Kim, a 12th grade student at West Lafayette High School, discovered his dog, Joy, had heartworm disease and ordered medicine through an online pharmacy.

But the medicine Kim ordered would not only be ineffective but also aggravate Joy’s illness even more.

Motivated by his dog’s health scare, Kim designed a way for people to verify the authenticity of pharmaceutical products — by printing an edible QR code directly on the medicine.

Kim was one of in middle and high school who presented their inventions and research projects focused on solving key global issues at the in Washington, DC.  

“There have been countless tragedies and deaths caused by either substandard, falsified or diverted pharmaceutical products,” Kim told The 74. “So I’m glad to have had this opportunity to raise more awareness of counterfeit medicine.”

Hosted by and the , student innovators were selected from an array of nationwide competitions, including the where more than 2,500 students submitted projects across six categories: Environmental Stewardship, Future Foods, Health & Medicine, Powering the Planet, Tech for Good and Space Innovation.

Here are five student innovators featured at the National STEM Festival:

Joshua Kim, 18

West Lafayette High School · West Lafayette, Indiana

Among more than 50,000 online pharmacies worldwide, Kim found only 3 percent operate and distribute medicine legally — contributing to the annual deaths of over one million people.

Kim said the measures most pharmacies use to reduce counterfeit concerns are “limited by low security,” such as only tracking medicine through its exterior packaging.

“It’s easy for medicine to be removed from their packaging…and dose level securities are either limited by the need for expensive technology or trained personnel,” Kim said.

“So this means patients at home do not have access to ways of verifying their medicine.”

Kim believes his edible QR code will allow people to ensure they are receiving genuine and legitimate medicine.

Ashley Valencia, 17

Harvest Preparatory Academy · Yuma, Arizona

Self-conscious about her crooked teeth, Arizona high schooler Ashley Valencia saw how expensive dental care can be growing up in a low-income family. But it wasn’t just her family that couldn’t afford dental care — many of her neighbors also struggled to afford it. 

Valencia, a 12th grade student at Harvest Preparatory Academy, channeled her insecurity to help students in developing countries who have even less access to proper oral hygiene products — by creating an affordable toothpaste and mouthwash using their native plants.

“I always knew I wanted to do something in medicine so when I thought about different [research] topics close to me, I started to think about my past experiences,” Valencia told The 74.

“That’s why I created my own oral treatments that were easily accessible and affordable to people who might not have access to the things I had,” she added.

Valencia said she shared her research with public schools in the Philippines to address their students’ dental concerns.

At the festival, Valencia said she plans to travel to developing countries across South and Southeast Asia to share her oral hygiene products.

“Because I come from a school that doesn’t have a lot of resources…being able to attend the festival and present my research to all of the important people that were there was really exciting,” Valencia said.

Clarisse Telles Alvares Coelho, 18

New Mexico Military Institute · Roswell, New Mexico

From lion’s mane to king oyster, New Mexico high schooler and longtime vegetarian Clarisse Telles Alvares Coelho loves eating all types of mushrooms.

Coelho, a 12th grade student at the New Mexico Military Institute, said the misconceptions of mushrooms inspired her research project on their health benefits — particularly the abundance of a soluble fiber called beta-glucan.

“I knew many people didn’t like mushrooms…but what if I was able to make them change their minds,” Coelho told The 74. “With beta-glucan acting in your immune system, our metabolism works faster.”

Coelho said she was “very surprised” to have the opportunity to present her project at the festival.

“It was such a great feeling because there was so much hard work and late nights put into researching this project…[so] it was so amazing to be recognized,” Coelho said.

Alicia Wright, 17

Rockdale Magnet School for Science and Technology · Conyers, Georgia

Concerned by our global carbon footprint, Georgia high schooler Alicia Wright discovered the majority of CO2 emissions come from the cement used in construction.

Wright, an 11th grade student at Rockdale Magnet School for Science and Technology, found a way to replace cement with mycelium — a type of fungi that can be transformed into a biodegradable construction material.

“I was inspired by the complexity of mycelium and how fungus works,” Wright told The 74. “This will better the environment so that future generations can enjoy as we have.”

At the festival, Wright said the diversity of students presenting their projects with her felt “empowering.”

“It was very encouraging to see people with my skin color and gender presenting with me,” Wright said.

Haasini Mendu, 16

William Mason High School · Mason, Ohio

Ohio high schooler Haasini Mendu came up with a way to improve medication dosage for Parkinson’s disease — a disorder that causes involuntary body movement, often called tremors.

Mendu, an 11th grade student at William Mason High School, designed a wearable device that quantifies the number of tremors someone has and automatically sends the information to an app she created called “TremorSense.”

She said the information is processed through an “AI-based machine learning” filter to distinguish between tremor and non-tremor movements.

Mendu said the opportunity to meet other students and build connections was her favorite part of the festival.

“It was very easy to make some friends and also learn about their very cool inventions and ideas,” Mendu told The 74.

“Having this recognition…feels motivating to continue working on my skills [because] there were so many people interested in what I’m trying to do with my research.”

But new federal data has given researchers some cause for optimism, suggesting efforts to make teaching more financially viable with strategies such as paying student teachers have helped to move the needle. 

From 2018 through 2022, enrollment in teacher preparation programs grew 12% nationally, or by about 46,231 more candidates, according to a from Pennsylvania State’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy Analysis.

Nine states lead the pack with notably higher bumps in teacher prep programs in recent years: Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Carolina and, with the highest average growth, Maryland. 

The modest upswing, seen both in enrollment and completion rates, during some of the most strained years in American education, has surprised experts.

“It was encouraging to see … at the height of the pandemic, it certainly was not what we were expecting,” said Jacqueline King, research and policy consultant with the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. 

Only 11 states saw continued enrollment declines in the prep programs during the last three years, among them Montana and Minnesota. 

“I think that all the work that we’ve been doing around grow your own, apprenticeships and residencies… to open up more affordable pathways into teaching are starting to bear some fruit, which is amazing and fantastic,” King added.

Contributing factors also include federal pandemic relief funds and new laws in states such as and that pay student teachers. In Maryland, for instance, some during their year long teaching residency. 

“It’s real,” said King. “It’s enough money that you’re not thinking, how am I gonna do student teaching and have a part time job?” 

Still, researchers caution, the growth is not nearly at the pace required to match hiring demand. Teacher shortages are , and in key areas like special education and math. 

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs in just one decade — about fewer teachers are prepared annually. Compounding social, political and economic strains fueled the decline, including a major recession and education reform efforts that negatively impacted public perception of teaching and America’s schools. 

By 2021, only five areas had bucked the overall trend, with more enrollees than a decade prior: Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, Washington and Washington, D.C. Texas’s growth can be attributed to rapid expansion of a particular alternative program, Teachers of Tomorrow, . 

“Over the last seven years, we’re kind of treading water in terms of the number of teachers,” said Ed Fuller, education professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of the most recent analysis. “We don’t need to be where we were in 2010 because we don’t have as many students, but we need to be a lot closer to that than we are now.”

About in K-12 public schools nationwide in 2022 than before the pandemic. The steepest drops are in the younger grades, partially a result of declining birth rates.

On the whole, districts did not pump the brakes on hiring teachers because of the alarming 2% drop in student enrollment. Flush with expiring pandemic relief funds, schools added 15,000 teaching positions last school year. 

Even as full-time school staffing reached an all time high, a quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student than they did in 2016. 

The demand for teachers is far from met, with about 55,000 teaching jobs open nationwide. Since 2008, the decline of teachers in training has impacted schools in every corner of the country. 

Even places like Pennsylvania, whose supply of teachers historically was so abundant that many newly-credentialed teachers were sent out of state, are of a shrinking teacher workforce. Its surplus has gradually disappeared over six years. 

“People weren’t paying attention,” said Fuller, who recommended that public figures talk up the professions’ value and that the legislature take on teacher scholarships to tailor recruitment for local needs. Scholarships could be earmarked for teachers of color, math educators, or those serving high-poverty schools, for example. 

But if districts and states, tasked with building diverse, robust teaching pools, are focused solely on producing new candidates, King cautioned efforts would be in vain, akin to using a hose to fill a leaky bucket with water. 

By the end of the 2021-22 school year, 10% of teachers left the profession nationally, 4% more than before the pandemic, according to . Experts point to job dissatisfaction, political polarization and exhaustion. 

In Florida, one of the nine states that saw a higher enrollment bump than most, more than 5,000 teaching positions are vacant, the . The job has gotten harder, too — remaining educators teach more students per classroom than they did before the pandemic. While the enrollment data suggest a move in the right direction, it will take years for today’s teachers in training to enter its workforce.

“We’ve really got to think more about the job of a teacher and how we make it more sustainable — financially, from the perspective of work-life balance, and giving people opportunities for growth,” King said. “We need to look at teaching and why it’s such a difficult job to sell.”

A Republican state senator wants to give students at Arizona’s public universities a new way to challenge grades that they believe were handed down due to a professor’s political bias.

Sen. Anthony Kern, of Glendale, who has previously as “not a university guy,” has taken aim this year at the Arizona Board of Regents and the three public universities that they govern for what he says is discrimination against conservative students and speakers.

The Board of Regents governs University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University.

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�������’s would create a “grade challenge department” within the Board of Regents at all three universities, which would “hear challenges from public university students regarding grades received in any class or on any assignment if a student alleges a grade was awarded because of political bias.”

The departments would be staffed by volunteers chosen by the Board of Regents.

If a challenge department concluded that political bias influenced a student’s grade, it could require the professor who awarded it to regrade the assignment or reevaluate the student’s grade for the class in alignment with the department’s findings.

If a student believed that the department wrongly dismissed their grade challenge, the student could appeal the decision to ABOR, though the legislation doesn’t require that the regents actually consider any appeals.

“A lot of students that I met with at ASU, they do not feel that they can debate issues according to their politics or according to what they believe, because they’re afraid their grades are going to be lowered, and this is trying to help those,” Kern said before voting in favor of the bill on Feb. 22.

The bill passed through the Senate that day by a vote of 16-12, with only Republicans voting in favor.

Kern acknowledged that ABOR already has its own process for students to challenge their grades, but said he criticized it as inadequate. He added that he doesn’t believe that the Board of Regents is necessary at all.

He said he believes the bill would make students “more comfortable speaking on issues that they should be able to speak on.”

During a House Education Committee meeting on Tuesday, Thomas Adkins, a lobbyist for the Board of Regents, told lawmakers that the board opposed the measure for several reasons.

Echoing Kern, Adkins pointed out that the universities already have and academic grievance processes that allow students to contest their grades. The legislation would circumvent and undermine that process, he said.

Currently, the process starts with an informal conversation between the student and instructor, and can escalate to the dean and progress to a review by an academic committee.

Secondly, the bill would create what Adkins said is an unfunded burden on the regents to create and oversee the new departments at each campus, requiring them to open satellite offices there. He said that ABOR only has 40 employees and that taking on oversight of these departments would put a strain on them.

Last summer, Kern co-chaired a legislative committee at Arizona’s public universities. The committee was formed shortly after ASU administrator Ann Atkinson from the university for bringing controversial far-right speakers to the campus for an event.

The university denied Atkinson’s claims, saying that she was let go because the organization that sponsored her position pulled its funding. In an investigation that was ordered by Arizona lawmakers, ASU determined that claims of censorship of conservative ideas and the chilling of free speech .

The event for which Atkinson claimed she was fired wasn’t canceled, and far-right speakers like Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, and Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host and writer, both spoke at the event.

Referencing students who spoke to the committee, Tucson Republican Rep. Rachel Jones told Adkins that conservative students on campus were “feeling silenced.”

“Some of these students are feeling the need to lie about their political beliefs so that they get good grades,” she said.

Adkins said it wasn’t a stretch to say the Board of Regents shares some of her concerns, but that its members believe that disagreements over grades can be resolved by making some changes to the existing processes instead of completely replacing them.

The bill passed out of the House Education Committee by a vote of 4-3, along party lines. Next, it will head to the full House of Representatives for consideration.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

That fact that three former education agency employees were among those indicted shows that the program lacks adequate fraud prevention measures, said Democratic Attorney General Kris Mayes.

“It was very easy for these individuals to do this,” Mayes said during a press conference. They’re accused of faking birth certificates and special education evaluations to bilk over $600,000 from the program. “I think we all have to be asking the question: ‘Is it being replicated?’ ” 

But ESA advocates saw little in the news that would lead them to push for more guardrails on Arizona’s system or halt the movement for in other states. Some dismissed it as an “inside job” that reflects more on government corruption than the thousands of families looking for better educational options for their children. To this group, the fact that Arizona investigators uncovered the alleged plot shows that existing safeguards worked.

“I don’t think there’s any program that can regulate out the possibility of bad actors,” said Lisa Snell, senior fellow at Stand Together Trust, a foundation funding school choice initiatives, and one of the leading voices nationally on ESAs. “In any sector, there are people that are taking advantage of taxpayer money.” 

She pointed to the national and as two government programs that have proven vulnerable to corruption. And she noted an investigation last year that found Los Angeles teachers union members received .

“Government employees committing fraud is a tale as old as time, and by no means unique to education,” said Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, an advocacy organization.

‘This kind of abuse’

Unlike their counterparts in several states, Arizona private schools accepting ESA students don’t have to be accredited and their staff members don’t have to pass criminal background checks. There are also no testing requirements for students, and while homeschooling parents are required to use funds to teach core subjects, many pull curriculum materials from the internet. 

Some argue that, with a little over 30 employees, the program lacks the staff to accommodate its rapid growth to nearly 76,000 students since 2022. 

“What I’m most concerned about is how ripe the program clearly is for this kind of abuse,” Mayes said in detailing the .

Suspects Dolores Lashay Sweet, Dorrian Lamarr Jones and Jennifer Lopez were ESA program specialists at the department who allegedly admitted real and fictitious students — some with identical birthdays — to the program and then approved expenses on their behalf. Jadakah Celeste Johnson, and Raymond Lamont Johnson, Jr., also indicted, are Sweet’s adult children. 

In an odd coincidence, just hours after the indictments, educators met in Washington, D.C. at the conservative American Enterprise Institute whether Democrats should get behind the ESA movement. Arizona’s program came up frequently.

“No academic accountability. No financial transparency. No student safety measures,” said Bethany Little, managing principal at Education Counsel, a consulting firm. 

“I agree with you on the flaws of Arizona’s law,” responded Ravi Gupta, a former Obama staffer and charter school leader who said he supports the idea of ESAs, but sometimes questions their implementation. 

In several other states that have embraced ESAs, administrators say they’ve put guardrails in place to prevent fraud and corruption. 

In Utah, where applications for the state’s new ESA program opened last week, advanced software is designed to spot fake documents, said Jackie Guglielmo, vice president of ESA programs at the Alliance for Choice in Education, which runs the program. If the system flags something irregular, a member of the customer support team will manually review it and might ask for additional documentation, she said.

New Hampshire officials employ to differentiate people processing applications from those who approve vendors. A third group approves expenses. A bill to passed the state House last month.

Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has proposed for the program by having an outside auditor track how private schools are using ESA money. 

But Snell, with Stand Together Trust, said she doubts there are any reforms that would satisfy most Democrats. She was among the school choice supporters gathered at a over the weekend to highlight the growth of microschools, homeschool co-ops and other unconventional programs. 

Not all of the programs represented accept ESA funds, but many attendees view their success as critical to the future of their movement. John Thompson, a researcher from Kennesaw State University, which organized the event, said the notion that ESAs are a fad is “very crazy and wrong.”

“����’s not going backward,” he said.

Kaity Broadbent of Prenda Learning, a microschool network, said alternative models are responding to parents who feel their children weren’t well served in a typical classroom.

“This generation of parents cares about mental health,” she said. “They don’t just need their kids to get into Harvard. There’s a new vibe.”

While sessions focused on policy and accountability, no one mentioned the indictments.

‘Bigger than any superintendent’

Inside Arizona, however, the news upset advocates who say thousands of children are benefiting from the flexibility ESAs offer.

“This type of thing is just devastating to those of us who really depend on the program,” said Kathy Visser, who administers a Facebook page for ESA families and vendors. “It angers us because accountability matters more to us than anyone else.”

Hobbs has also proposed background checks for staff members at private schools accepting ESA funds and for students to attend public school for a minimum of 100 days before they qualify for the program. But have opposed the measures, likening them to “death by a thousand cuts.”

