The voucher edition
A complicated kerfuffle … That’s a little personal … And everybody needs an auntie.
Arizona’s school voucher system got a dose of good old-fashioned journalism over the past few weeks, as 12News’ Craig Harris started vetting $124 million worth of expenses parents had racked up without any oversight.
And that investigation has kicked off a round of infighting and squabbling among elected officials, especially Republicans, who are struggling to reconcile their party’s cornerstone of fiscal accountability with their pro (school) choice ideology.
Early last month, Harris reported that the Arizona Department of Education isn’t reviewing purchases under $2,000 that parents make with their Empowerment Scholarship Accounts — AKA school vouchers — and they hadn’t been doing it since December.
In just eight months, the department processed 1.2 million reimbursement requests for purchases under $2,000 by parents in the ESA program, at a cost to taxpayers of $124 million.
Harris — who has been investigating ESAs for years, including at his old gig at the Republic — started digging through those under-$2,000 purchases. And of course, he unearthed all kinds of eyebrow-raising purchases, like parents buying diamond rings, hotel and resort stays, Broadway tickets, maternity clothes, dog food and even lingerie.
That revelation prompted Gina Swoboda, chair of the Arizona Republican Party and a supporter of school choice, to say she agreed that “people are taking advantage” of the system and call for an audit of the $1 billion program.
“Any time you have a government program, it’s going to be susceptible to abuse,” Swoboda said. “And when you expand it rapidly and you don’t staff up for it or put guardrails in place, this is where we are right now.”
Those commonsense comments set off a firestorm of criticism from her fellow Republicans, especially in the far-right Freedom Caucus that lashes out at any criticism of the voucher program.
Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman and former lawmaker Liz Harris (who was kicked out of the Legislature for spreading bonkers theories about state officials working for drug cartels) issued a statement saying Swoboda should be removed as party chair.
“Gina Swoboda’s recent Katie Hobbs-style attacks on Arizona’s signature school choice program are deeply troubling and a gift horse for Democrats in the 2026 election,” Hoffman and Harris said.
Swoboda didn’t take it lying down. She called Hoffman and Harris “low-rent grifters with sordid histories” who shouldn’t be taken seriously within the party.
The war of words over vouchers is part of a broader battle within the Arizona Republican Party. Hoffman and his ilk are preparing a slate of “Freedom Caucus” Republicans to challenge Republican officeholders in 2026, including Horne. And trashing Horne as a turncoat for calling for accountability with taxpayer dollars in the popular program is part of that campaign playbook.
On the other side of the aisle, Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes quickly pounced on the outrageous purchases.
Mayes said she plans to sue Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and his department. Notably, Mayes didn’t rule out going after the parents who made those purchases.
“I think that every Arizona taxpayer has every right to be demanding what in the hell is going on inside both the ESA program, but also the Department of Education," Mayes said.
Mayes sent a letter to Horne last week chastising him for not tracking the under-$2,000 purchases and demanding he “prevent further misuse of public funds.”
She pointed out that Horne told the State Board of Education last October that education officials tried to auto-approve purchases at or below $85, but parents quickly started buying Amazon gift cards for that amount “figuring that they would get through without anyone seeing it, so we had to stop that,” Mayes quoted Horne as telling the board.
Horne shot back in a letter the same day, saying Mayes “misled the public” with her “long-winded” letter.
He noted that education officials technically hadn’t approved the under-$2,000 purchases yet. They would be reviewed at a later date, he said. His department also has frozen the accounts of parents who broke the rules, and staff is currently recalling more than $600,000 that went to improper purchases. (Overall, the voucher program is expected to cost more than $1 billion this school year)
Horne went on to say the Legislature gave him authority to develop risk-based auditing procedures, a signal that his department didn’t have enough people to check millions of purchases.
That understaffing has been a problem since the voucher program was expanded in 2022 to include every student in the state.
The voucher program director, John Ward, told lawmakers in July that just a dozen employees review spending in the program.
