what I've realized is what I learned here. I can go into my community and make a difference in my community. I can make it the community I wanna see. And that is so incredibly important in why we really need to support our schools and being able to give the students the things and the teachers that they need in order to be able to facilitate that. Because in rural, our schools often are like our community center. It's where we ⁓ that's interesting. It's where we have events. It's where we see our neighbors. And when our schools start closing, that really impacts us as a whole community. I mean, because it's gotta have a range of diversity, right? There's gotta be like you in the Royal or is it really small little school, right? Versus maybe is are there one room schools left in Arizona anywhere? Does anybody know? No. Let's not stake that into existence. Yeah, there are, but yeah, I know, and I I and I touched on something there, you know, I would say, you know, public schools really are the foundation block of our communities. ⁓ they're also, you know, a huge economic driver for our communities as well. Okay. ⁓ when we have good quality schools, it helps out the whole community. It helps with, you know, making sure that we have adequate health care in our districts, that we have make sure that, you know, children are ⁓ getting the education that they need, ⁓ they're that they're staying out of, you know, bad stuff and they're continuing their education path forward. ⁓ you know, these really are really the the the foundation of our community and we have to protect them at all cost. ⁓ and that's what I love about what SOS is doing ⁓ to ensure that ⁓ but also you know our public schools need a lot of help right now. ⁓ you know, with funding wise, they you know, it could really impact a lot of students. You know, in my school district, we had to have the discussion earlier this year. Are we going to close a school or not? ⁓ and it was, you know, really kind of you know, heart wrenching to you know to see that, you know, the budget that we had to make these difficult decisions as a school board member. luckily we were able to kind of convert to a magnet school, ⁓ one of our schools to a magnet school and try to keep it open that way. ⁓ but we don't know if that's gonna be a long term fix. ⁓ and these ESA vouchers are definitely killing us in bolts. One thing about bolts is our I guess you're gonna kinda break it up for Jacob. We have to we have to reset your your Wi-Fi. I think something something's going on there. Yeah. ⁓ we froze. Come back to that. ⁓ it's coming in. So we might need you to drop off and come on back. ⁓ but Beth, yeah, so I think this is such an important part of you know, there's lot of discussion about vouchers and confusion about what that means. And, you know, it seems to me common ground that we have with people is people want our schools to be healthy. They want our children to get an education. We may have a different idea what that looks like. But I think that there is a really a lot of common ground as far as we really do want to support our schools. And how do we best do that? Because we've talked a lot about our finances and how costs are going at the grocery store or at the gas tank and what what can we do? Like this is one of those things I think that makes like Jacob was saying a healthy community is having educated students because these are our future community members. Well they're current community members too but decision makers in our community. Beth, do you have some thoughts on that? How do we as your neighbors support our schools like what is what is the thing that we can do to help us all get to a better educated community? Yeah, I mean I think wow that is that is such a great question and so open. I mean I'm glad we're talking about boundaries because I do think that that's something that has really you know it's a key issue in Arizona. The whole nation's kind of looking at us as we did this huge experiment first. ⁓ and like Jacob said, it is impacting our local school districts in massive, massive ways. And so I think, you know, the question is to your point, you know, everybody supports our teachers, everybody supports kids, everybody understands that, you know, giving them an excellent education is really important for that child and their life, but also for our state and for our economy and for community, right? Like it and also for our democracy. And I think we all kind of inherently know those things. The question is, should we should we be siphoning, you know, a whole lot of dollars without real rules for transparency or accountability to other forms when we're not adequately funding the system that we have that's constitutionally mandated, right? ⁓ and so it kind of becomes an open question of like, is it a good idea to have three or four systems where you're spreading those taxpayer dollars around sort of with reckless abandon? When the reality is like we've got these community schools that our communities paid for, that our teachers are, you know, trained to serve. And is that old fashioned or is it actually the best possible laboratory for democracy? And you know, I would argue the latter. ⁓ and our our students continue to be served so incredibly well by our public schools. And there's a lot of bad mouthing out there, and there's a lot of misinformation, but You know, if if our teachers had more resources, we would be doing even better. And I think everybody knows that. But I think, especially in rural communities, you know, it's Friday night lights. It's it brings the whole town together. And it is in many of our rural communities, to Jacob's point, is the number one employer as well. And so if our public schools fold, You know, what does that do to our communities? And if if everything gets converted over to private schools that can pick and choose kids and that might not survive in rural communities, is there even a school? I mean, that's that's a question that is scary, but it's not we're not that far off from it. If we're dividing ⁓ and siphoning a billion dollars into private schools ⁓ that truly don't have to serve all kids, they don't have to serve kids with disabilities, they don't have to serve students who may not have English as a first language, right? Like all of these wonderful things. that our public schools due to acceptance from everyone. It's really important. Yeah. Yeah. And I I think as as a ⁓ senior with no children in any school system, ⁓ but it's still important to me ⁓ to have a educated community, especially when you're checking out and that person can't count back change. Pisses me off. So anyway, but but ⁓ I think having more accountability for the program, I don't know that we can get rid of it now, but the accountability is just not there. Yeah. So and it's my taxpayer money. So I mean it's important. And I kinda just want to touch that. Hopefully my audio is good now. Can everyone hear me? It's better. Okay. I just had to turn off my camera and that seemed to fix it. ⁓ I just also wanted to touch on that, like, you know, there are no guardrails on this ESA voucher program. ⁓ you know, ESAs were originally designed to, you know, to help students with special needs and special