Marisol Garcia discusses the “Educators’ Budget” proposed by Arizona’s largest teacher’s union, the Arizona Education Association on March 22, 2023. Garcia is the union’s president. Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez | Arizona Mirror
Arizona lawmakers and governors have unconstitutionally underfunded public schools and are repeating the same mistakes that led to a landmark ruling more than 30 years ago, a trial court judge ruled this week.
At the core of Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Dewain Fox’s ruling is that chronic underfunding for both school maintenance and short-term capital needs has created a two-tiered education system in Arizona. The result is that school districts in wealthier areas with higher property tax bases can supplement inadequate state funding with voter-approved bonds, while those in poor areas cannot.
“(This) ruling is an important step in our union’s fight to get Arizona lawmakers to invest even the bare minimum in public schools,” Marisol Garcia, a middle school social studies teacher in the Isaac Elementary School District and president of the Arizona Education Association, said in a written statement. “We hope this ruling will be a wake-up call for lawmakers to do their jobs and fully fund the great public schools that Arizona deserves.”
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After a 14-day trial in late June and early July examining over 3,200 pages of transcripts and nearly 2,000 exhibits, Fox concluded that the state shorted public schools at least $2.2 billion for maintenance and construction costs between 1998 and 2013 — and likely billions more in the years since, after policymakers scrapped a formula for building repairs in favor of far less funding for competitive grants.
In 1998, lawmakers introduced the Students FIRST program, which created a formula for new school construction and maintenance for existing schools. The program was a direct response to the Arizona Supreme Court’s 1994 ruling in Roosevelt v. Bishop that found the state’s system for funding capital needs — buildings, buses, technology, books and more — violated the state constitution’s requirement that there be a “general and uniform” school system.
While Students FIRST resolved the funding disparities between wealthy and poor districts on paper, the reality was that it never received the money it should have, and so schools continued to operate with unconstitutional underfunding, Fox wrote.
One key component of Students FIRST was its building renewal formula, which was designed to ensure school districts had money to build new schools in growing communities and keep existing schools from falling into disrepair. But the GOP-controlled legislature never met its obligations to provide that money: Of the $2.8 billion that the formula called for, appropriations totaled just $647.5 million, or 23.5% of what was called for.
And that’s just through 2013, when Republican lawmakers and GOP Gov. Jan Brewer replaced the building renewal formula, which awarded money to schools as issues arose, with a competitive grant system in which school districts had to apply for a limited pool of money. The result was two-fold: not only was there less money available to schools, but there was no longer a clear benchmark for what adequate funding should be, limiting scrutiny of how much lawmakers were shortchanging schools.
In the years since, funding for school maintenance grants ranged from just $2.7 million to $79 million. That high point came in 2020, but Fox noted that it represented just one-third of what the old formula would have required in that year — with less than 1% of need funded in other years.
In fiscal year 2024, the state appropriated only $200 million for Building Renewal grants, while the School Facilities Division estimated needing over $587 million. As of June 2024, there were 435 building renewal projects totaling $227.3 million awaiting funding, more than the entire $200 million appropriation for the year.
Fox’s ruling spelled out how underfunding affects actual students and schools. Some particularly striking examples include:
- At Elfrida Elementary School in Cochise County, students must position trash cans to catch water from leaking roofs during class. The school lacks a gymnasium, has unreliable power that causes monthly outages and the water that comes out of classroom faucets is discolored and cloudy.
- In Bowie Unified School District, three schools need new roofs with a combined cost of $4.2 million. One building that was built in 1922 has 17 identified roof leaks causing extensive interior damage. Students attend classes where teachers place buckets to catch dripping water.
- Restrooms at Mohawk Valley Elementary School near Yuma are in such disrepair that one had “”black mold underneath” and “black mold along the walls” with urinals and toilets covered in mold. The court described conditions as “disgusting.”
Perhaps most damning, the court found that the state has failed even to inspect schools as required by law. For over a decade, Arizona conducted virtually no inspections of school facilities to ensure compliance with minimum adequacy guidelines. When inspections finally resumed in 2023, they revealed alarming conditions:
- 30 of 32 inspected schools had classrooms with excessive CO2 levels
- 117 of 167 classrooms had noise levels above state standards
- Some CO2 levels were six times higher than guidelines allow
Fox also noted that the chronic underfunding of Students FIRST was compounded by the Republican-led legislature reducing another school funding stream — District Additional Assistance, or DAA, which covers shorter-term capital needs that don’t involve major construction or renovation — by at least $3 billion between 2009 and 2022.
He wrote that, by systematically underfunding both DAA and building renewal, the state has created a cascade of problems that violates the constitutional adequacy requirement. If a district can’t afford basic maintenance items through DAA — say, changing air filters regularly or replacing worn flooring before it becomes a safety hazard — those small problems grow into major projects that require building renewal funding. As one district official noted, they had to choose between “curriculum and bathrooms and carpet and bussing.”
Fox’s ruling isn’t the final word on the matter: Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Steve Montenegro, both Republicans, don’t think the state should pay more for school maintenance and will appeal. Even though the case was filed in 2017, it likely won’t be resolved for several more years.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
