PHOENIX — Four candidates are running for Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. There are two Democrats running against each other and then two Republicans, known longtime politicians, are on the ballot for the primary.
Superintendent Tom Horne is the incumbent, running against current State Treasurer Kimberly Yee on the Republican ticket, while Democrat Teresa Leyba Ruiz, a 30-year educator, is up against Brett Newby, a certified behavioral analyst who works with children and is an associate professor.
ABC15 Education Reporter Elenee Dao went into the community asking parents what issues matter most to them. Then, she asked the candidates those questions among many others. Here’s what they had to say about some issues.
Note: Not every question or answer is included in the text below, but the extended cut interviews have additional questions and answers.
Tom Horne (R)
Why are you running for superintendent (again)?
"I've been working very hard to help the schools raise their academics, and I know from experience that's an eight-year job, not a four-year job. It takes eight years to really start to show the differences in test scores, and I want to finish what I've been doing."
School safety is top of mind for a lot of families. Do you feel like more still needs to be done with that?
"I've increased the number of police in our schools from 117 when the program started to now almost 500 police in our schools. I think our number one requirement is to protect the safety of our students and the teachers and staff. My nightmare has been that a crazy person will invade a school, kill 20 kids. It's happened in other states. It could happen here and the kids would be gone. The parents would never get over it. I know that because I lost a daughter. I'm working very hard on that. It's a very high priority for me."
"The police officers that are in the schools are the best trained police officers in the country because I hired Navy SEALS to train them."
Do you feel like there should be more guardrails on the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program?
"I've been providing guardrails. Let me give you a little bit of the history. Under my predecessor who was a Democrat, she was against ESAs, so she paid anything they asked for, and then, Save Our Schools (SOS), the anti-ESA organization, would go on radio or TV and say look how wasteful they are. "They pay for ski tickets." When I took office, I established two principles: number one, we would not pay for anything except a legitimate educational request, and number two, at a reasonable price.
That is what caused my opponent to run against me in the first place. She said that I had no right, I didn't have the power to do that, that the parents know what's best for their kids, and that I shouldn't interfere with the parents' decision. Well, if I had done that, I would have paid for a $5,000 Rolex watch, $24,000 golf simulator, and so on, and that's contrary to my values. I want the program to succeed, which means it has to be honest.
I wouldn't say [the program] is as good as it is. We need more work. We're working really hard on artificial intelligence. The number of mistaken payments is less than 2%, which is better than almost all other government programs, but I want it to be zero, and when we get artificial intelligence in there, we can get it to zero, and we're working very hard on that."
Arizona, for a long time, has ranked towards the bottom for education. How would you help improve that, given that you were also superintendent back then and you are also superintendent now?
"I have a number of initiatives. This is really my first priority. I have a number of initiatives to help schools do better, and I'll tell you about a few of them. I have something called Project Momentum where people from my department go out to help the schools. They worked with the bottom 5% of schools and 80% of the schools are no longer in the bottom 5%. We adopted a school in a poor neighborhood. We sent people there every week. We raised their math scores 27%, which proved that poor kids can learn just as well as rich kids if they're properly taught."
My next question for you comes from a mom from Phoenix. She feels that schools are underfunded. What would you do to help with that, and what would you do despite not having funding?
"My whole adult life, I've been an advocate for better funding for education. When I served on the school board, I saw the effects of underfunding. Every time I go to the legislature, I talk about the need for better funding, which would not affect anyone's taxes because, as I mentioned, the land trust has plenty of money and needs to be tapped. The funding is up to the legislature. The best I can do is lobby them as hard as I can to increase funding for education and especially teachers' salaries."
Kimberly Yee (R)
Why are you running for state superintendent?
"I have 30 years of fighting for Arizona school children to make sure that we have the best education as possible, and I'm a mom, and I just see our children in many of these school settings, and we see that we are at the 25th percentile in reading in 4th and 8th grades based on the nation's report card. That is absolutely unacceptable.
Today as state treasurer, I have advanced $3.2 billion for our Arizona public schools. I'm the daughter of a public-school teacher who taught for 38 years in our Arizona public schools, and I know we can do better. We deserve to have a better education system in Arizona, and I believe the current incumbent has failed us on his watch."
School safety is top of mind for a lot of families. Do you feel like more still needs to be done with that?
"I'm a long-standing advocate for school safety in our schools because children need to feel safe and secure when they are learning in their classrooms. Even when I was a staff member for the Arizona State Legislature back in the 90s and early 2000s, I staffed the school safety committee that allows for grants to go out to our school districts.
