Tolleson tangled in Isaac’s insolvency
Troubled school saves troubled school … We screwed up! … And who knew Deuce was a health nut?
Teachers at the Isaac School District let out a sigh of relief when paychecks showed up this week (a few days late) after a neighbor stepped in to help.
But that neighbor, the Tolleson Union High School District, has its own problems.
We’ve talked a lot about Isaac and Tolleson in the past few editions.
Isaac became a political flashpoint and educational crisis this year when auditors discovered it was somewhere around $28 million in debt. Lawmakers pounced, both promising to save the district and hammering it as an example of public schools run amok with taxpayer dollars. The district superintendent and CFO resigned, but the school board members have refused to, even in the face of bipartisan calls for them to step down.
Tolleson, meanwhile, has graced our pages thanks to its new governing board president, former lawmaker Leezah Sun, who was forced to resign from the Legislature due to her series of bizarre actions and threats against colleagues. We’ve also noted that its superintendent, Jeremy Calles, was briefly suspended for allegedly having a relationship with a school board member, Elda Luna-Nájera, who is also a state lawmaker.1 Calles claims Luna-Nájera sexually harassed him and tried to fire him in retaliation, and an investigation backed up his claims.
Last week, Tolleson loaned Isaac $25 million under a first-of-its-kind lease-leaseback agreement between the two districts. (The Tolleson Governing Board also agreed to pay out $450,000 in a settlement to Calles, who had filed complaints alleging sexual harassment and retaliation, and to renew his contract. Apparently, they’ve got money to burn!)
The bailout is just the first step in a long road to financial solvency – school closures, consolidations and layoffs are still on the table. But it helps solve the district’s massive budget hole and ensures teachers will get paid for the rest of the school year. And Tolleson stands to earn significant dividends off of the interest from the deal.
But not everyone is happy.
Republican Rep. Matt Gress, who had inked his own legislative plan to give the district $2.5 million as a stopgap, wants to outlaw the kind of agreement the two districts set up moving forward.
The Attorney General’s Office said there’s nothing illegal about the lease-purchase deal, but that it is investigating Isaac’s mismanagement of funds.
It’s good news that the teachers at Isaac can once again count on their paychecks showing up, and the students can count on their teachers showing up.
Still, we can’t help but feel some level of trepidation about Tolleson’s chaotic and politically scandalous leadership swooping in to save the potentially criminally mismanaged Isaac from financial ruin.
We screwed up big time last week when we complained that lawmakers are once again waiting until the last possible minute to lift the Aggregate Expenditure Limit, AKA the school spending cap.
Turns out, lawmakers preemptively lifted the cap for the current school year in a provision tucked into this year’s state budget.
We apologize for the error. Thanks to the several readers who flagged it for us!
Now, if lawmakers can preemptively lift the cap for next year – or better yet, reform the cap so it doesn’t need lifting every year – we’ll never have to write about the AEL again.
Still waiting: It has been a week since Republican Sen. JD Mesnard and Republican Rep. Matt Gress introduced identical bills to extend Prop 123, which provides around $300 million per year to schools and will expire in July unless lawmakers send it to a ballot and voters approve it before then. Neither bill has been scheduled for a hearing, including in the House Education Committee, which Gress chairs.
A tight-knit family: The Cartwright School District Governing Board appointed a new interim superintendent: former Republican Maricopa County Superintendent of Schools Steve Watson, who had a string of financial mismanagement issues during his final years in office, per the Republic’s David Ulloa Jr. And there’s a whole separate kerfuffle going on in that district over the 19-year-old daughter of board member (and Democratic lawmaker) Lydia Hernandez getting elected to the board and whether that’s legal, since the state has restrictions on who can serve on school boards to prevent nepotism. The duo cast the deciding votes in favor or Watson.
Send Howie some veggies: Capitol scribe Howie Fischer explains lawmakers’ attempt to crack down on ultraprocessed foods in school cafeterias (and ban SNAP benefits from being used on them) telling KJZZ’s “The Show” that hyperactive kindergarteners are hard to control. And 12News’ Brahm Resnik breaks down a couple of bills moving through the Capitol, including one to arm school teachers and staff that cleared the state House. Finally, AZFamily’s Dennis Welch had an interesting conversation with Stand for Children’s Rebecca Gau about Donald Trump’s attempt to shutter the federal Department of Education and what that would meand for Arizona students.