This was the second batch of indictments involving the program since last summer, when a grand jury in Maricopa County accused of fraud and theft of over $87,000 from the program. 

They allegedly created receipts and claimed reimbursements for “bogus” educational services, according to a prosecution report. When investigators examined one woman’s account linked to the ESA program, they found charges at retail stores, restaurants and companies like Uber and Airbnb. The case is ongoing.

Also last summer, the former head administrator of the ESA program, Christine Accurso, and another high-ranking official, Linda Rizzo, following a “cybersecurity incident” in which student names and their disabilities to a parent through ClassWallet, the program’s online financial platform. 

Superintendent Tom Horne, a Republican and strong advocate for ESAs, hired Accurso when he defeated Democratic incumbent Kathy Hoffman in 2022. After Accurso’s resignation, Horne put John Ward, who has years of auditing experience, in charge of the program. 

While a tip from a credit union alerted officials to large amounts being withdrawn from Sweet’s account, Horne, , said it was his department that raised concerns about Jones and Lopez and that he is working to “root out potential fraud and abuse.” 

But in an email to The 74, Hoffman said the state legislature should reform the program and fund more fraud prevention efforts.

“Ultimately, the problems with this program are bigger than any superintendent,” she said. “The ESA program does not have — and has never had — enough oversight to ensure tax dollars are being spent appropriately.”

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to The 74.

The West Virginia mom paid the operator a $2,200 advance from her — an education savings account that gives families state funds for tuition or homeschooling expenses.

But events at The Hive Learning Academy quickly unraveled. Instead of structured meal times, children just grabbed lunch from the refrigerator when they got hungry. Her son “would come home starving because he was too shy to just go into someone else’s fridge,” Romanishan said. 

Kathy Dailey, who enrolled her 13-year-old son there, had a similar experience. When she visited the school in the eastern panhandle town of Martinsburg, students were just “hanging out,” buried in their phones. 

An exasperated Romanishan said she “soon realized that The Hive was actually just a glorified babysitter.”

By Christmas, they’d joined several parents demanding their money back and scrambling to find other arrangements — inquiries that prompted Republican state Treasurer Riley Moore to include the school in an “ongoing audit and investigation,” an official said. 

The probe is believed to be the first government investigation anywhere into a self-identified microschool, providing an awkward milestone for a movement that mushroomed during the pandemic and now includes 125,000 schools nationwide, according to the .

Hailed by Republicans, and fueled by the spread of ESAs, microschools operate out of homes, storefronts and churches with a degree of freedom from government oversight. But the West Virginia episode shows that managing that freedom while maintaining public accountability can be a tricky balancing act, even for the movement’s fiercest advocates.

“We’re in a transitional market,” said Jamie Buckland, who runs , a nonprofit that advises both parents and vendors in the sector. She thinks states with ESAs should do a better job preparing school founders and helping families navigate their options.��

“If we don’t want the government to provide the guardrails and the parameters,” she asked, “what is our movement doing to provide our own guardrails?”

Acknowledging they’d received “allegations of specific Hope Scholarship violations,” the treasurer’s office, which runs the ESA program, would not comment on the scope of the investigation or when it would be completed. In a November email shared with The 74, an assistant treasurer told Romanishan the office was considering the “potential involvement of law enforcement if appropriate,” but has yet to bring charges.

In an interview with The 74, Hive founder Kaela Zimmerman explained that she lacked the cash flow to make the venture work and struggled to get answers from the state when the program collapsed. She said she has since repaid the state over $15,000 in Hope funds.

Romanishan called the experience “not only painful, but disruptive.” 

“It makes it hard to trust anyone else, which is sad because the area needs a good microschool,” she said.

‘We tried our best’

Zimmerman thought so, too. The homeschooling mother opened The Hive with co-founder Kristin Volpe to give her own three children more opportunities to make friends. She rented the space, hung maps on the walls and culled curriculum materials from her favorite homeschooling programs. 

When 30 families registered last summer, she had high expectations. To help get started, she asked parents in August to pay the bulk of their tuition up front  — roughly $2,000 to $4,000 per student. But she had to dip into her own money to pay for furniture and supplies, and when fall came, only eight students showed up. 

She said she and Volpe never intended to “avoid our responsibilities.” With far less revenue than expected, they didn’t have enough to cover costs and pay themselves. To save money, Zimmerman moved out of the home she was renting and into the second floor of the microschool location. She and Volpe took jobs at a Macy’s warehouse to pay bills and Zimmerman began bartending a few nights a week.

But juggling multiple jobs made for a “hit or miss schedule” for students, Dailey said. 

“It was a fun environment,” she added. “But there wasn’t any homework or a set curriculum.” 

The state doesn’t ask potential vendors to submit a business or education plan up front. Anyone who wants to be an authorized Hope “service provider,” including a microschool, must sign a contract agreeing to get criminal background checks on staff working with students and to notify districts when they enroll. To receive funds, vendors need only submit a W-9, a tax form for an independent contractor, and document the Hope funds they receive from parents. 

Their downfall, Zimmerman said, was a lack of startup cash. She applied for a grant from the , a foundation-funded initiative that has helped launch and expand microschools and other alternative education programs. But they turned her down, saying that they had received more applications than they could fund. 

When she realized she couldn’t keep the program going, Zimmerman said she asked state officials how to return the ESA funds, but didn’t receive a lot of guidance. That’s why a November certified letter threatening criminal charges caught her off guard. She said she has since returned over $15,000, covering all of the scholarship funds she received minus payment for days students attended.

“It was very stressful and upsetting for us,” she said. “We are just two working class mothers with a great idea, but no means to make it happen. We tried our best.” 

But it takes more than good intentions to run a quality program, said Rachelle Noble, founder of Microschool Solutions, an Arizona-based consulting firm that advises aspiring school leaders. 

Formerly with Prenda, a microschool network, Noble was in charge of the model’s growth. Two years ago, she made what she describes as a tough decision to close two programs that operated with a Kansas school district’s virtual program. Both schools served families in low-income neighborhoods near Wichita.

“We did it way too late,” she said. The environment wasn’t dangerous, she said, but “it got to the point where it was clear that it was educational neglect.” The schools, she said, lacked an “emphasis on academics.” 

The reality is that many new microschools don’t last beyond the first year, said Amar Kumar, CEO of KaiPod Learning, another microschool network. Before he accepts prospective founders into the organization’s “catalyst” program, he ensures they have a solid financial plan. 

“����’s the same as with any small business or startup — the chances of failure are very high,” he said. “Even with the best of intentions, if your microschool can’t make ends meet, then you’ll end up disappointing families, and no one wants that.”

The involvement of public money in the form of ESAs raises the stakes. While most microschools don’t take ESA funds, Don Soifer, CEO of the National Microschooling Center, said his group’s upcoming report will show that 32% of microschools now accept , up from 18% . 

After The Hive ordeal, Zimmerman said she still loves the concept of microschools. But she doubts she’ll try to open another one.

“They require more resources and business knowledge than most regular working class people [and] parents have,” she said.

Doing ‘due diligence’

That’s why don’t think public funds should support them. 

Chris Stewart, CEO of Brightbeam, an education advocacy network, once considered himself an ESA “evangelist,” and hoped they’d provide better educational options for marginalized children. But now he thinks the laws lack accountability and create potential for and “a huckster market of vultures who see ESAs as a business opportunity.”

Last year, for example, a grand jury in Maricopa County, Arizona, accused of fraud and theft of over $87,000 in connection with that state’s ESA program. 

While it’s unclear if any of their businesses operated as microschools, the women allegedly created educational receipts and claimed reimbursements for “bogus services,” according to a prosecution report. Investigators’ examination of one woman’s account showed she used ESA funds for “day-to-day living at retail stores and restaurants” and spent money at Amazon, Uber and Airbnb.

For many in the movement, the attitude toward bad actors is, “Let the buyer beware.” They say it’s up to parents to do their homework before choosing a school.

“Some parents do an inordinate amount of due diligence,” said Noble, with Microschool Solutions. But others, she said, “sign kids up and haven’t even seen the space.” 

Advocates believe the market will eventually fraud and low-quality options.

But that’s no consolation for parents like Romanishan, who eventually received a $1,340 refund for the days her son didn’t attend. While waiting for scholarship refunds to appear in her account, she subscribed to an and enrolled her son in a cooking class. In the meantime, she said, he lost his friends and had to adjust to a new routine. 

“I feel like I failed my son,” Romanishan said. “I should have seen the red flags.”

Disclosure: Stand Together Trust provides financial support to and The 74.

Microschooling is an education model that is small by design — typically with 15 or fewer students of varying ages per class. It fosters a personalized and community-centric approach to learning that is especially effective in addressing the unique educational needs of diverse student populations. Programs like are helping to fuel these microschools.

ESAs are instrumental in democratizing education. By providing direct funding to parents, they empower families with the financial means to make educational decisions that best suit their children while helping schools outside the conventional system truly flourish.

For example , a growing network in Arizona that focuses on culturally nuanced and inclusive education, is thriving in large part because of the state’s . It serves over 70,000 students statewide in nearly 400 learning environments and makes innovative schools like Black Mothers Forum Microschools far more accessible to families, while inspiring parents to explore the full breadth of education options available for their children.

Opening doors for such exploration is at the heart of the school choice ethos. Whether for a microschool, traditional public school, public magnet school, public charter school, private school, online school or home school, the more options a family can pursue, the better. These will be on full display during , an annual nationwide celebration hosted by the in collaboration with Navigate — The National School Choice Resource Center.

For National School Choice Week, our team is partnering with microschools and organizations across the country to celebrate these new options. For example, Microschool will host a school fair in Nevada to showcase microschools and other choice options. Meanwhile, will host a fun-filled microschool/hybrid/homeschool showcase event with guest speakers, vendors and activities. And in Georgia, will recognize the work parents and volunteers do to make these options possible.

National School Choice Week is, however, far more than just a packed calendar of unique events and activities. The week serves a vital dual purpose: raising awareness about the critical need for increased educational options and providing practical, jargon-free online resources for parents. With saying they will likely be searching for new schools for their children in 2024 and 64% wanting more information about how to exercise their choices, the week acts as a crucial juncture for empowering parents with the knowledge and tools to make informed decisions.

A fundamental shift is taking place in education, and National School Choice Week is shining light on every possible option. As schools and organizations celebrate all that has been accomplished in school choice this past year and embrace this new era of educational innovation in microschooling, ESAs and other school choice programs, the future beams bright with promise. Everyone who supports greater opportunity in education – –from parents to grandparents, educators, advocates, organizational and community leaders to state policymakers– – should recommit to doing all they can to keep this momentum going in 2024 so that, one day, all families will have the full breadth of educational freedom they so rightfully deserve.

Gov. Katie Hobbs is setting her sights on the state’s private school voucher program, announcing a plan Tuesday to reform the program’s oversight and eligibility, less than a week out from the start of the new legislative session.

“Arizonans deserve to know their money is being spent on educating students, not on handouts to unaccountable schools and unvetted vendors for luxury spending,” Hobbs said in a written statement announcing her voucher regulation agenda. “My plan is simple: every school receiving taxpayer dollars must have basic standards to show they’re keeping our students safe and giving Arizona children the education they deserve.”

Arizona’s private school voucher program, known formally as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, has seen ballooning enrollment rates and costs since Republicans championed a that allows any student to receive a grant regardless of their public school history. The program, originally meant to benefit public school students attending failing schools or with special education needs, is projected to cost the state nearly $1 billion in the upcoming fiscal year, and is a driving factor in the state’s .

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A year ago, Hobbs sought to of the voucher program in her first year as governor, but vehement opposition from Republican lawmakers meant the proposal went nowhere. Now, the Democrat’s strategy to address accountability issues within the program is an admission that scrapping the program is a nonstarter.

But this package of reforms may be just as dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled legislature as last year’s proposed repeal.

Under the plan, which Hobbs said will be part of her 2024 executive budget proposal, private schools who accept voucher money will be required to meet some of the same safety and educational standard requirements that public schools do.

For example, teachers at those private schools would be required to pass fingerprint background checks and meet minimum education requirements before teaching ESA students. And private schools would be responsible for providing accommodations and services to students with disabilities in accordance with their Individualized Learning Plans or Section 504 plans. Hobbs’ proposal also aims to empower the state auditor general to monitor and report on how ESA money is being spent in private schools, similar to how spending in public schools is monitored.

The voucher program has faced increasing criticism for facilitating luxury expenses, including . Hobbs’ plan seeks to eliminate such expenses by requiring review and manual approval of purchases greater than $500 to “ensure purchases are utilized for an academic purpose”.

In an emailed statement, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, whose office oversees the ESA program, said that safeguard is already in place.

“My office already reviews all expense requests regardless of amount,” he said. “In 2023, we rejected several thousand ESA applications for lack of adequate documentation and suspended almost 2,200 accounts totaling $21 million because the student was enrolled in a public school. We’ve also rejected more than 12,000 ESA purchase order requests.”

Hobbs’ plan would also prevent price gouging by prohibiting private schools receiving ESA money from increasing tuition at a rate higher than inflation. And she wants to require the state education department to track absenteeism and graduation rates, and inform parents what parental and student rights are being given up when leaving the public school system.

While Hobbs stopped short of calling for a full repeal of the universal portion of the ESA program, her new plan would guarantee that voucher recipients have at least some public school history by requiring recipients to have attended a public school for at least 100 days before becoming eligible for a voucher. When the universal portion first went into effect in September of 2022, and by June of 2023, .

“The ESA program lacks accountability and transparency,” Hobbs said. “With this plan, we can keep students safe, protect taxpayer dollars, and give parents and students the information they need to make an informed choice about their education.”

Democratic lawmakers lauded Hobbs’ plan as a commonsense solution and denounced the Republican-led universal expansion for its deleterious impact on the state budget.

“With all the issues and pressing needs we have as a state, Republicans knew that an unaccountable subsidy for private schools was more than our taxpayers can afford,” said House Democratic Leader Lupe Contreras. “This plan provides common-sense guardrails and fiscal responsibility that this program — that any taxpayer-funded program — should have.”

“The Republican expansion of government to universal ESA vouchers has put our state’s financial security at risk, and our students at risk without any safeguards,” echoed Senate Democratic Leader Mitzi Epstein. “These safeguard policies are common sense and vitally important to help children learn and to keep children safe.”

But legislative Republicans, who hold a majority in each chamber, threw cold water on Hobbs’ proposed reforms.

“Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are wildly popular with Arizona parents because they leverage private sector solutions to offer the best educational opportunities for their children,” said House Speaker Ben Toma, a Peoria Republican who sponsored the universal expansion. “Meanwhile, Governor Hobbs and Democratic Party legislators now seek to strangle ESAs and private education with bureaucracy and regulation. I won’t allow that to happen.”

Senate Education Committee Chairman Ken Bennett, R-Prescott, said that while he would be open to addressing student safety and helping to protect students with disabilities, he is opposed to adding more hurdles for families seeking school choice.

“I do believe there are some common sense improvements that can be made to the program to ensure student safety, protect the rights of students with disabilities, and level the playing field between public, charter and private schools,” he said, in an emailed statement. “I’m looking forward to working with my colleagues this session to provide transparency and accountability, but we will not add layers of bureaucratic red tape, as some of the Governor’s proposals suggest, or discourage parents from participating in ESAs.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

Brian Miller is a fixture at Charles W. Harris School in Phoenix, a familiar face kids and parents encounter four days a week.

Mornings and afternoons, the school resource officer is in the parking lot directing traffic — and sometimes, he notes, defusing a little road rage. Before lunch, he’s on the playground herding students toward the cafeteria, or in classrooms where teachers have requested help. In between, he’s walking the campus or in his office, on standby for serious disciplinary incidents or lockdowns prompted by crimes nearby.

What he doesn’t do, Miller acknowledges, is provide comprehensive mental health services to the many students who need them. That’s where Cartwright Elementary District’s counselors and psychologists come in.

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District officials believe both types of positions are essential for a secure campus, which is why they asked the to fund one officer and one additional counselor at 19 of their schools, including Harris, this year. In all 19 cases, the state paid for only the officers, the result of a 2022 legislative requirement forcing the Department of Education to prioritize requests for campus police over mental health positions.