As a member of the legislature, I was the co-chairwoman of the school safety committee, and one of the things I advanced was a $12 million bill that allowed for more of those grants to be added because there was a waitlist of so many districts that needed to have a school resource officer on their school campus. Today, I continue to advocate for that and bring more of those school resource officers to our campuses, even those who might be retired, who have the skill set to be protectors of those schools."
Do you feel like there should be more guardrails on the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program?
"As state treasurer, I've already been working on what we can do better, and I'm a strong proponent of school choice. As state treasurer, I've already been working on what we can do better and I'm a strong proponent of school choice and was one of the prime sponsors of ESAs in 2011 when we had ESAs just at that time for students with disabilities. Today we are at 102,000 families who are on the ESA program, and I believe that the growth, the rapid growth of this program is just going so quickly that the infrastructure is not meeting that need.
What I think we can add is AI and other technologies that will allow for us to be a little bit more sophisticated in this field on the technological front so that there is accountability to the taxpayer and yet a greater ease of being reimbursed to that family, especially if this is an educational need."
Arizona, for a long time, has ranked towards the bottom for education. How would you help improve that?
"Arizona should not be at the bottom of education. We deserve better, and as a mother, I believe that we can do better. I used to visit my mother, she was a school teacher in South Phoenix, and every single time I visited her school, the printer was wrapped in duct tape, and it was always broken. Yet when we visited the school district office, everything was in place, and all of these fancy printer machines were what you would see at OfficeMax or any professional printing shop.
It was backwards. Even then, as a young person, I knew that the administrative funding was scooping up the bulk of finances at the school level when it really should be down at the schoolhouse level, meaning where the teacher is, where that student is, because that's where the greatest need is, and that's where it matters most. So from my perspective, I want to make sure with my financial executive management background, we can move the dollars to the right place where it will create the greatest effect on academics, and I believe that's with teachers and with the students. We shouldn't have teachers going out to a garage sale to purchase their own supplies that should be paid for by the school."
My next question for you comes from a mom from Phoenix. She feels that schools are underfunded. What would you do to help with that, and what would you do despite not having funding?
"Yes, I'm a strong supporter in ensuring that our schools have their financial needs met, and I worked very hard in the state legislature to create more funding for our education system. As I mentioned, I've been laser focused on education funding for many, many years and making sure that teachers get what they are due and paid for with great performance, being able to bring back performance-based pay to teachers who are doing great and moving their children along in those key subject areas.
I also believe that we need to ensure that we have the funding moved from the Proposition 123. As you know, the Permanent Land Endowment Trust Fund provides additional funding for our schools K through 12 public education, including charter schools as well. As state treasurer, you know, we have advanced a record-setting numbers in the Permanent Land Endowment Trust Fund, over $3 billion again for public schools in a very short period of time, and that will go away if it's not renewed. So, Permanent Land Endowment Trust Fund will allow for us to continue to advance education funding without taxing additionally to our residents in Arizona.
I do believe that we can do more by moving money away from the administrative office into the classroom and that classroom funding matters most because that's where the teacher is and that's where the student is."
Brett Newby (D)
Why are you running for state superintendent?
"I'm a dad. My kids go to public schools. I've worked with teachers across the state, across the country, helping them learn how to work with kids with special needs. I just had a lot of outreach from friends and family that are former teachers in the communities here in Arizona. Just having to see them struggle and teachers leaving the profession, I felt it was my duty to sort of take a stand, not only as a dad but as a clinician helping folks here in Arizona. Really just be able to have somebody that is gonna bring some balance."
School safety is top of mind for a lot of families. Do you feel like more still needs to be done with that?
"I think they're doing an adequate job. I think that there are some certain things that we can change. I know that they're putting some more money to school resource officers, and I think that's great. I am more of a person, professionally and personally, that has seen what representation can do for kids… For me, the thing that I would do differently is ensuring that all of our public schools have representation of the folks that are going to those schools to be able to ensure that.
I think school resource officers are great, but I think we also need some behavioral health folks in place to help for those situations where a law enforcement officer may not be the right person to handle those situations."
Do you feel like there should be more guardrails on the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program?
"Yes, absolutely more guardrails. I've been here from almost the start of the ESA program, and seeing how it's helped the students that I've worked with and clients that I've worked with, the families, in that they needed more resources for their children, to be able to get the education that they needed.
What's happened over time is, here's a whole bunch of money to go and find some resources that our school districts are not willing to do or not able to provide to those families, and then it was sort of, well, we have all this money, where do we go? How do we spend it?
