Ballot measures to dictate public school spending getting off the ground

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A GOP consultant is lining up separate citizen initiatives to force more money into classrooms and cap the pay of administrators.

According to the Arizona Auditor General, Arizona spent 53.6 cents of every education dollar on instruction, an all-time low since the state began tracking the data in 2001. That puts Arizona about seven percentage points behind the national average

GOP political consultant Sean Noble is now working up initiatives to reverse that trend. But he isn’t thinking about putting more revenue into the K-12 system.

The first initiative will require 60 percent of Arizona public schools’ funding be spent in the classroom, as defined by the U.S. Department of Education. It’s under that definition that only about 54 cents of every dollar is currently going back to classrooms, Noble said.

Chris Kotterman, director of the Arizona School Boards Association’s Governmental Relations, said that definition of money spent in classrooms is lacking context, perpetuating an “irritating” conversation about how schools are wasting money.

“It (Noble’s initiative) belies this assumption that somehow school districts are just taking your money and wasting it. . . despite the fact that children continue to have a school to go to every day and we don’t see people getting arrested for fraud left and right every day in the school,” he said.

Read the full story at AZ Capitol Times

Corrie O'Connor