In fact, more than 100 schools throughout the state received officer funding while a counselor or social worker request went unfulfilled this year, as Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne embraced the strings Republican lawmakers had tied to the grant money. In another 130 cases, schools that asked only for mental health positions did not receive them, according to an analysis of School Safety Program data.

Overall, district and charter schools requested funding for 857 counselor and social workers and 301 campus officers, citing problems with bullying, trauma, suicidal ideation, truancy and more in the hundreds of applications reviewed by AZCIR. About a third, or 291, of those mental health positions went unfunded after the grant program ran out of cash.

The apparent mismatch between what schools need and what certain state leaders want to give them reflects an ongoing clash over which types of positions actually make a campus safer. In the wake of tragedies like the Uvalde, Texas elementary school shooting, proponents of campus police say officers are the professionals best equipped to respond to dangerous situations, while advocates for expanded mental health services argue counselors, social workers and psychologists could help stop many of those situations before they start.

In interviews with AZCIR, officials representing districts and charter schools in both rural and urban areas across Arizona were hesitant to criticize the School Safety Program, worrying they would be perceived as ungrateful for needed funding. But they indicated it should be up to school leaders, not politicians, to determine which positions are best suited to tackle the post-pandemic surge in mental health issues they’re observing among students.

“The schools know better what is needed,” said Monika Fuller, director of Prescott Valley School, a K-9 charter that received money for police but not a counselor this year.

Pointing to the breakdown of funding requests, she said the “numbers don’t lie.”

Arizona leaders expanded the School Safety Program, initially created to fund school resource and juvenile probation officers, to cover counselors and social workers in 2019. At the time, the state had the worst student-to-counselor ratio in the country — 905:1, nearly four times the recommended 250:1 — as schools continued to confront Recession-era cuts that had decimated the ranks of campus-based mental health professionals.

The program, which awards funding on a three-year basis, could not meet the resulting appetite for counselors and social workers, leading to a wait list nearly 90 schools long. That demand only grew after COVID-19 swept the state, leaving students to cope with new sources of grief, anxiety and anger.

In 2021, the state Department of Education dedicated $21 million in federal pandemic relief dollars to unfunded campus counselor and social worker positions. The move eliminated the wait list, which had continued to grow, and further reduced the state’s student-to-counselor ratio to . But, with the federal dollars’ 2024 expiration date in mind, schools expressed a desire for a more stable, permanent funding source for mental health staffing.

Instead, the GOP-controlled Legislature decided to prop up the School Safety Program for another three-year cycle — and stipulated the additional $50 million had to go toward requests for school police first, before officials could consider counselor and social worker needs.

Though schools could technically apply for up to two School Safety Program positions of either type this year, Horne warned applicants that schools with “no armed presence” would “not receive a recommendation from this Department to the State Board of Education” if they didn’t request an officer. In some cases, this led schools to rank their requests for SROs as higher-priority than their requests for counselors or social workers, in an effort to make sure they got at least something.

Yet campus officers are not interchangeable with school counselors or social workers, even if some of their responsibilities overlap.

“Fundamentally, school resource officers are taking more of an enforcement approach … and often are viewing behaviors through a lens of threat,” said Angela Kimball, senior vice president of advocacy at national mental health policy coalition Inseparable. School mental health professionals, meanwhile, are “viewing behaviors as a manifestation of challenges a youth may be having in terms of their thoughts, their feelings, their perceptions” and “giving them coping skills,” she said.

Fuller, the Prescott Valley School director, is hopeful that whoever fills the charter’s School Safety Program-funded officer position can back up administrators on “heavy-duty” disciplinary issues. But she said the roughly 450-student school, which has been relying on a virtual counselor because it’s “all we can afford,” still needs in-person mental health support — both to provide targeted interventions for kids with emotional disabilities and to help educators address students’ pandemic-related trauma more broadly.

Cottonwood-based Mingus Union High School District, which has just one physical school, is much better off when it comes to campus mental health professionals: Its high school has counselors for each grade level, as well as one psychologist.

But even that team has struggled to fully meet what Superintendent Mike Westcott described as the mounting “needs of the students around social-emotional health,” particularly as the rural school finds itself having to “step up in ways that maybe schools in larger areas don’t.”

Like Prescott Valley, the district sought funding for both officer and counselor positions, with Westcott envisioning the additional counselor working as a liaison with area mental health agencies. The district also hoped a new counselor could help implement suicide prevention efforts, trauma-informed teaching strategies and grief management services, so the state’s decision to grant only the SRO request has left Mingus Union “in a bit of a lurch.”

Westcott also expressed concern over the patchwork of limited-term grants and relief funds districts have largely relied on to pay their mental health professionals, as did several other school officials interviewed by AZCIR. He urged the Legislature to view campus counselors and social workers not as “extras” but as “integral components of what we do,” and to fund them “in a way that can be sustained.”

Uncertainty about the positions’ staying power, as well as shortages of available law enforcement officers and mental health providers, has made it difficult for some schools to hire at all. As of October, more than 130 School Safety Program-funded SRO posts remained open, according to ADE, as did 148 counselor and social worker spots.

That month, the state’s School Safety Task Force unveiled a plan to fill campus police vacancies by shifting more than $18 million in grant funding for full-time SROs to part-time school safety officers. It offered no comparable plan to assist schools with counselor and social worker vacancies.

After the task force on Dec. 7, Horne doubled down on his commitment to the police-first approach, saying he had “very little patience” for criticism.

“I’ve encountered opposition from people who say they don’t want a school-to-prison pipeline,” Horne said, referring to those who’ve questioned whether boosting the ranks of campus officers would ultimately push already-marginalized students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system. “What they’re really saying is people should be able to violate the law without consequence.”

Under the part-time officer staffing plan, off-duty police sign up to work school safety shifts as their schedules allow, a change that has reduced vacancies but sacrificed the kind of continuity districts like Cartwright believe have made their officers successful.

Ema Jáuregui, the deputy superintendent who oversees the district’s SROs, said officers’ ability to have a consistent, visible presence at a specific school has been an essential part of building trust and goodwill with students and families in the Maryvale area.

“Our community, they value the SROs because they see them out on the playground. They see them out during (pickup and dropoff) traffic. They see them talking to kids in a positive way,” she said. “When Uvalde happened, you would not believe how many kids did not want to come to school because they were scared, and I think the police presence made our families and kids feel safer.”

Jáuregui acknowledged not every school system has had the same experience, calling Cartwright “very lucky.” Nationwide, school resource officers have made headlines for using excessive force against children, disproportionately arresting students of color and for contributing to what civil rights organizations have described as a threatening, rather than safe, school environment.

Arizona School Safety Director Michael Kurtenbach has repeatedly emphasized the importance of officer training when it comes to preventing such controversies. Kimball, the national mental health policy advocate, said she has seen training in adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed care help school police shift their focus from rigid enforcement to understanding and prevention elsewhere in the country.

Still, she believes it’s better to hire mental health professionals directly, versus “hiring people that you have to train to be like mental health professionals.”

Harris School Resource Officer Miller, for his part, promotes a collaborative approach that involves school police and mental health staff working closely while deferring to each other’s areas of expertise.

To make the arrangement work, he said, police must adopt “a different mentality” when shifting from patrol work to a campus setting — and not every officer can do it.

“You don’t talk to people (at a school) the same way you do on the beat. It’s a different philosophy,” he told AZCIR. “And if you don’t have that desire to work with kids, this is probably not the position for you.”

AZCIR is part of the , a group of newsrooms that are covering stories on mental health care access and inequities in the U.S. The national partnership includes The Carter Center and newsrooms in select states throughout the nation.

PHOENIX – Arizona Republican lawmakers announced a plan to increase pay for teachers in K-12 public schools – they’re calling it the “Teacher Pay Fund.”

“This session the Republican-led Legislature will be introducing legislation to increase teacher pay by 7% or about $4,000,” said Senate President Warren Petersen at a news conference Monday. “The average teacher in Arizona makes $56,000 a year. Our plan will increase the average teacher pay to over $60,000 per year.”

Petersen said the land trust endowment, which is a long-term savings account that helps fund education, would pay for the plan.

He said Arizona teachers will be making above the national average, and starting teachers would be paid well above the national average if the plan is implemented.

According to the , Arizona’s average teacher salary ranks 32nd in the nation, and per student spending ranks 49th in the nation.

The Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association said its  of more than 130 school districts and charter schools this fall showed that of the 7,518.3 open teacher positions at the beginning of the school year, 2,229.7 were still unfilled as of September, or 29.7%. Advocates blame the vacancies, in part, on Arizona teacher salaries.

“Arizona has had a significant teacher shortage for many years,” said Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona. “����’s worsening primarily because of two factors: One of them is teacher pay, which is abysmally low, and the other is really poor working conditions. What I mean by that is a lack of resources and lack of other employee support.”

Julie Garcia, who has been teaching kindergarten for 12 years, supports the proposal.

“The teacher pay has been my biggest struggle in recent months, especially during this inflation. There are more times than I would like to admit that my family has had to wait a few days to get groceries or gas or have to use the dreaded credit card,” Garcia said at the Monday news conference. “This is alarming for me and my family. Many teachers have second or third jobs and pick up many odd jobs to get by.”

According to the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, 15.8% of public school teachers had other jobs outside the system during the 2020-2021 school year. The average amount earned from other jobs was $6,100. The Teacher Pay Fund proposal will help bridge that gap, Republicans say.

“What I really like about this proposal is it puts 100% of every dollar into the classroom. Arizonans want teachers to be paid more. Arizonans want more dollars to go into the classroom,” said Rep. Matt Gress, R-Phoenix. “����’s time to do the right thing to bypass administration and the education unions and get our teachers the pay raise they deserve.”

House Democratic Whip Nancy Gutierrez, who is also a public school teacher, said the Democrats are ready to discuss any realistic proposal to raise teacher pay, but the devil is always in the details.

“It was a nice change to see Republicans speaking respectfully of public school teachers, but the reality is it would be much easier to raise educator pay if their universal voucher scheme to subsidize private schools hadn’t put our budget  before we even start our next session,” Gutierrez said in a statement.

A  released in October indicated the projected shortfall is due in part to a drop in individual income tax collections. Democrats highlight universal school vouchers and a flat tax as causes of the shortfall.

The Arizona Education Association is a professional association and a labor union advocating on behalf of students, staff and teachers in Arizona. The association supports pay raises for teachers but says the proposal doesn’t go far enough.

“Just like classroom teachers, our education support professionals are seriously underpaid, leading to shortages that impact our students every day,” Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia said in a statement. “The people who open our schools in the morning, and who close our schools each night, deserve to be included in any proposed raise.”

Lewis of Save our Schools Arizona emphasized a lot of schools don’t have sufficient numbers of counselors, librarians or nurses, and all of that work falls on the classroom teacher.

“If we raise just teacher pay and not the pay of other professionals and not more resources for kids and we are not taking care of school facilities … everything else will crumble around us,” Lewis said.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit .

Higher education is under increased pressure to prove its value, and the pandemic presented us with an opportunity to reexamine outdated assumptions and approaches.

Opinion surveys capture part of the challenge. While the majority of Americans continue to trust in the value of higher education, the belief that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country and local communities dropped from 69% in 2020 to 55% in 2022. This declining public trust, attributable to such factors as student debt and costs of attendance, underscores the work ahead. Here at ASU, as the New American University and a National Service University, we have centered the changing needs of students and their families as the pandemic pushed those needs to a new level.

We’re Responding to the Pandemic in Several Important Ways

Adjusting student support. The enforced isolation of the pandemic has delayed developmental milestones for many of our traditional-aged students, affecting their social development, emotional health, and cognitive readiness. Incoming students are displaying behavior we might expect of younger adolescents, with difficulties managing their daily responsibilities, challenges resolving interpersonal conflicts, and troubling incidents of violence, vandalism, and even vigilantism. Students who feel under-prepared for the learning environment may draw attention, albeit maladaptively, to their struggles.

We are testing several approaches to improve conduct, enhance safety, and promote success. In some of our residential settings, where we have noted an increase
in property destruction, our community assistants and community directors will ask students to set some of their own rules. Do you want quiet hours? If so, when? How should our common areas look? Do we establish a type of neighborhood watch? What happens to students who don’t abide by these expectations? Instead of rules imposed from above, students will be empowered to take the lead.

Another approach will be to increase the presence of our campus safety aides, students paid to circulate around campus and in the residential communities. They identify security risks (e.g., unlocked or propped doors, damage), and we have found their presence helps to deter problematic behavior. We are also moving toward the tightened access

controls that were more common during the pandemic, evaluating who needs access to what portions of the residential community or building.

To improve health, well-being, and student success, we are continuing some of the approaches
that the pandemic forced on us while expanding other supports. Notably, we will continue using technology to increase access to services, resources, and care at the times convenient for students. We expect to see continued use of Zoom advising appointments, telehealth, telecounseling, and texting. We are also expanding the use of our chatbot, Sunny, to deliver information and interact with students. Sunny has the ability to refer students to the appropriate resources and alert our teams to students in distress.

Expanding inclusive and compassionate learning practices. We are accelerating our efforts to redesign everything, from buildings to instruction, to serve the diverse range of students. Not only the nearly 10,000 students who receive disability resources or accommodations from us, but all students will benefit from increased flexibility in instruction and assessment. Instead of a test at the end of every course, what about allowing students to choose how to demonstrate mastery of material? Instead of insisting that all students come back to class now that the pandemic is over, how do we serve the students for whom remote learning was a godsend—those students who would rarely speak in class but were avid users of the chat function on Zoom?

Compassionate and inclusive learning strategies can benefit everyone, yet they have an especially marked effect on students with disabilities and others who were disproportionately affected during the pandemic. Requiring students to document a disability in order to receive accommodations favors those with means, access, and resources. Inclusive learning practices challenge us to deliver content in a variety of ways, allowing students to engage with the materials and express their comprehension through
various mechanisms. If we want more students to succeed, compassionate and inclusive design should become the norm; thus, we are working closely with faculty to implement these practices.

Blurring the lines between K-12 and higher ed. Another way that higher education can capitalize
on this moment is to blur our lines with K-12. When students can get a degree faster through dual enrollment or credits for passing scores on Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams, the financial and time investment may prove less daunting. Our ASU Preparatory Academy (ASU Prep; brick-and-mortar) and ASU Prep Digital offer ideal pathways for this kind of acceleration.

We can also move career exploration earlier in the educational journey, to middle school, helping students discover their interests and then mapping out possible choices and options. Knowing the relationship of a particular degree to a particular career will help connect the dots in meaningful ways. If students and their families understand that college increases the likelihood of a secure career, then we might have a chance to convince those critical of higher education that it still offers the most promising pathway for enhanced economic, social, physical, and emotional well-being.

This leap of faith requires that we address those students and their families who choose work over school for very immediate and understandable reasons. One solution that we offer students who tell us they need to work: “Come work for us. We have no shortage of jobs on campus, plus you’ll get a tuition benefit.” This is a win-win for us and for them.

Prioritizing access. Despite the selectivity that many colleges maintain in order to increase their rankings, we must shift our focus to providing both accessible and excellent learning environments. Higher education has long needed to reconsider its admission requirements and allow students
to demonstrate readiness in different ways—such as the test-optional admissions that increased significantly during the pandemic. Increased accessibility will help to ensure a diverse student population, contributing to a richer learning environment. We should also encourage and

empower the return of students who needed to step away from their studies during the pandemic. Furthermore, at ASU we have contemplated next steps for two other types of students: 1) those whose learning loss or disruptions during the pandemic may have kept them out of higher education institutions, and 2) those who may have long ago given up on the idea of a college degree. Opportunities like Earned Admission provide a reasonable and attainable pathway for entry into higher education.

Last year’s State of the American Student report observed, “A public education system built for rigidity and sameness collapsed in the face of uncertainty and highly varied needs.” A higher education system built upon the same principles encounters a similar dilemma. We must consider what subjects are best taught in what ways for what learners. Students shouldn’t feel forced to learn only in the ways that we find convenient but in ways they need, want, and can learn most effectively.

See more from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and its .

The world is dependent on innovations, systems and equipment that are designed and sustained using science, engineering, technology and mathematics. This means the nurturing of STEM talent cannot be reserved for a slice of our student population but, instead, an essential component of every student’s educational journey.

It turns out, industry agrees.

