Resistance is building to Gov. Doug Ducey’s education-funding proposals — enough so that his backers felt the need to publicly attack one prominent critic.
But whether this budding revolt will amount to anything depends a lot on how the Legislature reacts.
The issue is clear. In his budget, Ducey proposes to shift education spending from administrative costs to classroom needs — and he’s labeled his idea “Classrooms First.” But educators and even the broader Arizona public seem to disagree with his approach.
They also object to the fact that his budget does not include spending the additional $330 million per year that a judge has ordered paid under a 2000, voter-approved ballot initiative.
The first overt act of resistance was the letter of protest sent out by 233 Arizona superintendents and similar administrators to the Legislature, which I wrote about last week. They rejected Ducey’s argument that his proposed budget would help schools by putting more money in classrooms.
It was interesting — and sweeping considering the number of people who signed on — but not that daring since there’s safety in numbers. What was daring was when a handful of superintendents stepped out from that group, contacted the parents in their districts and essentially asked them to join the resistance.
The superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, Michael Cowan, placed robo-calls to parents of the 64,000 students in the district and sent a follow-up email, telling parents the proposed budget would hurt their kids’ schools and how they could contact officeholders.
That didn’t sit well with Ducey’s dark-money supporters, American Encore, a group headed by Sean Noble of Phoenix that uses anonymous donations to influence elections and was a big supporter of Ducey’s campaign. They followed up last weekend with robo-calls of their own.
The calls alleged that under Cowan, “Nearly two-thirds of Mesa’s education dollars never reach the classroom.” This wasn’t true, of course: The latest audited numbers for Mesa showed 56 percent of the district’s spending is in the classroom.
“The reaction I’m hearing is that there is quite a genuine rebellion against his (Ducey’s) policies on education,” said David Berman, a senior research fellow at the Morrison Institute who has studied anonymous political spending in Arizona. “His supporters are trying to put that down as quickly as possible, attacking the messengers as much as the messages.”
Ducey and American Encore, he said, are “wedded” to each other politically.
I have no problem with outside groups joining in the political fray, but I do think American Encore’s contributors should be disclosed if they want to play the game. In any case, it looks like they’ll have to keep spending if they want to tamp down the dissent.
A poll released this week by the Morrison Institute at ASU reported that, of 754 Arizonans surveyed, 62 percent said they would be willing to pay $200 more per year in taxes to support K-12 education. Even the majority of Republicans surveyed, 53 percent, said they’d be willing.
In the Phoenix area, other superintendents, including the head of the Paradise Valley district, wrote letters or op-eds. Here in Tucson, Amphitheater Public Schools Superintendent Patrick Nelson sent a letter to the district’s parent-teacher organizations, asking them to send it on if they wished.
In it, he wrote, “Over the last 7 years, the Arizona State Legislature has cut more than $56.3 million from our Amphitheater schools; in just the current year alone, they took more than $9 million from our district schools.”
He went on to argue that Ducey’s wish to cut “administrative costs” means cutting essential services such as bus drivers, counselors, custodians and crossing guards. Overall, his proposed budget would mean another 5 percent cut for Amphi, Nelson said.
Whether the Legislature will listen to the protests of Ducey’s plan depends to a large degree on whether they’ll feel any consequences for going along with it, Berman said.
“If there aren’t any consequences for politicians, they can do whatever they want,” he said.
CHILD-SAFETY
FIRING CLARIFIED
When Gov. Ducey fired Charles Flanagan, who had headed the new Department of Child Safety for less than a year, it was mysterious why, and it worried me and some others who monitor Arizona’s child-safety efforts.
Ducey replaced Flanagan with Greg McKay, who was a midlevel investigator in the agency and had been the whistleblower who exposed 6,000 uninvestigated cases in late 2013. McKay is a former Phoenix police detective.
A newly released memo, reported Thursday by the Star’s Patty Machelor, shows that in November McKay sent Flanagan a stern memorandum questioning the way the agency was responding to backlogged complaints.
The motivation apparently was the abuse of a child in Sierra Vista. In the memorandum, McKay pointed out that the DCS received alarming reports that the child was not being fed in both January and March 2014. It wasn’t until September 2014 that officials investigated and found the child was near starvation.
McKay wrote in the memo, “Considering food deprivation and malnutrition reports began in April 2013 and continued until September 2014, I believe we can safely say this child was not safe in January 2014. For these reasons, I question the efficacy of the implemented plan.”
For this reason — this incisive memo — I feel better Ducey’s picked a good man for the job.
She likes us;
she really likes us
In case you missed the online furor Thursday, you need to know that Scarlett Johansson told an interviewer at the Oscars that “I love downtown Tucson. It’s the best.”
Her prompting was that she asked the two questioners — writers from the Ellen DeGeneres show — where they were from, and one was from the Old Pueblo.
I’m sure you’ll all join me in inviting Johansson back to downtown Tucson. She can be assured that we’ll have a nice warm “dream pod” waiting for her.