The Department of Education would have had more eyes on those purchases if $2 million in funding for staff had made it out of the Legislature earlier this year. Hobbs, and many Republicans, opposed the measure.
Ward said his office does hundreds of audits every day and they’ve suspended more than 400 accounts. (Roughly 90,000 students are enrolled in the voucher program.)
While all this was going on, two Colorado residents pleaded guilty to defrauding Arizona’s voucher program of more than $100,000 by using fake birth certificates when they submitted applications to the voucher program.
Horne jumped out in front of that case, saying the fraud was first caught by Department of Education staff and he was “committed to doing everything possible to protect taxpayer resources and root out fraud and abuse.”
That might sound like a bland statement, but Horne’s commitment to rooting out fraud in the voucher program has put him squarely in the crosshairs of Hoffman, who is backing Treasurer Kimberly Yee’s run for superintendent of public instruction next year.
You can help us stick around to see whether Yee beats Horne next year. All you have to do is click that button!
That good old-fashioned journalism didn’t just reveal potential fraud in the school voucher program.
It also revealed the personal information of parents who use the program.
It wasn’t reporter Craig Harris’s fault, though. The Arizona Department of Education included personal information of dozens of students when the it responded to a public records request.
While 12News reporters redacted that information in the database they published, the Arizona Republic initially published a full, unredacted database before taking it down.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne downplayed the release of the personal information, saying it was a “tiny percentage” of parents who were exposed.
Horne’s likely opponent for the GOP nomination next year, Treasurer Kimberly Yee, said the release showed Horne had a “vendetta” against the families in the voucher program.
"This isn't just incompetence; it's a direct assault on school choice," Yee said.
If all this sounds a little familiar, it’s because something similar happened back in 2023, when ClassWallet, a vendor the Department of Education uses, suffered a data breach that exposed the names and disabilities of students with ESAs.
Two top administrators of the program resigned after that episode, including one who was later determined to be at fault.
And those with longer memories might recall another similar episode in 2020, when Democrat Kathy Hoffman was superintendent of public instruction and the personal information of thousands of students was released to journalists.
Republican lawmakers jumped on Hoffman, including Senate Education Chairman Sylvia Allen, who called for moving the voucher program out of the Department of Education and “put it where it could be run efficiently, correctly and without political malice and intent.”
ESA Program Lacks Accountability, Risks Student Outcomes
Education Forward Arizona is sounding the alarm over the mounting reports of waste, fraud, and a lack of transparency in Arizona's universal school voucher program, calling Empowerment Scholarship Accounts “a taxpayer-funded black hole.”
The nonprofit points to growing reports of waste, fraud, and secrecy in the ESA system and is urging lawmakers to act before more public money is lost.
“The Empowerment Scholarship Program, as it currently stands, is failing Arizona’s students and wasting taxpayer dollars,” said Rich Nickel, president and CEO.
While not opposed to vouchers in principle, Education Forward Arizona argues ESAs should be held to the same standards as any other public education investment — with clear academic benchmarks, fraud protections and public reporting.
The group warns that unchecked spending in the program threatens to drain resources from core state education goals, such as ensuring all students read by third grade and reaching Arizona’s target of 60% postsecondary attainment.
Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that ESA dollars are still being disbursed despite the clear lack of adequate performance standards, measurements for student success, and oversight to prevent fraud.
Education Forward Arizona is urging lawmakers to take immediate action to regain control.
Polynesian students have taken college football by storm in recent years, and the University of Arizona is right in the thick of it.
When they’re at the UA, Polynesian players are finding a bit of home with Benjaline Medlock, the Arizona Daily Star’s Justin Spears reports.
She’s the unofficial “auntie” of the players and makes sure they get generous helpings of teriyaki chicken and Spam musubi when they come by her house.
“Whenever we feel homesick, she’ll bring us cookies or brownies. That’s the root of our culture, family and love. Auntie Benjie shows us that while we’re away from home,” UA quarterback Noah Fifita said.