Our colleagues in the community report the need for curious and creative professionals who can work in teams to solve the toughest problems encountered in the fabs and labs of our most advanced workplaces.

Because innovation is happening at a quickening pace, readying students through the curriculum for every workplace scenario will be impossible. The ability to design solutions from scratch, in real time, is necessary to the innovation enterprise.

Whether this is perceived as an issue of equity or economics, the goal is the same: To value STEM knowledge in the same way we value reading.

K-12 needs to be rethought and redesigned or it will not only fail to meet the needs of a STEM-dependent world, it will fail to meet the needs of a unique generation of students who learns, thinks and engages with the world around them differently than any before.

Millennial and Gen Z parents are tech-integrated and experience-driven. Their children are hard-wired to be the same. Practically, this means they innately use technology to learn anytime, anywhere. But it also means they want to learn by doing. They consider technology their guide but want in-person engagement for connection, collaboration and support.

These were the trends and challenges we had to consider when designing . ASU Prep is a P-20 system of schools and educational services embedded in a larger learning enterprise at Arizona State University. The needs and preferences of our student body is what drives our iterative design. Students become masters in various learning domains from home, at a K-12 campus, on a university campus, at their parent’s workplace or even with peers at a coffee shop.

Thanks to the innovative K-12 policy environment in Arizona, students who can do a day’s worth of school work in less time can fill the remaining hours getting ahead in courses, catching up on concepts where they struggle, working, pursuing an interest in music, theater, Olympic sport or even launching their own small business.

Online learning should not be remote from people. We pair students with Learning Success Coaches to help students build personalized educational pathways into their desired future career. From kindergarten on, ASU Prep students build their own learning plans in concert with a guide and present it to their parents.

Our students are exposed to ASU courses as soon as they are ready and can take any of the 4,000-plus courses on the ASU catalog: in person, online or through our . High school students at ASU Prep are applying their learning via paid internships and hybrid high school/university schedules.

����’s working. With graduation and college-going rates that exceed the averages and large numbers of students matriculating to STEM careers, we believe that we are the school system of the future. As part of , ASU Prep is wired like no other K12 system in the country and is poised to design and open access to a K12 model fit for the future of work. 

We do all these things not to simply grow enrollment but to develop a knowledge base of what works to share with the broader community and the ASU teams that are increasing university enrollment in underrepresented communities.

Stakes are high for both our country and the families striving within. We embrace the efforts laid out in the New Essential Education Discoveries (NEED) Act to evaluate what is happening right now in the most innovative systems in the United States and apply those lessons rapidly for the benefit of all students.

There is brilliance in every household. We believe it’s our job to design new educational models that value curiosity and show every student that they do, in fact, have a path to a successful future.

MESA – On a playground in Mesa, a group of children of various ages and abilities plays with several dogs and two miniature horses. Some run around with the animals while others just pet and hold them. This is animal therapy.

Once a month, the Arizona organization Pawsitive Friendships brings therapy animals to A Place 4 Everyone Learning Center, a school to help students with physical, social and emotional issues.

Pawsitive Friendships was founded in 2014 when the founder and CEO, Tosha Tharp-Gaitanis, discovered that exercise routines with her son, who has autism, were more productive when the family dog was part of the sessions. “I’m not a therapist, I’m not a teacher, just a mom with a passion to have others succeed like my son did,” Tharp-Gaitanis said.

Facilities with educational and clinical day programs for people with special needs, from early childhood to adult, contract with Pawsitive Friendships to bring trained animals and handler teams to work with individuals at their facilities. Tharp-Gaitanis says the 2023 goal for Pawsitive Friendships was to serve 1,500 kids and the company has already helped over 1,600 kids in 22 different facilities.

When the animals arrived at A Place 4 Everyone Learning Center, the children seemed immediately calmer, an observation confirmed by the instructors at the center who said the animals help children express themselves with a more tranquil demeanor and consider their actions before lashing out.

“The connection is all body language. It teaches them how to use that body language throughout their whole lives in their day-to-day,” said Karen Shields, senior manager at A Place 4 Everyone Learning Center. “����’s extremely impressive how the animals are able to bring that out more than we are as humans with our spoken language.”

Shields has found that the kids interact more with the animals. “����’s a deep down soul want-to connect,” she said.

Behavior therapist Danyelle Tarlowski, from Arizona Autism, helps children with autism learn appropriate behaviors at home and in public. “We can use the animals to say, ‘Hey the dog is sitting nicely, let’s sit nicely,’” said Tarlowski. “A lot of times we use friends and peers to show behaviors that are good and in this case, we use the animals.”

Tori Rimmer, a staff member at A Place 4 Everyone Learning Center, said that she notices a change in the children’s behavior the rest of the day after Pawsitive Friendships visits. She adds that the children immediately begin to look forward to the next time the animals will visit.

The company currently has over 115 animals and has expanded to over 10 different species, including dogs, birds, horses, snakes and even an alpaca.

The therapy animals have to be at least 1 year old, have lived with the owner for at least 8 months, be up to date on their vaccinations and pass a behavior assessment. The owners of the animals need to have fingerprint clearance and be able to advocate for the animal.

Two of the miniature horses, Dante and Daphne, are owned by Roger and Arlene Lewis. Roger Lewis said that the horses need to maintain a calm disposition and demeanor. “They cannot react to anything, that’s what makes them a therapy horse. You could shoot off an air horn here, they’d stay like this.”

Pawsitive Friendships is currently accepting volunteer applications on their website.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit .

Enrollment in Arizona’s school voucher program has officially surpassed the number accounted for in the state budget, reigniting the quarrel among Republican lawmakers and Gov. Katie Hobbs over the program’s financial viability.

The budget passed earlier this year to fund demand from what lawmakers projected to be a maximum of 68,380 students. (That estimate was widely criticized by voucher opponents for exceeding the student body of Mesa Unified, the state’s largest public school district.) But that estimate has been outstripped just three months into the fiscal year, and stands at .

Reacting to the update, Hobbs issued a scathing criticism of the program, known formally as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, warning that the ballooning costs are likely to cut into other state-funded initiatives.

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“The school voucher program is unaccountable and unsustainable. It does not save taxpayers money, and it does not provide a better education for Arizona students,” she said in a posted to X, formerly Twitter. “The runaway spending threatens funding for state troopers fighting drug trafficking, social workers protecting Arizona’s most vulnerable children, and doctors caring for Veterans who sacrificed their health to protect our country.”

The Democrat also blasted the program for bankrolling ski resort passes, luxury car driving lessons and pianos, among other expenses recently revealed in an . The program has few accountability measures in place, and an Arizona Department of Education spokesman justified those purchases as likely meeting an educational need.

Hobbs has been an outspoken opponent of the universal expansion that led to the explosion in enrollment and in her first executive budget proposal. Since then, she has floated an enrollment cap as a possible solution to pursue next year, but Republican lawmakers, who championed the expansion, have said they are not interested in placing any limits on the vouchers.

The program was initially crafted to help fund educational alternatives, including private school and homeschooling efforts, for students who met specific criteria, such as attending a D or F rated school, being part of a military or foster family or having special education needs. But its proponents always sought to expand it to all students, and they achieved that in 2022, when Republican lawmakers that meant any student, regardless of their lack of public school history, could qualify for vouchers.

ESA proponents push back

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican and strong supporter of ESA vouchers, refuted Hobbs’ calamitous predictions, saying that the Department of Education’s total K-12 budget is on track for a surplus.

“The Governor’s calculation is in error,” he said in a joint statement issued with GOP legislative leaders. “She is counting the $7,200 paid for each ESA student without offsetting the $13,000 paid per student that would otherwise be spent for that student to attend a public school. The overall numbers bear this out as the expenditures for all public school spending, including the ESA program, are $72 million below budget.”

Horne has repeatedly touted the ESA program as a cost-saving measure, reasoning that per-pupil funding amounts paid to public schools in the state education budget are higher than the average ESA grant. But that argument ignores students who never attended a public school and so represent a new cost, and the fact that the payment formula for ESA’s was changed several years ago , which receive higher per-pupil stipends than public school districts.

Ben Toma, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives and the sponsor of the universal voucher expansion, chastised Hobbs for lashing out against a large portion of the state’s student population on social media and called on her to put forward real policy proposals. The Peoria Republican dismissed concerns about the increase in voucher use, saying it is within 1% of the initial legislative estimate.

“We remind the Governor that she leads the entire state of Arizona, and if she seeks changes to the ESA program, she ought to propose serious policies, not tweet vague threats,” he said in a written . “The State Legislature has yet to see any policy proposals from her office. Arizona will continue to responsibly fund students, not systems.”

Senate President Warren Petersen added that the ESA program is a priority for legislators seeking to give Arizona families more power over their children’s education, and unequivocally rejected any attempt to do away with it.

“Arizona families want choices for their children’s education. ESAs are one of the many choices the legislature is prioritizing,” the Gilbert Republican said. “We’re always open to improving our state’s programs, but for the sake of Arizona families who want to choose the best educational settings to meet their children’s needs, ESAs are here to stay.”

Budget deficit on the horizon

The debate around ESAs has been complicated by the Grand Canyon State’s deteriorating financial outlook. A new legislative analysis estimates that the end of the fiscal year will see Arizona face a budget deficit of $400 million, setting the stage for contentious budget talks in the upcoming legislative session.

And public education advocates have already started to weigh in, pointing to the skyrocketing cost of ESA vouchers, for worsening the shortfall. Both the and the estimated over the summer that the universal expansion would cause ballooning costs by the end of the fiscal year, reaching more than $900 billion — far above what was set aside in the state budget.

On Oct. 2, Save Our Schools Arizona, a public education advocacy group focused on opposing the expansion of private school vouchers, sent a memo to Hobbs, state Treasurer Kimberly Yee and legislative leaders urging them to take action against the ESA program.

“As of this week, SOSAZ calculates that the ESA voucher program is $22,945,005 in the red,” warned Executive Director Beth Lewis and Policy Director Melinda Iyer. “By the end of this fiscal year, the program is on track to cost taxpayers $296.6 million more than the legislature budgeted — meaning the program will be 47.5% over budget.”

Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union, denounced Republican lawmakers for creating the budget deficit by passing laws that benefit the wealthy.

“In 2021, right-wing Arizona politicians chose to side with their campaign donors and lobbyists and pass a huge tax break for the 1%,” Garcia said, in an emailed statement. “And in 2022, they pushed through a hugely unpopular universal ESA voucher program. We’re seeing the impact of those decisions today.”

The 2.5% flat income tax rate, passed in 2021 and touted by former governor Ducey and Republican legislators as a relief for everyday Arizonans has significantly reduced revenues for the state and represents .

Petersen, however, placed the blame for the state’s upcoming financial troubles squarely on the Biden administration’s shoulders. Taking aim at the ESA program to mitigate the deficit is a nonstarter, he said.

“Unfortunately, the immediate crisis negatively impacting our budget is the skyrocketing inflation caused by reckless policies being pushed by Democrats at the federal level,” he said, in his joint statement with Toma and Horne. “As a result, many of our citizens are struggling to pay for basic necessities, they’re spending much less and now our state is limited in the tax revenues we’re able to generate. We will evaluate ways to cut spending to accommodate any budget shortfall, but our school choice program will not be on the chopping block.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

Four teenagers take turns reading steadily from a teleprompter. Their message is as simple as their videos’ black and white color scheme: With fentanyl, there is no second chance. 

“Look, I’m not here to preach. But you need to be aware of a serious issue,” begins one of now seven public safety announcements written and produced by Arizona’s Tempe Union High School District students. 

In a conversational tone aimed at their Gen Z peers, the students calmly walk through party scenarios and life saving information about fentanyl, the synthetic opioid responsible for over . As little as two grains of salt, approximately 2 mg, are lethal. The size of a pencil tip.

What began last fall as a marketing club project has since become a nationally-recognized, peer to peer called “No Second Chance,” led by four students from two Tempe schools.

Students traversed Arizona and the country, leading local parent workshops and competing in an international competition to quickly spread the word about , commonly laced recreational and counterfeit prescription drugs, and Naloxone or Narcan, the overdose reversal medication. 

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has just — one of two projects in the country to be recognized for their prevention work.

Students behind the campaign were motivated by the silence on the deadly trend that has claimed the lives of thousands of teens throughout their state. 

“There’s this entire world underneath our feet,” Corona del Sol high school senior Jaia Neal told The 74. “And yet I don’t hear any of it on social media, or from any of my friends or parents or anything. It’s like, what is happening? How are people not freaking out that so many people are dying from this?”

A sobering released last year revealed that among 10 to 19 year olds, fentanyl-related overdose deaths increased 182% from 2019 to 2021. Two thirds of them were not alone when they overdosed. 

Nearly all deaths were unintentional — of synthetic opioid deaths from 2021 were ruled a suicide. 

Such was the case for Ethan Dukes, 16. His mother, Shari, did not know why her early riser did not wake up one Saturday until the autopsy results came in.

In a way, No Second Chances’ campaign story begins with Ethan, the track athlete with dreams of being a parent and lawyer.

“One pill can kill — I always say one pill does kill. One pill flipped my entire world around,” his mother, lifetime district administrator and local prevention advocate Shari Dukes said. 

He had gone to bed early, by 10:15, after coming home from a party Friday night. At the time, February of 2019, fentanyl was not on her nor the district’s radar. 

Shari told her family’s experience, and frustration over schools’ silence for over two years after Ethan’s death, to the school board and an old colleague, Tempe Union’s social emotional wellness director, Ron Denne Jr. 

“I thought, if I don’t know and I’m so involved, then there’s got to be all these other folks. Your kid can’t go to bed one day and not wake up the next,” Dukes said. 

Denne pitched their community relations team and Corona del Sol’s marketing club advisor — and students took the torch.

No Second Chance has been meeting and presenting with family survivors, and National Guard and DEA drug trafficking teams. Their videos have been screened during video announcements at high schools within the district. Later this basketball season, some will make an appearance on the Phoenix Suns’ jumbotron. 

For those who’ve been doing prevention work for years, the campaign is exactly what’s been missing: how to reach young people effectively.

In the few months since students wrote and recorded PSAs, the landscape has already shifted. The amount of counterfeit pills containing lethal doses has risen from four in ten to seven in ten, the DEA reports. 

Teens are most commonly accessing fentanyl unknowingly from social media or secondhand from friends who have. Looking for prescription drugs, youth find laced, counterfeit Oxycodone, known as blue M30 pills, Percocet or Xanax.

“People don’t know what they don’t know… we want them to understand that there are bad people that are using social media platforms to sell drugs,” said National Guard Sergeant Tommy Morga, who helps lead the Arizona Counter Drug Task Force. 

Compounding concerns, fentanyl is hard to accurately test for. Drugs are mixed unevenly; scraping one side of a pill may yield a false negative. Some THC vapes are impossible to take apart. 

Just six years ago, fentanyl was a rarity outside of medicinal use as an anesthetic particularly for cancer patients. But the drug, 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, has ravaged parts of the country, particularly border areas, like Tempe Union’s , one of the nation’s most populous.

In Texas alone, have sought to authorize Narcan and emergency training for educators and schools. California last month, requiring school safety plans include opioid training. In , advocates are pushing for harm reduction approaches like Tempe Union’s, instead of abstinence or zero tolerance messaging. 

Almost immediately after the PSAs debuted at Tempe Union’s high schools, emails from teachers rolled in: thank you for showing these, my brother died of an overdose; my cousin is addicted. 

Today, 10 doses of Narcan are available at five locations at each high school. Buses are stocked. About 50 students and 250 staff have been trained to administer it, including all nurses, security guards and transportation teams. QR codes to make confidential counselor appointments are posted throughout campuses. The districts’ teachers can access free counseling through Talkspace and longterm support via .��

At Corona del Sol, Neal never crossed paths with Ethan, four years her elder. But while presenting at a DEA teen academy meeting, she revealed her link to him, trading confidence for pained frustration. 

How could they walk the same halls, have the same teachers, and not know Ethan died from fentanyl poisoning?

“How did we not know,” Neal asked, “how close it is to us?”

Two out of three students were enrolled in schools with high or extreme rates of chronic absenteeism during the 2021-22 school year — more than double the rate in 2017-18, the report found. Students who miss at least 10% of the school year, or roughly 18 days, are considered chronically absent.

, from Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University, shows a fivefold increase in the percentage of elementary and middle schools with extreme rates, where at least 30% of students are chronically absent. 

