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Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Spending Called Into Question

The Arizona voucher program that permits parents to utilize taxpayer money for sending their kids to private schools is being called into question, according to a recent report.

The Arizona Auditor General’s Office found that roughly $700,000 of the funds were taken by parents from their children’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts over the last 13 months and spent on prohibited items.

Next week’s election has the ESA program, known as Proposition 305, listed as an item on the ballot.


The purchases on prohibited items include athletic apparel, beauty supplies and other products that were not approved by the ESA’s overseeing body, the Arizona Department of Education.

“Those transactions are not necessarily all misspending,” said Jeff Gove, performance audit manager for the Auditor General’s Office. “The only way you would know if they were misspending was to go in and actually review each of the specific receipts or other documentation for those purchases for every one of those transactions.”

Despite his comments, Gove also said that the spending is still concerning since the items do not appear to be “educational in nature,” meaning that screening process of spending by the Department of Education “doesn’t appear to be working.” 

According to Department of Education communications officer Stefan Swiat, the purchased have been difficult to review as a result of a lack of funding. 

“Our team is so woefully underfunded that they haven’t had the opportunity to go through all of those transactions, which there are about 900 of them, and actually look and see if there was actual misspending or not,” Swiat said. 

Roughly $5.7 million has been dedicated to the ESA program, but has yet to be appropriated by state legislature.

In addition to that, only 1.6 percent of the ESA are being dispersed to a child’s prior public school in an effort to cover administrative costs, when it should be 4 percent.

The information has been made public with less than a week until Arizona voters decide if more students will become eligible to apply for ESA vouchers. The program is currently limited to certain students, which includes those with parents in the military, those with disabilities or those who are attending schools with a D or F rating. 

If Proposition 305 is passed, the result will be an expanded eligibility to all students by 2022, with enrollment to be capped at approximately 30,000. Only 5,000 students are currently using the program.

If Proposition 305 passes and staffing levels at the Department of Education don’t change, Swiat said adding more students to the program would be “untenable.”

“That’s not going to be good for students, it’s not going to be good for the state, and there’s going to be repercussions for that,” Swiat said.