Arizona, from my perspective, has always been fiscally conservative but here's our state legislature saying here's a blank check, go ahead and spend it and give it to whoever you want. I think there needs to be some reforms. There needs to be some guardrails, but also we need to have some open honest conversations with our legislators, our communities because our rural schools are suffering."
Arizona, for a long time, has ranked towards the bottom for education. How would you help improve that?
"Arizona is at the bottom in some test scoring. They're at the bottom of per-pupil spending, our teacher salaries, and all of those things, which is not great. I think, first and foremost, we need to reinforce our teachers better, whether that means more salaries, better benefits. I think it also includes flexibility and better job shared responsibilities because at the end of the day, I think we have to remember that they're human and that they have a choice to be a teacher, and so I think we need to do a better job of respecting that.
When we can be able to give more of the tools and resources to our teachers, because our teachers have been doing amazing things for a really long time with very limited resources. I would really love to see what they can do with all of the tools and resources that they should have to be able to make those changes and increase our our literacy scores, our math scores and really just be able to give kids a fair shot and our teachers a fair shot at being able to do everything that they can with all the tools and resources that are available to them."
My next question for you comes from a mom from Phoenix. She feels that schools are underfunded. What would you do to help with that, and what would you do despite not having funding?
"First and foremost, I am an early childhood specialist, so I work with kids from when they're diagnosed until they start kindergarten, first grade. All the evidence-based resources that we have and all of the data and research that's out there says that when we provide things, and do better things for the little ones, our early learners, the better off they are as they move forward. So, really investing a lot of our time and money and being able to increase our literacy and math scores by being able to fund, you know, preschool, being able to fund full-day kindergarten will ultimately enhance those things.
We have to really work across the aisle in bipartisan in making sure that we are fixing the funding formula because a lot of folks don't really understand how the funding works in the Department of Education and the school systems here in Arizona and so it really is a balance of we need to be able say, hey, our school districts get this X amount of money every year versus having to go to the ballot every two years, every four years to get bond measures and all of the different things that they have to do. We really need to work to be better at being able to appropriately and fully fund the schools through our state legislature and the constitution."
Teresa Leyba Ruiz (D)
Why are you running for state superintendent?
"I'm running to continue my 35 years of service as an educator in Arizona. I believe Arizona deserves to have a certified educator in this very important role as Superintendent of Public Instruction, and I have spent my entire career serving students and families in public education."
School safety is top of mind for a lot of families. Do you feel like more still needs to be done with that?
"I think Arizona has been very fortunate that we haven’t had tragedies as other states. I believe, and this is where I trust in our schools, to really know what the needs are. We're fortunate to have resources available to provide safety grants to our schools, but again, it’s based on what the schools need and as I've traveled the state really we've gone to all 15 counties urban schools, rural schools and we see the differences.
The schools know what their communities need and what their students need that might be a counselor that might be a school resource safety officer. I believe it's my role as the next Superintendent of Public Instruction to really honor those needs and to provide the resources so that the schools can have the personnel that they feel they need to help keep their school safe and our students safe."
Do you feel like there should be more guardrails on the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program?
"It feels that there needs to be guardrails around this, common sense guardrails, allowing for there to be some accountability, some transparency to ensure that taxpayer resources are really being spent on educational needs. Some of the reporting we have seen has shown that there has not always been resources spent on educational purchases, and there needs to be some accountability around those processes, and I would bring that."
Arizona, for a long time, has ranked towards the bottom for education. How would you help improve that?
"That's the consequences of 50 years of underfunding public education. What I can do, and within the resources that I would have available to me, is again, partnering with the county superintendents. They're asking for some basic support. Maybe that comes in the form of professional development for their educators, for their teachers. Let's make sure the resources are going out where they're needed, and let's really focus on our students. Under the current Tom Horne administration, reading proficiency rates have declined 5% from 41% in third-grade reading proficiency down to 36%. That's not acceptable. So, let's make sure our educators are getting the resources they need. Let's focus on our students. Let's not focus on anything else that can distract us. The focus should always be 100% on our students and our educators."
My next question for you comes from a mom from Phoenix. She feels that schools are underfunded. What would you do to help with that, and what would you do despite not having funding?
"That's not something that the superintendent can control. That’s working closely with our state legislature and really getting everyone to focus back on our students. We are losing teachers. We have classrooms that without a certified educator leading a classroom, that definitely has an impact on academic progress. If we want to lift our students and lift being prepared for the future, we must invest in public education. We must invest in our educators, and this is a conversation that I would have regularly at the legislature and you know we have to have support again focusing on our students."
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