In addition, the researchers released an at 2022-23 figures from . The data shows that overall chronic absenteeism levels remain extremely high at 28%  — well above the pre-pandemic level of 16%.

Empty desks have a on both teachers and students who are still trying to make up for lost learning during the pandemic, said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works.  

“It makes teaching and learning much harder,” she said. She finds the increase at the elementary level especially alarming because absenteeism becomes “habit forming.”

Many students started preschool and kindergarten remotely during the early years of COVID and missed out on a normal transition into school. “When they start off not ever having a routine of attendance, what does that mean for addressing it in middle and high school?” she asked. 

The analysis — the first of three researchers plan to release on the federal data — shows that the percentage of high schools with extreme rates increased from 31% to 56% during that time period. A November release will focus on demographic disparities and one in January will examine state-level trends.

Soaring absenteeism rates have contributed to declines in math and reading scores on national tests, the said last month. Despite billions available to schools to address learning loss, students of extra help if they’re not in school. Districts are tackling the problem by dedicating staff to attendance, offering home visits with families and targeting voicemail messages to alert parents that their children’s absences are piling up. Experts say it takes multiple strategies to make a dent in what might seem an insurmountable challenge.

“If we aren’t careful, the problem can feel overwhelming,” said Terri Clark, literacy director at Read On Arizona. The nonprofit began efforts to improve attendance seven years ago when that reading performance declined as chronic absenteeism increased. But when schools tailor their strategies to students’ needs, they can make progress, Clark said. 

“Often the focus is on awareness and getting the word out,” she said. “But you can’t stop there. What if a family can’t get [to school] everyday?”

Her organization is working with about 60 districts across the state to better identify the barriers that keep students from attending school regularly. One is the Tanque Verde Unified School District, near Tucson, where chronic absenteeism has more than doubled to 27% since 2018. Superintendent Scott Hagerman pointed to a practice that he hopes will bring the rate back down. 

When students are absent, teachers are required to make sure they get their assignments. He knows from experience how important that connection can be to a student.

“When I was a kid, I had a chronic health issue, and the back and forth, in and out of school, without any idea of what was happening when I was gone made coming back harder,” he said. “We are trying to deal with that issue — absences causing more absences.”

Health- and transportation-related issues before the pandemic, Chang said. But now a school has further complicated daily commutes. And in , she’s heard from kindergarten parents who are confused about when they can send children back to school after a fever or illness.

“These are lingering effects of COVID protocols that aren’t helpful,” she said. She stressed the need for frequent, two-way communication between parents and school staff and the importance of reversing a “more-relaxed attitude” about attendance that has permeated school culture. 

The risk of ‘wasting precious time’

Sometimes a robocall from an NFL player emphasizing the importance of daily attendance is the added boost a student needs. That’s one of the methods an Ohio district used as part of the Cleveland Browns Foundation’s initiative.

“If you want to make your dreams become a reality, whether that’s getting into college, getting a good job or even becoming a champion on the playing field, it all starts with hard work,” said cornerback Greg Newsome II, one of three players to record the same message. 

The East Cleveland City Schools found that the player’s messages caused a 1.6% decrease in absenteeism among students who had missed school within the previous two weeks. That’s on top of a 6.3% reduction in absences after families received an automated message from a district staff member. 

The experiment was part of a Harvard University effort to help schools find the right combination of strategies to address absenteeism. 

“How do we layer in the right supports, at the right intensity, for the right students, at the right time?” asked Amber Humm Patnode, interim director of Proving Ground, a project of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. The team works with districts to test solutions before scaling them districtwide. Without gathering evidence on what works, Patnode said, “we risk wasting precious time, resources and energy on things that may not result in actual reduced absences.”

The Euclid City School District has also participated in Stay in the Game. One kindergartner last year received three tickets to a Browns game after making significant progress in attendance. Six-year-old Mekhi Bridges had a speech delay, which made his mother Tasia Letlow extra cautious about getting him to school everyday. 

“I wasn’t comfortable with him riding the bus because of not being able to necessarily communicate everything,” Letlow said. But she also had car trouble, and it wasn’t long before Mekhi amassed over 20 absences. The district sent a letter alerting her to the problem. 

Targeted letters are just one way the district has addressed a chronic absence rate that reached 73% in 2021. This fall, Jerimie Acree, attendance and residency coordinator for the district, is trying a different approach for middle and high school students who miss class — a deterrent he calls “working lunch.” Students who cut three times have to spend lunch in the media center away from their friends and without their phones. 

“It is totally in place to inconvenience them,” Acree said. 

The district’s attendance clerks — staff members who are supposed to focus on improving attendance — now report to him. Previously, they reported to principals, where they frequently got sidetracked with other duties. 

“[Administrators] would pull that person to do supervision of field trips” among other things, he said. “Attendance work wasn’t being done everyday.”

To respond to the absenteeism crisis, districts and nonprofits across the country have tapped for dedicated positions or to pay educators stipends for home visits. With the deadline to use those funds coming up next year, the ability of districts to sustain those efforts has become “a huge question,” Chang said.

Gina Martinez-Keddy, executive director of Parent Teacher Home Visits — which began in Sacramento 25 years ago — said she’s talking to districts about how to use other sources of federal funding, like Title I, to support the efforts. the model can have what she called “spillover effects” on chronic absenteeism even if the original intention was to build trust with families.

“Relationship-building works,” Chang said. “That was proven before the pandemic. One-on-one engagement is really essential.”

At San Tan Heights K-8, my team and I are looking at every aspect of how we educate students. Among the most important changes we’ve made is departmentalizing our teaching teams by subjects in grades K-8. Our grade-level teachers are now specialists, and our students rotate between classrooms — starting in kindergarten.

Departmentalization isn’t a big deal in middle or high schools, but it’s rare in elementary settings and virtually nonexistent in the early grades. Making the shift meant altering schedules, getting the children used to transitioning from class to class, building new professional development programming and more. Working with , a developer of high-quality curriculum, we started two years ago with third grade and up. At first, the teachers were nervous. But soon they were feeling less scattered, more focused and better at their jobs. Now, the whole school operates this way. 

The morning starts with an advisory, or homeroom, lasting about 20 minutes and focusing on social and emotional learning. This sets a positive tone for the day. The homerooms are led by our math, reading and English language arts/social studies teachers, so when advisory ends, students stay in that room for their first academic class.

Each grade level has three class rotations, and each class lasts 86 minutes. In kindergarten through third grade, one dedicated reading teacher works across grades on foundational skills. There is one English language arts teacher per grade, who also provides social studies instruction, and one math instructor, who also teaches science. 

Every grade is divided into three cohorts, and these groups of children move from class to class together. We keep the transition time short, just about two minutes, to limit distractions and misbehavior in the hallways. 

So far, the preliminary evidence indicates the change is producing positive benefits. For the first time in our school’s history, we experienced the highest growth in our district in both English and math, and I believe departmentalization has played a key role. 

We’ve also seen improvements in our school culture and climate.

Students enjoy rotating classrooms during the day. It gives them a chance to move. And because they’re traveling together in assigned groups, they get to know one another well.

We had initially worried that teachers might have trouble building relationships with their students if they didn’t have the same kids all day. But we’ve found teachers can build great relationships with students if they have them for about an hour and a half a day and connect with them in meaningful and engaging ways on the subject at hand.

Departmentalization has also allowed educators to go deep into the subjects they teach and become the experts students need — especially given pandemic-related learning gaps. For example, our literacy teachers have been able to devote time to studying research related to the science of reading without feeling like they’re shortchanging other subject areas. Similarly, our math teachers have stepped back and studied , received intensive coaching and learned new problem-solving and mathematical modeling approaches.

Our school, like many others, has replaced outdated curricula with higher-quality options, and more rigorous materials ask more of teachers. For example, they tend to require more time planning and preparing lessons. Departmentalization has given them that flexibility, and it allows our school leaders to tailor professional development offerings to their specific needs, based on the content they teach. They also get more opportunities to build their knowledge and collaborate with peers who teach the same subject in the grades above and below theirs. This allows teachers to explore how content builds upon itself from grade to grade.

As a result, teacher satisfaction is on the rise, leading to increased retention. Our school’s usual attrition rate has usually been around 30%, but in 2022-23, it dropped to 13% percent. Also this past year, half of the open positions at the school were filled by teachers within the district who requested to transfer in. That has never happened before.

Our teachers are happy because we’ve made them partners in the restructuring. Their input was critical when determining which educators to assign to each subject, a decision that also involved data showing which were the most effective. Once we moved to departmentalized instruction, I encouraged teachers to share feedback on how things were going as we progressed. Their insights have informed our practices — which are being evaluated by researchers from Johns Hopkins University over the course of a five-year study.
For elementary school leaders interested in departmentalizing, my advice is: Try it. You can always switch back if it doesn’t work, but I doubt that will happen. We at San Tan Heights welcome the chance to share what we’ve learned and help more schools close pandemic-era learning gaps by adopting this revolutionary approach. It’s well past time to rethink what schools are doing and take steps that can make a big difference in young lives.

She envisioned teaching elementary students in the primary space and middle schoolers in the casita. The sheds would be for students’ personal interests, like metal working and car repair. But in July, after she put down a $5,000 deposit and just weeks before she was ready to open, Howard ran up against the county’s zoning bureaucracy. Despite plans to serve about a dozen students, officials told her the law required private schools to have at least five acres of land.

“We lost our money, and the families lost their anticipated school,” Howard said. “A lot of families are looking for an alternative to what they are seeing in public schools right now.”

Microschools, as such small learning environments are known, aren’t new. The model took off during the pandemic, and now serves between students. But as interest has surged, so have regulatory snags. Parents and educators with dreams of running their own schools are clashing with local officials armed with sometimes arcane rules that were never designed for education. Lawyers and veterans of unconventional education programs are now jumping in to help newcomers navigate everything from fire codes to food safety.

“����’s the problem that comes with trying to fit a square peg in a round hole,” said Paul Avelar, an attorney with the conservative Institute for Justice. The public interest law firm, which has won major school choice victories before the U.S. Supreme Court, represents Howard. Avelar wants Pinal County to in light of a that says counties can’t require a private school to have more than one acre of land. He hopes to have an answer by the end of this month. 

“This is going to be one of those growing pains,” he said.

There are now an estimated 125,000 microschools in the United States, said Don Soifer, executive director of the Las Vegas-based National Microschooling Center. Those running them have varied backgrounds and reasons for taking the plunge. While some started out as homeschoolers, other operators left the public system in search of greater flexibility or to offer students a more personalized education. Over 60% of microschool founders are white, and almost three-fourths of leaders are or were certified educators, according to the center’s recent .

Lawmakers are beginning to pay attention. A Utah proposal this year would have written microschools into the law, permitting them to operate virtually anywhere, much like charters. Despite a close vote, the bill failed after Democrats over traffic in residential areas and said it would further draw families away from public schools.

While they wait for local officials to respond, many advocates warn that microschools ignore the regulatory system at their peril.  

“We don’t want a graveyard of microschools that we’re looking back on,” said Jamie Buckland, founder of West Virginia Families United for Education, a homeschooling and school choice advocacy group. “If you’re going to charge someone money to educate their child, you do have a responsibility to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.” 

In West Virginia, that money includes public education funds. Students attending microschools are eligible for the state’s , an education savings account, which this year is set at $4,488 per student. ESAs allow families to pay private school tuition or cover a wide variety of homeschooling expenses. 

Buckland has been advising homeschooling families for 16 years. Some of those families collaborate to teach multiple children — an arrangement that might now be called a microschool. She provides workshops across the state on details from employment taxes to liability insurance.

Microschool operators often use spare church spaces, and may incorrectly assume their insurance is covered by the church. Buckland also recommends that schools that store data online invest in cyber insurance to protect from data breaches. 

She urges vigilance because opponents of vouchers are on the lookout for “fly-by-night schools and start-ups who don’t understand what they are liable for.” 

Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a pro-public schools group, is among those who think microschools lack sufficient safeguards. Many operate from private homes that lack pool fences, gun safes and locked medicine cabinets to protect children, she said. 

“We have asked questions about who is ultimately responsible if something happens to a child at a microschool,” she said. But when she contacts state authorities about these questions, she usually gets the runaround. “It’s only a matter of time before something happens and a child is hurt.” 

‘Just want to teach’

Whether public or private, microschools can be subject to land use restrictions and health and safety mandates. But these often vary by county and city, leaving school leaders at the mercy of local bureaucrats who frequently lack experience with schools. 

“Overzealous regulators are looking to do their jobs, and doing it inconsistently,” Soifer said.

Almost weekly, his team is on the phone negotiating with officials who are unfamiliar with microschools. If they’re trying to shut down a school, he often seeks a temporary exception that lasts at least until the end of the school year to avoid disruption. 

The risk of shutdowns can be enough to make leaders resort to using terms such as “learning community” — anything other than “school” — to describe their work.

Lizette Valles, a former private school English teacher and librarian, runs a microschool out of a warehouse in an industrial area south of downtown Los Angeles. Sharing space with a race car garage and a plant nursery, the school serves just a few in-person students, but reaches kids learning from home or  in an RV.

County fire officials determined a glass enclosure around the classroom space violates industrial zoning codes. But the owners, whose children attend the program, satisfied those concerns — for now. 

“In the long run, this is not sustainable,” said Valles, who is already looking for another space. “I just want to teach kids.” 

Over a third of microschools occupy a commercial business space, according to the microschool center’s report. That means prospective school leaders might have to conduct a traffic analysis or notify the surrounding community of a school’s opening, even if it will only serve a small group of students. 

Pizza, goats

Soifer has heard numerous examples of regulations designed to govern traditional schools or businesses clashing with educational programs that don’t fit the mold.

A health department in southern Nevada, for example, wouldn’t allow a microschool in Clark County to order pizza for students on Fridays because it lacked a commercial kitchen. 

Soifer advises microschool operators to avoid serving younger students altogether because child care licensing rules can be especially difficult to navigate. Last fall, Hawaii officials on the Big Island they said was an “unlicensed preschool” and didn’t meet credentialing requirements for staff.

This fall, Katie Saiz, who runs Green Gate Children’s School in Wichita, Kansas, bought a couple of goats for the preschoolers and elementary-age students to take care of. But the city first required her to get permission from members of a homeowners association in the surrounding neighborhood.

With years of experience running a microschool, she wants to help other educators avoid such pitfalls. She’s creating an online guide to the regulatory process for microschools, with a grant from the , which supports innovative education programs.

‘Just wanted to give up’

Regulatory delays can leave parents scrambling for a backup plan. When Tamra Hopkins had to put off opening Desert Peach Montessori in Reno, Nevada this spring, five families suddenly had to find another school. 

She thought the process would be easy. After identifying an old church building that previously housed a preschool, regulators told her she had to erect a 6-foot-high retaining wall — a legally required buffer between child care centers and residential areas. 

Then she had to hold a public forum to gather input from the community. Many residents opposed the move, concerned that a property zoned as a “public facility” would one day invite a hospital or some other high-traffic facility to move in. Prospective parents attended the gathering to voice their support for the program. 

“They must have really wanted this for their children,” Hopkins said. The program opened in August after the city granted the school a special permit to serve up to 54 students. 

“In the end, it was good news,” she said. “But there were so many times that we just wanted to give up.”

Who is ensuring that the people driving vans full of K-12 students in Arizona are properly qualified? Not the , which is tasked with making recommendations for the use of those vans, because the council effectively doesn’t exist — and hasn’t for at least a year.

When lawmakers passed that allows schools to transport students to and from school using 11- to 15-passenger vans instead of yellow buses, proponents promised skeptics that the , in conjunction with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, would establish minimum standards for drivers and safety standards for the vehicles themselves.

But it’s not possible that DPS worked with the council to create those standards, because the council hasn’t met since then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed the bill into law on June 16, 2022.

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The council, whose membership was increased to 14 members from nine by the same bill, is currently completely vacant, and has been vacant for more than a year with no indication from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs when or if new members will be appointed.

The law that established the council says that it’s Hobbs’ responsibility to appoint members to the council, but it was Ducey who initially allowed all of the members’ terms to expire without making reappointments.

Hobbs did not respond to multiple requests for comment or a list of questions that the Mirror sent to her team. Instead, her spokesperson referred the Arizona Mirror to DPS.