education. ⁓ and then, you know, the Republicans abused the abused the program. And like Beth said, we are the Petri Dish ⁓ Arizona for this ESA voucher ⁓ program to see how it worked here. And then other states are gonna try to implement it, right? ⁓ but we had people using it to buy diamond rings, lingerie, you know, a whole bunch of stuff, espresso machines, trips to SeaWorld. I mean, you name it, somebody has probably used this money to buy it. And let's just be frank, most of the money that is being used and abused in this system is coming from wealthy people ⁓ in the East Valley that, you know, make over $150,000 a year, ⁓ that are using this, you know, this this program. ⁓ that frankly they don't need it. ⁓ and so it's very, you know, critical that we are putting this money back into our communities, putting it back into our public schools. ⁓ all we're asking here is to put some guardrails on the ESA program. Yeah, to kind of bring it back to what what it was originally intended for, not not make it a slush fund for ⁓ people to to kind of abuse. I mean, people are pretty honest, but there's yeah, I there's a temptation, right? P plus GP ever A family who has a they've been going to a private school and suddenly you can get money to pay for the private school back from your you know, obviously from tax dollars you put in. That sounds like a pretty tempting thing, but it also means that there's some schools that lose money and and it's not that's not great 'cause it distributes the money ⁓ sort of unequally. So we need some some guardrails of some sort. I'd imagine. What's is is there is there anything now? I mean, what kind of guardrails do they have now, by the way, just what's the baseline? Beth, I'll I'll hand that to you. Yeah. So they're, you know, it's a it's a very mixed bag. ⁓ we know that plenty of folks, of course, use the program as intended and you know, use it for expensive private school tuition to offset those costs. Many of the people were already in private school though. So it truly is just a coupon that we, you and I, taxpayers, are giving them. ⁓ so think about it. You know, if you're paying $20,000 for private school tuition. And you get $8,000. Well, now, you know, that's $8,000 less you have to pay, and you can spend that on, you know, European vacation. So we are providing that. We the taxpayers for people that were already in private school. ⁓ but then the other half of folks were are really ⁓ using it for homeschool. And and most folks will tell you you don't need eight thousand dollars per kid to homeschool. You don't have brick and mortar expenses, you don't have a teacher, right? You don't have librarians and psychologists and counselors and like all the stuff that you gotta pay for for a good education in this schooling. ⁓ even to the point where in Texas they passed a similar voucher program where they only gave two thousand dollars to students who were in homeschool versus ten thousand dollars for kids in private school. ⁓ so you know, I think that is a really important point for people to kind of understand that Arizona is. The reason that this is so expensive is we're just doling out money to a lot of folks who really don't need it ⁓ or don't need that much money. In terms of guardrails, some folks are, you know, buying educational things, but then a lot of folks that we see on the internet are using AI to to create curriculum for things that are not educational, but they're getting passed by Tom Horne's ⁓ Department of Education because there's a curriculum that's attached. And so just as an example, we saw somebody say, well, I need a standing kitchen aid mixer, $300 because I want to teach my kid fractions. So we're gonna bake together. Or I wanna buy a tabletop ice maker for $400 because I wanna teach my fifth grader states of matter. And I mean, I'll tell you as a public school teacher, like the amount of hoops we have to go through just to get like the basics funded takes a very long time. And so there's a lot of kind of wild justification ⁓ that you see in here where there's there's a little bit of an entitlement, like, well, these are my dollars and I get to use them however I wish. And ⁓ I just don't think that's how tax dollars should work, you know. So who's making what y'all think? Who's is is there anybody ⁓ who's I mean is legislature who's who's the the not the police, but who's doing the enforcement of the the guardrails or yeah, ⁓ like yeah, but I mean you can imagine you know. Well, the Department of Education is the one that's doing the approvals. And Tom Horn ⁓ created a new rule about a year ago that said anything under $2,000 will automatically approve. And so any purchase under $2,000. And we'll go back and audit it. Sure, sure, sure. ⁓ so far we don't have any evidence that any real auditing has actually happened. And that's where you see all of these wild stories about the $10 million. In the last year that's been spent on big screen TVs and iPhones and Disneyland tickets and lingerie and jewel diamond jewelry because, like Jacob was saying, because these auto approvals are just killing the system. Hey Beth, I have a question. ⁓ go ahead. No, you're good. how much has this cost the Arizona taxpayers in our overall state budget? So it's over a billion dollars this coming year. you know, again, not saying all of that is fraudulent, but a billion dollars on the ESA voucher program. And that continues to grow. And our Department of Education is also using our taxpayer dollars to advertise the program and try and sort of coerce people into the program and to leave their public school. so I'm curious if we and I know we need to wrap up our conversation, but if we wanted to. have somebody from Saber Schools or somebody like Jacob come and talk with our community groups so we can better understand what it is that we can do and what the situation is. How would we go about doing that? ⁓ for save our schools, we absolutely would love that. We have ⁓ you know, organizers and volunteers everywhere who would love to come speak with your group or your group of friends. ⁓ so you can just reach out. Our website is sosarizona.org and there are forms to sign up and also to sign up for our emails. and You can email info at slsarzona.org. And we also have a really important petition that is finishing up next Thursday, July 2nd. So I don't know when the podcast airs, but that is the last day to sign the Protect Education Petition, which would enact these ⁓ reforms that we're talking about for the ESA program. So it's incredibly critical. We're going to be turning in hopefully over 400. thousand signatures from Arizona voters to get this on the ballot in November so folks can vote yes to protect education. Yes. Well thank you for coming and joining us. I feel like we just barely scraped you know the so we gotta have you guys back. Yeah we gotta yes have you back we would love to have some small group discussions about this. So thank you Beth and Jacob for joining us today. We do want to have another conversation with you in the future. So hopefully we can have you both back again. Perfect Thank you so much. Thank you all so much. All right, thank you so much for yeah, thank you for coming on to the Arizona Inscript.