“Those are all the things that keep me alive – candy and red Dye #40,” Fischer explains.
Too many Avas: Democratic Sen. Catherine Miranda penned an oped for the Republic about why she’s supporting the proposed “Ava’s Law,” which we wrote about in the Arizona Agenda last week. The bill, SB1106, would hold schools liable if they don’t do full background checks on employees who later go on to commit sexual offenses against students.
“Because ignorance of past bad acts provides legal protection, the immunity clause incentivizes schools not to dig too deeply into applicants’ pasts,” Miranda wrote.
Music to protesters’ ears: Amid ongoing budget cuts, Mesa Public Schools backed down from cutting its music program for fourth through sixth grades after more than 3,000 people signed a petition – and 60 people showed up in person – to tell the governing board to keep music in schools. The district plans to pay for the program with $1.3 million in unobligated funds, the Tribune’s Cecilia Chan reports.
We don’t need $1.3 million to keep the Education Agenda arriving in your inbox.
But a few bucks would help!
The pandemic took a toll on Arizona’s students.
Five years later, students still aren’t bouncing back, and our school test scores are showing signs that Covid’s long tail is still with us.
Arizona students took a dive in fourth and eighth-grade reading in the last two years, while holding steady, but below the national average, on fourth and eighth-grade math, the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report shows.
Only a quarter of Arizona fourth and eighth graders scored proficient or advanced in reading.
In math, about a quarter of eighth graders scored proficient or above, while almost a third of fourth graders scored at that level.
The NAEP is the most comprehensive assessment of how American K-12 students are doing – and after its 2022 report showed students across the nation struggling with academic success post-pandemic, educators had hoped that the 2022 scores would signal a bottoming out from which schools would rebound.
But the national test scores kept sinking, and Arizona’s schools continued to slump behind the national average in all four markers.
And those slogging numbers are forcing educators to grapple with questions about the efficacy of the flood of federal funding that hit schools in the past five years, and how to lift Arizona’s students below the national average.
Since the pandemic, Arizona’s schools have basically erased roughly 25 years of mostly steady upward progress. These days, most of Arizona’s students are now performing about as well as their peers did in 1998, per the NAEP. The results were even worse for Black, Latino and poor kids in Arizona, who have remained steadily behind their white and wealthy peers for the last 25 years of testing.
More data: The NAEP has a wealth of national data, but if you really want to nerd out on the granular level, we recommend clicking around the Arizona Education Progress Meter, which has district-level data and some pretty cool data visualizations.
And a quiz: And if you want to check if you’re smarter than an eighth grader, London-based news outlet The Times put together a handy quiz containing questions from the NAEP. We don’t like to brag, but we scored 100%.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne pulled out the big guns yesterday when hosting a press conference about the need to cut certain additives and chemicals from school lunchroom cafeterias.
He called in California political refugee and actor Rob Schneider – best known for his support roles in old Adam Sandler movies – who occasionally inserts himself into local politics, and Danika Patrick2 – the former racecar driver and Arizona transplant best known for her starring roles in GoDaddy commercials – to make the case for him.
“I don’t understand – this is the cheap stuff, but they need a giant factory,” Patrick said, pointing to a box of cereal. “What about the stuff that you pull out of the ground? It costs sunshine, which is free. And they tried to take us out of the sunshine for a while – that was horrible.”
Like the true thespian he is, Schneider showed up in costume, declaring himself a stark warning at what will happen to children who eat Fruitloops.
“I should be six-foot-five at least. Look at me, I’m a balding midget. My pants are too tight. I’m angry all the time because I ate this crap,” he shouted into a microphone.
It’s hard not to take the bill seriously with those solid arguments in favor.
Also, the “Confirm RFK” sign in the background really lent itself to the vibe.
The bill passed the House Education Committee unanimously yesterday (though two Democrats abstained).
Fun fact: Luna-Nájera was appointed to replace Sun in the House for the West Valley’s Legislative District 22 after Sun resigned.
Interestingly, Patrick had never voted before casting her vote for Donald Trump in 2024.
"Rob Schneider ...who occasionally inserts himself into local politics, and Danika Patrick² –"
I read this without that last comma and really thought you had an exclusive TMZ story. lol
I appreciate the clarification on the AEL, lawmakers know what school spending will be when the state budget is negotiated each year and there is no good reason to wait until the following March and risk disruption to school operations before addressing it. Approval to exceed the AEL should routinely be part of the state budget package.