DPS did not answer the Mirror’s questions before this article was published. The most recent for a School Bus Advisory Council meeting — the former name of the council — was dated Dec. 14, 2021. A member of the , who wanted to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal from DPS, told the Mirror that was the council’s last meeting.

The law governing the council lays out its specific duties, including that it meet twice annually, and that it “advise and consult with the department of public safety concerning matters related to the certification of school bus drivers and the safety of school buses” and 11-15 passenger vans.

The promise was ‘a lot of eyes’ looking at the safety

Sen. Sine Kerr, R-Buckeye, sponsored the bill that allows schools to use passenger vans to transport students. She said the vans would be a way for smaller schools in rural areas and charter schools with a widely dispersed student population to transport students more efficiently than with a large-capacity yellow bus.

Vans would also be cheaper than a school bus, which has higher maintenance and operational costs.

The through both chambers of the Arizona legislature last June with only Republican support.

As the bill made its way through legislative committees, multiple Democrats expressed concern about credentialing for drivers and the safety of high-capacity vans.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recommends that only people who are used to driving large passenger vans do so, and it advises that ideally drivers should have a commercial driver’s license. More than half of the 235 people killed in rollover crashes in 15-passenger vans from 2010 to 2019 were ejected, and 69% of those killed weren’t wearing seatbelts, according to the NHTSA. Electronic stability control in newer 15-passenger vans prevents the that poses a safety risk in older models.

Regular school bus drivers must obtain a commercial driver’s license and submit to drug testing, but drivers of 15-passenger vans are only legally required to have a regular drivers license.

During a in February 2022, Sen. Sally Ann Gonzalez, D-Tucson, spoke about working as a school bus driver more than 30 years ago while she was in college. She said that she believes requiring drivers who transport students to have a CDL is an important safety measure.

The transportation administrator who spoke to the Mirror said that DPS strongly recommended during a meeting the agency held with school transportation administrators that schools require van drivers to have a CDL in order to ensure student safety, but he said that the department has no way to enforce that. He estimated that up to 70% of districts in Arizona were already using the vans for student transportation this year, including his own.

Also during the February 2022 committee meeting, Sen. Christine Marsh, D-Phoenix, said that she appreciated the idea of the bill and the possibility that it might help with an ongoing school bus driver shortage, but was concerned that safety and insurance coverage would be an issue. Marsh ultimately voted against the bill.

In June 2022, when the Senate voted on the bill, Kerr assured those with safety concerns that DPS, in conjunction with the Student Transportation Advisory Council, would keep a close eye on safety measures for use of the vans.

“����’s an important bill, particularly for rural areas that need flexibility in their school transportation when it doesn’t make sense to take a full size school bus to transport students safely on their regular bus routes,” Kerr said, adding that there would be “a lot of eyes looking at this on safety.”

Kerr did not respond to requests for comment.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

Arizona’s public schools chief is taking the governor and attorney general to court in an over how English Language Learner students should be taught.

On Wednesday, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court asking the judge to settle a disagreement over the interpretation of state law between his office and Gov. Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes.

At the heart of the disagreement is whether a teaching model authorized by the State Board of Education and used in as many as across the state complies with a law approved by Arizona voters more than 20 years ago. The 50-50 Dual-Language Immersion model is one of four methods used to teach students who aren’t yet proficient in English, known as English Language Learners. Under the model, students are taught half the day in English and the other half in another language, often their native language.

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Horne, long an opponent of bilingual education, argues that the 50-50 model violates Proposition 203. The measure, which voters approved in 2000, mandates that all students be taught only in English until they’ve achieved proficiency. Acting on that interpretation, Horne from schools using the 50-50 model.

Democrats Hobbs and Mayes disagree with Horne’s stance and strongly support dual language models. In a issued just a month after Horne’s warnings, Mayes said his office has no ability to withhold funding and assured schools that the 50-50 model is protected by the authority of the State Board of Education, to which Horne can, at most, report violations of board rules. She pointed out that a , passed by legislators concerned with the academic struggles of English Language Learners, ordered the board to develop alternative, research-based teaching methods.

That directive ultimately paved the way for the adoption of the 50-50 model and gave the board sole authority over how to teach English Language Learners.

The State Board of Education affirmed shortly after Mayes’ opinion that it had no plans to make any changes to its adopted teaching models or punish schools for using the 50-50 model.

The question of whether the 50-50 model falls afoul of the provisions in Prop. 203 was not discussed in Mayes’ opinion, however. And Horne returned to the conflict in his lawsuit. The Arizona Constitution protects voter-approved initiatives from being amended by lawmakers unless the changes are made in the spirit of the original initiative, and neither the State Board of Education nor the legislature has the power to override the will of the voters, Horne said.

“No governmental body can override a voter-protected initiative,” reads his lawsuit. “The voter protected initiative specifically requires that instruction be in English until the student tests as proficient in English, or a parental waiver is obtained.”

The only exception baked into Prop. 203 is for parents to waive the requirement of an English-only education annually, in writing and in person. While the State Board of Education has said it won’t require waivers, it has also stated that it is within Horne’s power to begin doing so. And, according to Horne, schools that employ the 50-50 model without asking for written waivers are doing so illegally.

“The voter-protected initiative specifically requires that English-language learners be taught English by being taught in English, and that they be placed in English-language classrooms,” Horne’s attorneys wrote. “Dual language classrooms, in the absence of a statutory waiver, are therefore prohibited by the voter-protected initiative.”

In a declaration added to the lawsuit, Margaret Garcia Dugan, Horne’s deputy superintendent who has served under him for two terms and helped draft the language of Prop. 203, said the inclusion of a waiver requirement underscores the English-only aspect of the initiative.

“Had the intended purpose of the initiative been to allow students to be taught in a language other than English throughout the school day, then there would have been no need for the waiver provision,” she said.

Clearly, Dugan said, Prop. 203 was never meant to promote bilingual education, and the efforts from lawmakers to allow the State Board of Education to adopt the waiver-free 50-50 model are nullified as a result.

“Some have interpreted legislation passed by the legislature in 2019 as authorizing dual language classrooms. If that is true, the legislation is invalid as a violation of the Voter Protection Act,” Dugan said. “That is because it does not further the purpose of the initiative, which was to make sure that students are taught English through the school day so that they can learn English quickly and then go on to academic success.”

A common refrain from opponents of dual language models is that it hinders the progress of students learning English, and that argument is present in Horne’s lawsuit, which was also filed against Creighton Elementary School District.

Horne said that the English proficiency rate of Creighton’s English Learner students is dismal, at 5.1% last year, compared to elementary schools in other districts, like Catalina Foothills Unified District, with 33.03% proficient, or Scottsdale Unified District. which saw 23.87% of students become proficient.

But both of those districts are significantly different from Creighton, which has a student body that is , and poor — about in 2022. The demographic makeup of Catalina Foothills Unified, which is similarly sized, is and only 11% of the district’s students qualified for free and reduced meals last year. Scottsdale Unified, which is three times larger than the two other districts, has a . About 22% of Scottsdale Unified students qualified for the free and reduced meal program in 2022.

Research indicates that the dual language models are , albeit at a slower pace than fully immersive methods. Importantly, studies show that full immersion models can for English learners, including depression and anxiety.

Horne requested that the court declare the 2019 law unconstitutional if its purpose was to permit dual language instruction. He also asked the judge to settle the disagreement between his office and those of other state leaders by dismissing Mayes’ opinion as incorrect and declaring that the currently approved 50-50 model is contrary to the provisions of Prop. 203 if there are no waivers being required.

A spokesperson for Mayes declined to comment, saying her office is still reviewing the lawsuit.

Christian Slater, a spokesman for Hobbs, said she will continue to back the 50-50 teaching model as a critical support for students across the state and Arizona’s future workforce.

“Dual language programs are critical for training the workforce of the future and providing a rich learning environment for Arizona’s children,” Slater said. “Governor Hobbs is proud to stand by dual language programs that help ensure the next generation of Arizonans have an opportunity to thrive. She will not back down in the face of the superintendent’s lawsuit.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

State schools chief Tom Horne is canceling millions of dollars in contracts funded by COVID-19 aid that his Democratic predecessor awarded to Arizona education programs in order to funnel the money into a new tutoring program for struggling students. But the tutoring will help only about 10% of the students who are falling behind academically.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arizona received three federally funded grants to bolster public schools and improve student outcomes. Former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman awarded money from the third grant package to , a particular focus of her administration. Recipients included the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Valley and Playworks Arizona, which serves low-income schools and teaches inclusivity and conflict resolution via play.

On Sept. 6, Horne, a Republican who has vowed to raise academic achievement, announced that his office has eliminated and reduced ESSER-funded contracts by as much as $70 million. Of that, $40 million will be earmarked for a new tutoring program aimed at students in first grade through eighth who failed to meet a proficiency benchmark on state assessments.

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“We have to make up for the deficiencies of our predecessors and make sure that the students learn more and we have better academic progress,” Horne said at a Tuesday news conference.

Students who qualify will be able to take advantage of extra help four times a week for six weeks. Teachers who choose to tutor can teach a maximum of three students per six-week session, earning $30 an hour. And $200 bonuses would be awarded for every student who shows a one-half year academic gain between the pre-test administered at the start of the tutoring session and the post-test at its end.

����’s unlikely, however, that the funding will pay for tutoring sessions for more than a fraction of students who failed to meet state standards. There are at least 525,000 students who tested below proficiency in at least one subject, and the $40 million would cover tutoring sessions for only about 54,000 of them.

But Horne dismissed that criticism, saying any help is valuable.

“It doesn’t solve the whole problem,” he said. “We can’t generate money out of thin air and we have to deal with the money we have, but a 40 million dollar program — for 1.3 million hours of tutoring — is very major.”

Neither will the program target the populations most affected by pandemic-related learning loss. High poverty schools , and the inequality that already existed was . Instead, the program will be awarded on a first-come, first-serve basis, with applications set to launch on the department of education’s website on Sept. 15.

“Race has nothing to do with it, I’m looking purely at academic performance,” said Horne.

If the program is successful, Horne anticipates taking the idea to the state legislature to continue it beyond the ESSER funding’s September 2024 deadline.

Organizations left in the lurch

As many as 27 contracts were eliminated entirely or reduced. On Aug. 18, the Arizona Department of Education, which Horne oversees, contacted organizations awarded grants under Hoffman and gave them five days to prove their work was improving students’ academic achievement. If an organization could present tangible data showing the benefits of its programs, but wasn’t spending enough to use up its award by 2024, the contract was simply readjusted to cover the rest of the grant period. Any leftover money will be returned to the federal government.

Among those cut off completely was Playworks Arizona, which focuses on creating a welcoming environment during recess to improve student’s well-being. Last year, more than 22,000 Arizona students experienced the structured play offered by the organization. In an emailed statement, spokesperson Beth Eisen said Playworks was still in discussions with the department of education about restoring its grant.

“Last school year, 94% of educators in Playworks Arizona partner schools agreed that Playworks helps to create a supportive learning environment in their schools,” Eisen said. “We remain steadfast in our belief that every child in Arizona should benefit from safe and healthy play every day.”

Horne on Tuesday noted that, despite the five-day deadline, organizations still have the opportunity to prove they deserve to keep their funding. While $70 million was pulled back, only $40 million is currently set aside for the tutoring grants. The rest is a buffer in case an organization earns back its funding and will also be used to pay for the development of the tests used during the tutoring sessions to show improvement levels.

Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union, was unimpressed by Horne’s decision to rescind contracts.

“Once again, Tom Horne is giving us a side show,” she said, in an emailed statement. “He is throwing unneeded chaos into the work of programs serving kids and reneging on promises made to families so that he can get a cheap headline.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

Yaritza Dominguez glanced at her car’s odometer, which was showing one of those numbers that sticks in a person’s memory: 123,456. A month later, she’d added 3,300 miles. 

Dominguez’s 2013 Camaro serves as a kind of rolling office, the linchpin of her academic plan. A complicated tangle of chargers sprawls across the console between the front seats, which are stacked with files. Rosaries hang from the rear-view mirror.

“Since I’m on the road all day, I cannot let my phone die,” says Dominguez, 16, a rising senior at one of the country’s most innovative high schools. PXU City HS has no physical site — its 83 students create custom programs, choosing from a menu of some 500 options from Phoenix Union High School District’s bricks-and-mortar schools; its online-only program, internships; jobs; college classes; and career training programs.

The Camaro enables Dominguez to navigate this dizzying array of choices. When school starts up next week, every morning she will drive five miles to a high school in the city’s redeveloped Midtown district for two hours of classes. By 10:30, she’ll head home for lunch and log on to the few courses she needs to graduate. By 3, Dominguez will be on the road to Surprise, a far northwestern suburb about 30 miles away, where she is enrolled in a dental assistant training program. If she’s lucky and traffic has died down, she will be home again on the west side of downtown Phoenix by 7:10.

A decade ago, Phoenix Union was a plain-vanilla district of high schools facing the same problems as many large, impoverished school systems. With open enrollment and more than 20% of students attending public charter schools, Phoenix offers families lots of options, and the district didn’t have much that was attractive enough to make it competitive. 

Enter Chad Gestson, who recently ended an eight-year run as . In 2015, he announced a plan to operate 25 schools by 2025, with a goal of offering distinctive options throughout the district. In addition to comprehensive high schools with their array of athletics and extracurriculars, there would be medium-sized schools with attractive career and academic focuses and small, personalized microschools to choose from. Many of the new programs would be located in poor neighborhoods in the sprawling city, with free transportation for all students.

Phoenix Union was in the midst of a wholesale redesign when COVID-19 forced schools to close. Fortuitously, a fully online school was in the works, so the district was able to adjust to virtual classes relatively quickly.

But in the process, it became clear just how many high school-aged students were working, caring for siblings, filling in for their parents or significantly behind — or ahead and bored — academically.

As Gestson took it all in, he concluded the original redesign plan didn’t go far enough. PXU, as the district had restyled itself, needed to give up the idea of high school as a building where students spend a certain number of hours a day, for a set number of years, until they graduate.

For 60 years, experts had bemoaned the concept — central to the very DNA of the American high school — that being physically present in a prescribed set of classes for a defined amount of time adds up to a quality education. A few individual schools, particularly charter and private schools, have broken the mold. But most large-scale efforts to get rid of seat time and the bell schedule — the system where everyone moves in lockstep through a standardized sequence of in-person classes, regardless of their interests — run into a thicket of red tape. 

Gestson’s decision to go bolder got a boost from the Arizona legislature, which freed school systems to innovate. But even more important, he says, was the realization that lots of COVID-era teenagers were no longer interested in a traditional high school.

So far, it seems to be working. Last fall, PXU surpassed its highest single-day enrollment in over a half-century. On state report cards, the district has more A- and B-rated schools than ever before and, for the first time, none rated D or F.

“The pandemic gave us an entree,” says Gestson. “It enabled us to go to a system with no limits.” 

If PXU City works as well for all its students as it does for Dominguez, he adds, every high school in the district ought to throw away the bell schedule and offer a truly personalized education.

‘Lots of light and pure water’

The Phoenix Union district itself was born 125 years ago as a different kind of bold experiment.

Completed in 1910, Phoenix Union High School’s Domestic Arts and Sciences building was intended to make a grand statement. Not yet a state, Arizona was then dotted with tiny schoolhouses serving young children, most of them destined for jobs farming or performing physical labor. Previously, the territory’s entire high school student body had been wedged into four classrooms in an elementary school. 

In contrast, of the new, modern secondary school reflected the nation’s burgeoning love affair with public high schools. Designed by Norman Foote Marsh — the architect who replicated Renaissance-era Venice in Southern California — its grand entrance was framed by neoclassical columns supporting a soaring cornice. The structure was supposed to anchor a multi-building complex — “a well-ventilated campus with lots of light and pure water,” as Arizona State University .

Inside, classrooms were appointed to facilitate the study of everything from literature to skilled trades, the menu of offerings that would come to characterize comprehensive high schools throughout America for the next century.

The grandeur sent a signal. At the turn of the 20^th century, schooling for most U.S. children ended in eighth grade. But rapid changes in technology sparked demand for literate workers. Recognizing the prosperity that higher-skilled jobs could bring, employers and families alike clamored for more public secondary schools. 

Leaders rushed to open schools to prepare young people for this new economy, igniting the era historians call the . In 1910, just 19% of American teens were enrolled in what was a small number of high schools. By 1940, 71% of Americans ages 14 to 18 were attending.

As the numbers of high school buildings and students rose, so did the desire among employers and colleges for a uniform definition of what a diploma signified. The trustees of industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s newly created Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching proposed a set of standards: 120 hours of exposure to a subject should equal one credit. To graduate, a student should earn at least 14 credits in four years. Thus was born the Carnegie Unit, now better known as seat time, used to calculate everything from the length of an academic year to the amount schools would be reimbursed for their services.  

For several years, Phoenix Union High School was the only secondary school in the area — and the largest school, enrollment-wise, west of the Mississippi. When more high schools were eventually built in other parts of the fast-growing city, what had begun as a single school became the Phoenix Union High School District. 

The school system today would be unrecognizable to the architects of the original domestic arts building. In the 2022-23 academic year, Phoenix Union served almost 29,000 students spread across the city’s 500 square miles. Some 90% are low-income and nearly as many are Latino. Students speak more than 100 languages and represent 50 tribal communities. 

Phoenix Union does not face many of the same problems as other large, urban districts. Enrollment has not declined — partly because of the city’s boomtown status. Despite Arizona’s low per-pupil funding, the school system is fiscally sound. It attracts veteran teachers and pays them well above the state average. The community repeatedly votes for bonds that enable the district to build, renovate and equip modern facilities.

At the same time, Phoenix Union is confronted with numerous challenges. Arizona’s wide array of school choice options makes it compete for students with wealthier neighboring districts, tax credit scholarships for private schools and one of the nation’s largest charter school sectors.

As recently as a decade ago, Phoenix Union’s graduates were attending college in low numbers and earning degrees at even lower rates. Students were not leaving high school equipped for middle-skills jobs — well-paid positions in growing fields that don’t require a four-year degree. 

A fervent believer that it was time to reimagine high schools, Gestson had been a principal himself. While head of his district’s Camelback High, he had started some specialized academic programs. As a result, he knew redesign efforts were fraught with contradictions.

Worried their kids will slip through the cracks in a large student body, many families want small schools. But they also want the clubs, sports and other opportunities a big high school can offer. Some want career training programs that will lead to a good job immediately after graduation, while others want college prep. Phoenix Union, he believed, needed to become all things to all families.

“There is still magic in large, comprehensive campuses,” says Gestson. “Lots of kids in this country go to school not for math but for theater or the chance to go to MEChA [El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, a national Mexican-American club] or the Black student union.

“The challenge was to take large schools and make them feel small.” 

When he took over as superintendent, the district had 11 high schools and three schools serving students with disabilities or who were significantly behind academically. When he stepped down last spring to start an education innovation research organization at Northern Arizona University, the district was operating 24 schools: the 11 comprehensive high schools, six small specialty schools, three microschools, the three alternative programs and an online-only school.  

Phoenix Union now includes four small high schools with specific themes: law enforcement and firefighting; coding and cybersecurity; the college-preparation program AVID, which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination; and a bioscience school. In the fall, Phoenix Educator Preparatory will welcome its first students.

Uniquely, the district also operates microschools, standalone programs housed in wings of existing high schools. There is one of the country’s only Montessori high schools, a microschool geared for students working toward admission to highly selective colleges and a gifted and talented academy. 

The existing big high schools have been reconfigured. Metro Tech, for example, now is a career-technical education magnet offering 19 workforce training programs. South Mountain is home to distinct programs focused on media arts and design; science, technology and aerospace; and public and social services. At North High School, students work with an adviser to choose their own classes instead of following an established sequence.  

Each high school also has a freshman academy, intended to accomplish several things. To help them take advantage of the district’s specialty programs, ninth-graders are exposed to a variety of career and higher ed options and given the skills to navigate an individualized path. Because they come from 13 K-8 school districts within Phoenix and dozens of public charter schools, it helps them acclimate to PXU. Once students have an idea of what interests them, they can switch schools.

When creating the menu of options, district leaders ignored the temptation to locate popular programs in the city center — a tactic used by many school systems in the name of efficiency that typically excludes the students with the fewest resources. 

For example, Phoenix Union’s gifted and talented program is located on the city’s west side, home to a number of disadvantaged neighborhoods. Transportation anywhere is free for district students, with some able to count on yellow school buses or passes for public transit. 

District leaders were at work creating a fully online school, Phoenix Digital, when the pandemic hit, and when schools closed to in-person learning, having a system for remote schooling was a godsend. As face-to-face classes resumed, however, it became clear that a digital option would be key to Phoenix Union’s ability to offer every student a truly personalized high school experience. 

A just-right school 

When Dominguez started high school in fall 2020, COVID was raging and Phoenix Union classes were online. She flew through the material, but she was lonely. 

“I was like in a bubble,” she says. “I was alone in my room. I had a dance class, and I had to dance in my room in front of my camera.”

She enrolled at North High School when in-person instruction resumed. There were clubs and activities, but the classes were too slow for her. 

Like the rest of her family, Dominguez has a work ethic on steroids. Her grandparents immigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico, supporting their daughter when she became a single mother at 15 in the hope that their grandchild could continue her education past high school. 

Focused and ambitious, Dominguez knew at an early age that she wanted both to work in the dental field and have a creative side hustle. Until recently, she earned extra money by setting up dessert tables at parties on weekends and selling candy at events. 

Headed into her junior year, she was leaning toward transferring to Phoenix Union’s then-new full-time digital school in hopes of also attending a two-year dental assistant program. That way, she could get the prerequisites for her degree out of the way while she was in high school and finish a four-year training program in two years. 

Then, Dominguez’s mother heard about PXU City. She plunked down $1,500 for the girl’s first semester of dental assistant school, bought the Camaro and ordered her to stop working at weddings and ��ܾ��Գ���ñ�������.

“My family is like, ‘Your job is not a necessity. If you’re not going to do well in school, you’re going to quit that job,’ ” Dominguez says, adding — with an almost imperceptible eye roll, “My mom also needs me to be a teenager.” 

Sitting through hundreds of hours of classes that, for her, moved at a crawl would waste Dominguez’s time. But it would also not give a future employer so much as a glimmer of information about her focus and drive. 

For decades, researchers had known that the Carnegie Unit was a poor proxy for quality of education and a student’s skills and aptitudes. But despite general agreement that the credit hour had outlived its usefulness, getting rid of it seemed all but impossible.

COVID’s arrival upended seat time overnight, forcing states and school systems to rethink, at least temporarily, everything from what counts as attendance online to how to ensure that homebound seniors had enough credits to graduate.

Like many states, Arizona had allowed school districts to tweak their approaches to seat time even before the pandemic. But securing permission to truly experiment — to replace conventional lessons with hands-on projects, give students credit for independent study or internships, let them demonstrate mastery of a subject instead of logging time in class, blend remote and in-person instruction, create individualized schedules — was still cumbersome.

Because schools got state funding for documenting Carnegie Units, innovation was disincentivized. To count for credit, for example, a high school class had to meet for at least 123 hours a year, regardless how long it took to cover the material. Students had to take four such classes, even if a larger number of shorter courses would better suit their needs. And because many laws governing online schools were aimed at regulating troubled, low-quality education companies, few policies encouraged expansion of remote learning. Similar inflexibility stymied innovation in transportation, food service and technology.

Then, in 2020 and 2021, Arizona legislators allowed districts to adopt local policies but ensuring that the freedom to design different kinds of learning did not mean students received less instruction. 

Until her recent appointment as Virginia’s deputy secretary of education, Emily Anne Gullickson was head of , a nonprofit focused on school quality. Once the pandemic forced the state to build flexibility into its seat-time laws, she says, districts “were able to come back and say, ‘Don’t take it away.’ ”

Lawmakers also created a $55 million fund for schools wishing to explore alternatives to yellow buses and, for the first time anywhere, allowed for public microschools, which Gullickson envisions as appealing to families and teachers alike. “Arizona is no different than other places in having a mental health crisis,” she says, “and having those very small, safe environments will definitely allow us to keep some very high-quality educators.” 

During the pandemic’s school closures, Gestson asked every district employee to check in with 10 families every day. After surmounting their first big challenge — not knowing how to reach many students — educators started using these newly strengthened relationships to understand the difficulties kids and families faced.

Now, students at PXU City, which opened last fall, are encouraged to attend daily morning advisory groups online. Staff meet weekly to review each student’s progress. This, for example, was how a counselor realized Dominguez was not speeding along independently in math the way she does in other subjects. To help, she got regular coaching. 

In its first year, the school was a very lean operation, says Principal Leah McKiernan: two licensed educators and three support staff brainstorming transportation, troubleshooting schedules and making sure students had the kind of solid relationships with PXU adults that would keep their autonomy from devolving into disarray. Next year, with the addition of two new staffers, PXU City adults will visit students at their job, college and internship sites.  

In many ways, the challenges PXU City’s staff are thinking through mirror the issues that the district’s other schools are grappling with as they move away from bell schedules. A good example is Bioscience High School, located a block south of the original Phoenix Union High School building. 

With capacity for 400 students, Bioscience is the oldest of the district’s small, themed specialty schools. Instead of sitting at desks for a prescribed number of hours, students are required to spend time at nearby engineering and biomedical facilities — including an adjacent research campus where the 1910 Domestic Arts and Sciences building still stands. 

To make time for these outside experiences, students typically complete most of their graduation requirements before their senior year. Teachers set each grade level’s schedule according to what they want students to focus on during a year or a term, says Principal Neda Boyce. But they can put the calendar aside if, for example, students need extra time for projects. 

Starting in their freshman year, all students work on annual, year-long projects where they research a real-world problem, create an intervention and evaluate its effectiveness. One engineering group turned a plot of sunflowers growing behind the school into biofuel and then built a car that ran on it.

Camelback Montessori is a 150-student microschool located in an airy, self-contained wing of a 2,200-student high school. Teachers work in teams to make sure students are engaged in interrelated lessons as they move between subject-specific classes. Dictated by the instructors’ personalities, some classrooms are hushed while others buzz with motion.  

Kids work with the same teachers for all four years, fostering close relationships. The school sees the pillars of the Montessori philosophy — hands, heart and head — as highly effective in guiding students’ self-discovery.

“Hands” includes experiences such as an all-school kayaking trip to learn about the ecosystem. To satisfy the “head” component, all classes are honors-level. The work of the “heart” includes Socratic seminars and close attention to mental health.

“You don’t recognize all of the possibilities until you see what the kids figure out about themselves,” says Principal Danchi Nguyen. “We always say we want you to see what your role is.”    

Coming online this fall, Phoenix Educator Prep may be the district’s most audacious effort to integrate a specialty school with the larger community. It will train future teachers, school counselors and psychologists, as well as encourage students to have not just the vocation of working in a school, but to study something else — like art, music or botany — that they are passionate about. 

After a freshman year dedicated to a smooth transition to high school, Principal Alaina Adams says, students will begin earning an associate degree in their chosen educator track. Upperclassmen will use a version of PXU City’s flexible model to get as far as they can in higher ed, in partnership with one of five Arizona colleges.

Graduates will be encouraged to complete teaching residencies — year-long, hands-on training — at Educator Prep, where they will have financial and logistical help with housing, transportation and other issues that challenge new teachers with low starting pay.   

Later, Adams hopes to position Educator Prep grads to earn two BAs in three years so the would-be teachers can explore their own passions, too. She says she hears over and over that having a “side hustle” is energizing to the current generation of students and educators alike.

“You have to do a lot of listening,” says Adams. “You have to accept that they want more. They want options. They want to change the world.

“����’s turned into a really fun dreamfest for us.”  

‘The best of both worlds’

In April, PXU City held a rare all-school assembly. Dominguez was one of 32 students who showed up to spend the day in a glass-walled conference room in the basement of the district’s administration building, participating in leadership and team-building workshops put on by civic and district leaders. 

Like Dominguez, some kids drove, while some used public transit. McKiernan and PXU City’s other four staffers picked up others using vans the district had purchased to help move students around the community during the school day. 

The aroma of lunch — Cane’s chicken fingers — lingered as students shifted their attention to an exercise in decision-making and how one’s perceptions can sometimes make it hard to see all options. It was being led by the district’s chief talent officer. Other speakers of the day included Gestson, the vice mayor and an executive from the Mayo Clinic. 

The different sessions focused on the so-called soft skills — cooperation, negotiation, self-advocacy, etc. — that students need to navigate learning opportunities outside a conventional school setting. But they also gave PXU staff a chance to cement the personal relationships that are the glue that makes sure whatever students are doing in place of earning Carnegie Units is purposeful.

Indeed, the Carnegie foundation is tracking a handful of school systems trying to devise meaningful replacements for seat time. One goal is to find ways to evaluate mastery that go beyond measuring how much classroom instruction students retain. With its portfolio of schools offering opportunities to learn on college campuses, at research organizations, by working on projects and at job sites, the Phoenix district — and especially PXU City — is closely watched.

The confab had started to wind down when Dominguez got a text from her mother asking if she could pick up her baby brother. As luck would have it, her dental instructors were doing professional development that day, so she had a rare opportunity to take the boy home and play with him. 

Though Dominguez has zero interest in going back to a conventional high school, she was pleased by the assembly. She got to see several friends — including a girl she bonded with virtually during her online dance class — and spent time with the counselor who is helping her with math.

And she got a little encouragement to start thinking about the fall, when, as a senior, she’ll have less than two hours a day following a conventional class schedule. 

“I like a fast-paced life,” she says the next morning, parking the Camaro for a brief moment to grab a latte. “This school, it’s the best of both worlds.”   

Disclosure: The XQ Institute, which has partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to explore alternatives to the Carnegie Unit, provides financial support to The 74.

]]> /article/hobbs-has-questions-about-data-breach-that-exposed-esa-student-info/ Tue, 01 Aug 2023 14:00:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=712430 This article was originally published in

A data breach exposed the personal information of thousands of Arizona students enrolled in the state’s school voucher program, according to Gov. Katie Hobbs, but the state’s top education official says it’s not a problem.

Earlier this month, ClassWallet, the online financial administration platform that handles payments for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program, suffered a data breach that jeopardized the names and disability categories of thousands of Arizona students. The incident triggered an investigation by the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, according to a sent from Hobbs, a Democrat, to Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, on Friday.

Over 60,000 Arizona students are currently enrolled in the ESA program, more than in the , Mesa Unified. A recent enrollment explosion was the result of a universal expansion passed last year by the GOP-controlled legislature. Previously, only public school students who met specific criteria, such as being a foster child, being part of a military family or having special education needs, qualified for a voucher that roughly equals the cost of teaching them in a public school. That voucher can then be used for homeschooling efforts or private school tuition.

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The expansion has been widely denounced by Democrats and public school advocates as bankrolling the education of wealthy Arizona families at taxpayer cost. The initial wave of new applicants last year were found to be and, as of June, those students continue to make up .

Hobbs, a long-time critic of the expansion who earlier this year , rebuked Horne in Friday’s letter about the data breach. She requested a detailed response by Aug. 3 explaining his administration’s actions regarding the breach, preventative measures in place for the future, how the department has notified parents, what laws may have been violated by the exposure of private educational information and whether or not the department has referred the problem to the state attorney general for investigation.

“It is my responsibility to ensure the safety and security of our state, our agencies, and our people,” Hobbs said, in a press release accompanying the letter. “Arizona students and families deserve to know that proper measures are in place to protect their personal information.”

In a letter released shortly after Hobbs’ request, Horne shot back that the incident was a nonissue and no cause for alarm. Once a breach was identified, Horne said, his office contacted ClassWallet. The company responded with assurances that the problem had been resolved internally and only one user had actually been affected.

“Parents were not notified because of the finding that it was a unique and isolated incident that affected no other users and was corrected right away,” Horne wrote.

Horne criticized Hobbs for not seeking answers to her questions about possible legal violations with the state department of homeland security.

“Since the department of homeland security is part of your office, we would have thought you would have checked with them before writing your letter that is full of wild exaggerations,” he wrote.

Data breach spat caps week of ESA scrutiny

The news of a data breach comes on the heels of a week of renewed criticism leveled against the ESA program and closely shadows the Aug. 1 deadline for the education department to select a vendor to oversee the program’s financial administration — which until now has been ClassWallet.

On Monday, Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, issued a consumer warning notification for parents considering taking advantage of school vouchers. She advised that leaving the public school system puts students in danger of losing critical non-discrimination protections.

“Families should know that when they accept an ESA, they lose protections from discrimination related to a child’s learning abilities, religion and sexual orientation,” Mayes .

Under state law, schools that accept vouchers aren’t required to abide by the same policies or laws that public schools do. Public school advocates have warned the loophole allows institutions that accept vouchers to discriminate against LGBTQ Arizonans while receiving state funds without legal repercussions, as happened in the who were told they weren’t welcome on their daughter’s private school campus earlier this year.

Also on Monday, two high ranking program administrators, Director Christine Accurso and her assistant, Operations Director Linda Rizzo, suddenly resigned, raising eyebrows among critics of the program. In her letter, Hobbs questioned their departures so soon before the first school year when school vouchers will be widely available.

“As students and parents prepare for a new school year, the sudden and unexpected departures of Director Accurso and Linda Rizzo raise concerns and questions about the administration of the ESA voucher program and the protection of student data under your supervision,” she wrote to Horne.

The ballooning cost of ESA vouchers to the state, and ultimately, taxpayers, also received renewed attention this week, after Hobbs’ office released a funding analysis sounding the alarm over skyrocketing costs. In June, the is likely to grow to 100,000 students in the next year and cost $900 million — hundreds of millions of dollars more than the $500 million allocated to the program in this year’s state budget.

An early of the voucher program’s impact, released while the expansion was being considered, estimated that it would cost just $65 million in fiscal year 2024.

outpaces even the education department’s whopping estimate, pinning the cost to Arizonans at more than $943 million and warning that the current funding level is set to fall short by more than $300 million in the upcoming year. The report notes that the rapidly increasing price tag of the voucher program means that more than 53% of new K-12 education spending in fiscal year 2024 will benefit ESA recipients, who represent just 8% of all Arizona students.

GOP leadership, however, remains skeptical of both financial reports and is .

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

]]> /article/ag-mayes-says-horne-cant-defund-dual-language-education-programs/ Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=712115 This article was originally published in

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne doesn’t have the power to punish schools for using dual language instructional models, according to Attorney General Kris Mayes.

But this won’t be the end of the matter, as Horne is preparing to sue schools teaching students in two languages.

Last month, Horne, a Republican and long-time foe of bilingual education, from schools using the 50-50 dual language model. The model is one of four instructional strategies approved by the Arizona State Board of Education in 2020 to teach students not yet proficient in English. Under it, students are taught in English for half of the school day and in their native language for the other half.

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As many as across the state, including , employ the 50-50 model and were poised to lose critical funds if they didn’t retire the teaching method. With the start of classes just weeks away, school officials and public education advocates over the uncertainty sowed by Horne’s statements.

But on Monday, Mayes dismissed the threat to schools, saying Horne doesn’t have the legal authority to withhold state dollars or make any decisions about the model’s validity.

“The Superintendent’s and the (Arizona Department of Education’s) role…is limited to monitoring and referring school districts and charter schools to the Board,” Mayes in a formal opinion issued in response to a request from Democratic legislators.

Mayes, a Democrat who was elected in 2022, concluded that Horne is responsible for overseeing and reporting on the implementation of English learner programs in Arizona, but no state law gives him the authority to take action against schools or decide the fate of certain programs.

The most a state superintendent can do, under , is compile reports on noncompliant schools and refer them to the State Board of Education. Only the State Board of Education has the power to modify or invalidate a teaching method. And until the board decides to eliminate the dual language model, Mayes said, it remains an option for schools seeking a way to teach their English language learner students.

At the heart of Horne’s criticism of dual language programs is that they violate the English-only standard set up in Proposition 203, a law overwhelmingly passed by Arizona voters in 2000. It prohibits teaching English learners in any language other than English until they’ve achieved proficiency. The only exception is for students whose parents fill out a yearly waiver allowing them to be taught in a bilingual program.

But four years ago, state lawmakers, alarmed over the dismal academic outlook of English learners, that gave the State Board of Education permission to branch out into new, research-backed teaching models. One of those was the dual language model that’s increasingly popular today.

Mayes points to the laws which govern English language learner programs as evidence that only the State Board of Education has the power, given by the legislature, to do away with a teaching model.

“The Board has sole statutory authority to delete or modify an SEI (Structured English Immersion) model,” she wrote. “Neither the Department nor the Superintendent has statutory authority to reject an SEI model approved by the Board or to declare its illegality. Nor does the Superintendent or the Department have authority to withhold monies from school districts or otherwise impose consequences on schools for utilizing the Dual Language Model.”

Mayes declined, however, to rule on the question of whether a conflict exists with the provisions of Prop. 203, writing that such a “fact-dependent analysis” is outside the scope of interpreting Arizona law in a formal opinion.

“This Office declines to attempt such a fact-dependent analysis in the context of an official request for an Opinion, which does not involve public hearings or other taking of evidence,” she wrote. “The Board has approved the Dual Language Model as a model of SEI instruction, and school districts and charter schools remain entitled to rely on that approval.”

Doug Nick, a spokesman for the Department of Education, which Horne leads, said the next step is likely to take place in court.

“We are in the process of reviewing the opinion and we expect to deliver a court challenge,” he told the Mirror.

Shortly after Mayes issued her opinion, the State Board of Education affirmed that it would neither modify the teaching models currently in use across the state nor punish schools for implementing the 50/50 dual language method. Making any changes to currently approved teaching models or even eliminating them requires a majority vote of the board’s 11 members, which includes Horne.

“The Board will not be taking action to change the approved models,” Executive Director Sean Ross said in an emailed statement. “The Board will also not take action against schools for using the approved models.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

]]> /article/can-a-community-charter-go-national-arizona-autism-charter-school-says-yes/ Fri, 21 Apr 2023 15:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=707733 This article was originally published in

“����’s very easy for a child on the spectrum, even one with the mildest case of autism, to get lost and overwhelmed in the mainstream public school system,” says Kerrie Mallory-Thompson. 

That’s why, when it was time to enroll her son, Conor, in school, she knew she wanted him to attend Arizona Autism Charter School (AZACS) in Phoenix, the first and only autism-focused  in the Southwest. 

Conor was born nonverbal and with severe social and sensory issues. Now age 13, he just lost his nonverbal status and has become much more open to other people and experiences. 

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“Conor has made a tremendous amount of progress in the last couple of years. Just the social aspect, in general, has been huge,” she says. “Being on campus and around friends and staff who help and encourage him has made a difference. If he had been in a large mainstream school, he wouldn’t be as successful as he is today.”

Thompson credits her son’s progress to the support he receives from the staff at AZACS — and especially to the hard work and vision of its founder, Diana Diaz-Harrison.

Meeting A Need

Diana Diaz-Harrison never imagined that her life would take the direction that it did. A former teacher in California, she transitioned into broadcasting and worked in Spanish-language media. But when her son, Sammy, was diagnosed with autism, she immersed herself into his care and the educational best practices for the disorder. Like many parents, she struggled to find affordable schooling that met his needs.

“I did pay for private school for a couple of years, but that was not sustainable,” she recalls.

In 2014, Diaz-Harrison established the first AZACS campus for 90 students in grades K-5. Today, the school has expanded to more than 700 students across four campuses, including a high school and an online component. She expects that number to increase to 1,000 students for the 2023-24 academic year. AZACS also will be opening a high school in Tucson in fall 2023. 

Arizona is a leader in school choice, thanks to former Gov. Doug Ducey, who signed some of the most expansive educational options into law. His support of AZACS was common knowledge.

“I’m greatly inspired by the work the Arizona Autism Charter School has done over the last decade. Diana’s act of true, unconditional love for her son has positively impacted thousands of Arizonans and revolutionized education nationwide,” he says. “Charter schools such as AZACS have an enormous impact on our communities — they lead with purpose by mentoring and empowering the next generation of leaders through a personalized education, innovative spirit, and undeterred commitment to extending their efforts beyond the classroom to make a difference in the lives of families.” 

Meeting Demand

There is a growing need for specialized learning opportunities for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

According to a recent study from the CDC’s Autism and Development Disabilities Monitoring Network, 1-in-36 children at age 8 are estimated to have ASD. That’s up significantly from 2018, when the numbers were 1-in-44, with the greatest increases in Black and Hispanic children.

In Arizona, the prevalence of autism has nearly doubled since 2014, when the reported rate was 1 in 71 8-year-olds.

This data, which was released in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report in March, highlights the need for enhanced infrastructure to provide equitable diagnostic, treatment, and support services for all children with ASD. 

“There’s a need for a really individualized type of school for this specific disability,” says Caroline Allen, vice president of The Yass Prize, an annual award that celebrates innovative providers who are transforming education across the U.S. 

 The Arizona Early Intervention Program offers access to services for families with infants and toddlers. But when it comes to school-age children, options are more limited — and costly. There are almost two dozen private schools and institutions throughout Greater Phoenix that cater to students with ASD and other disabilities, but tuition can run upward of $40,000 to $50,000 per year. 

And while the state offers an Empowerment Scholarship Account program that allows parents to receive a portion of the public funding as financial assistance for private school tuition or online education, the amount offered is capped at $7,000 per year.

“There are a lot of great services for children who are two-to five-years old,” Diaz-Harrison notes. “But sadly, when Sammy was ready to go to school, those services were not available in a traditional school setting.”

Lourdes Sierra’s son, Reece, has been a student at AZACS for about seven years. Initially, he attended a private autism-focused academy in Tempe, which became too cost-prohibitive, before moving to a mainstream school with an autism education department. 

“The big difference with Arizona Autism Charter School is that the teachers and staff have the experience and the passion to work with this population,” Sierra says. “����’s not easy to work with students who are neurodiverse. Their physical, mental, and social abilities run the gamut. So to be able to deal with such a wide-ranging population of students and to be able to manage them so effectively and so professionally really makes AZACS stand out.” 

Set Up for Success

With a 3:1 student-to-faculty ratio, AZACS is set up to help students master the foundations in reading, math, and science and help them develop behavior and social skills. 

“By grouping our students based on their strengths and needs, no matter where they fall on the spectrum, we’re able to meet them where they’re at and help them apply those skills into projects and tasks that are of high interest to them,” Diaz-Harrison explains.

Small class sizes and hands-on coursework have proven effective. “Our kids require a lot of small-group instruction, sometimes one-on-one, depending on where they fall on the autism spectrum,” she continues. “����’s really hard to get that in traditional schools.”

Learning modules based on Woz ED, an individualized STEM program designed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, teach both academic and social skills. Students also can participate in cooking classes, sports, dance and even help take care of the school’s two desert tortoises.

“They learn not only building skills, but also collaboration, teamwork, and negotiation,” says middle school science teacher Tyler Sherrill. “We’re able to individualize our education plans for each student, so they have all their needs met, behavioral-, communication- and education-wise.” 

Research from 2015  that two-thirds of young adults with ASD are not working or in higher education in the first two years after high school. The transition academy at AZACS for students ages 18 to 22 offers career and vocational training. Field trips and internships with local businesses provide additional real-world training.  

National Recognition

In December 2022, Arizona Autism Charter School won the prestigious Yass Prize. This $1 million recognizes the most innovative and transformative educational providers throughout the country and “aims to amplify their work through financial support, collaboration, coaching, encourage and an extensive mentorship network,” according to the Yass Foundation. 

The award is based on four core principles: 

• Sustainable, meaning they exist without continual philanthropy
• Transformational, by utilizing new approaches, tools and understanding
• Outstanding, meaning they measure success not only by retention and test scores but through each student’s personal achievement
• Permission-less, or operating independent of regulatory bodies

“Diana wants to make sure that there’s an autism-focused charter school in every state around the country, in order to provide really individualized, exceptionally tailored support for students and families,” Allen says. “The traditional school system doesn’t always work for typically developing kids. Then you throw in a neurodiverse learner who has different social and cognitive needs and requires different supports to thrive — these kids deserve great teachers who are experts in the learning style of autism.”

In April 2023, Diaz-Harrison received the Sustained Benefactor of Education Award from the Pete C. Garcia Victoria Foundation. The organization seeks to improve conditions in impoverished communities through higher education. 

Diaz-Harrison was nominated for the award by Lourdes Sierra. “Diana has been such a huge advocate for education, and that came as a result of her determination to have a place where her son could attend school in a safe and nurturing environment with people who understood him and cared for him,” she says. “As we surveyed the landscape, seeking out those who are advocating for education, we needed to honor Diana for all the work she does, especially for the Hispanic community.” 

More than 50% of students at AZACS are Hispanic.

“Children with autism are great learners, and they can contribute to their community —the school community and society. I want to give hope to parents who are just learning that their children might be neurodiverse or have autism. There is help. Our schools are here,” Diaz-Harrison says. “Perhaps it’s a different journey that parents thought they were going to have, but it’s a beautiful journey, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Editor’s Note: To learn more about supporting young people with autism, read . For more on community charters and their innovative practices, read our profiles of schools in ,,, and .

This piece originally appeared on 

]]> /article/arizona-students-walk-out-over-anti-lgbtq-bills-demand-action-from-lawmakers-and-schools/ Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:00:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=707615 This article was originally published in

For the second year in a row, Arizona Republicans have sought to restrict the behavior of LGBTQ students, and for the second year in a row, students across the state walked out of class to protest that hostility.

On Friday, students at eight Arizona schools gathered to express their support for LGBTQ youth on the , held to acknowledge the erasure of LGBTQ people. At Chandler High School, dozens marched to nearby Dr. A.J Chandler Park, where they discussed their fears and called on schools to implement better safety measures and more inclusive policies.

Tamaiah Briggs denounced Republicans lawmakers and others who make students feel unwelcome in school.

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“Every student has the right to feel safe in the space where they go to learn,” the 15-year-old said. “Arizona legislators, teachers and administrators: you have a duty to make your students feel safe.”

That concern has been a key focus of , the student group that organized the walkout and has led other to call out discriminatory laws. The group was launched last year as a response to anti-LGBTQ laws approved by Doug Ducey’s administration, including one that now that best match their gender identity and another that .

Dawn Shim, who founded the organization, noted that its advocacy work is far from over, in light of the legislature’s continued attacks. The GOP legislative majority has advanced several measures intended to , that include any mention of pronouns, consistent with their gender identity and who request pronouns opposite of their biological sex. All of those measures are fated to meet Gov. Katie Hobbs’ , but Republican lawmakers have continued to back them.

“As students, (anti-LGBTQ bills) compromise our safety and our mental health, both of which are burgeoning crises across the nation amongst teens,” Shim wrote in an emailed statement.

In an attempt to fight back, Support Equality Arizona Schools issued a list of demands for Arizona public schools, including better systems for trans students to submit their preferred names and pronouns, more inclusive bathroom policies and equitability training for teachers.

The pronoun ban bill being considered and unanimously approved by GOP lawmakers is particularly concerning for 14-year-old Rhig Yates, who is transgender and uses “he” and “they” pronouns.

“We should all be ourselves and we should not be forced to come out to people when we don’t want to,” he told a crowd of students on Friday.

Yates experienced the anxiety of being forced to come out when he shared his preferred pronouns with a middle school teacher, who then told his parents. While his family wasn’t hostile, he warned that not all students can count on not being kicked out or hurt by transphobic parents.

“Sometimes secrecy is required,” he said. “And the bill that has been made won’t help, it’ll only make situations worse.”

Even with assurances that the measure is doomed to fail, Yates worries anti-trans rhetoric at the Capitol will bleed into classrooms and hurt trans and questioning students. Research from the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention organization, found that anti-LGBTQ legislation and speech from politicians

“����’s awful that people continue making these comments and rules that continue to oppress us,” Yates said. “They are literally killing people with what they say.”

Corinne Collins, an organizer with Support Equality Arizona Schools, lamented that lawmakers haven’t shown any inclination to stop advancing discriminatory legislation, despite ample testimony from the community. Members of the student-led group have been regular fixtures at the state Capitol this session, calling on lawmakers to halt anti-LGBTQ measures with little success.

“I have a fear that legislators aren’t absorbing what we’re telling them,” she said.

But she firmly dismissed the idea of giving up, saying it’s important to continue advocating for the LGBTQ community, especially trans people who have been at the center of GOP attacks.

“Trans people are just people,” she said. “They are just trying to live their lives, they aren’t predators, they aren’t dangerous people. They are people.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on and .

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