PHOENIX — Arizona's Empowerment Scholarship Account program has reached a significant milestone, with more than 100,000 students now enrolled in the controversial school choice initiative.
The ESA program allows parents to use tax money that would have been allocated for their child's public school education to pay for private schooling or homeschooling expenses instead.
Since the program's universal expansion in 2022, more than 6,000 students join each quarter on average, and the state's ESA website shows 100,208 ESA students are currently enrolled as of January 20.
Shift in student demographics
Early data showed most ESA students represented additional expenses - children already homeschooled or attending private schools. However, recent trends show a significant shift.
Now, four in 10 new ESA students weren't previously funded by public education dollars, down from eight in 10 when the program began.
Geographic concentration in suburban areas
ESA enrollment is most popular in the Valley's suburban communities, particularly in the southeast region. Four of the five ZIP codes adding the most ESA students are located in Queen Creek and San Tan Valley.
The one outlier is ZIP code 85365, which covers the Yuma Proving Grounds area and serves mostly military families.
Public schools losing students to ESA
The school districts experiencing the highest percentage of students leaving for ESA include Kingman Unified, Alhambra Elementary, Dysart Unified, Amphitheatre Unified in Tucson, and Queen Creek Unified.
Among charter schools, online institutions are seeing the most departures. These include ASU Preparatory Digital, Arizona Connections Academy, American Virtual Academy, American Leadership Academy, and charter schools run by Eduprize Schools.
How ESA funds are being spent
Nearly six in 10 ESA dollars spent last quarter went toward private school tuition or textbooks, totaling almost $104 million.
About $70 million was spent on homeschooling or supplemental materials - a category that has drawn scrutiny for some questionable expenses.
Spending drops significantly for other categories, including online learning, disability services for non-universal students, technology, and classes at postsecondary institutions like Mesa Community College.
What’s being said about ESAs
As the state surpasses this major milestone, Superintendent Tom Horne, on Tuesday, January 27, celebrated the achievement and highlighted new safeguards are in place during National School Choice Week.
For Byanca Carrasco and her family, the ESA program has been life-changing.
“The ESA has been a blessing for her and for us as a family. Now, she's in high school and she's having fun and learning,” her mother, Ramona, said in a news conference.
With the growth of ESAs, it’s also drawn a lot of scrutiny.
"I think the public needs a lot more. When it comes to where are taxpayer dollars going? Are kids learning?,” questioned Beth Lewis, the director of pro-public education organization Save Our Schools.
Critics say the program drains resources from public schools and lacks basic accountability, like tracking whether students are actually learning.
Superintendent Tom Horne previously acknowledged they don’t measure ESA student achievement, but he defends the program's popularity.
“This illustrates the fact that the program is successful and it appeals to parents. I want to add that we still have 1.2 million students in the public schools. So, the ESAs are not a threat to the public schools,” he said.
There have been some instances of fraud in the past. The department has rolled out some new fraud prevention measures over the last few months. Recently, John Ward, the director of the ESA program, said they’re asking new families enrolling into ESA to provide the last four digits of their social security number.
"That allows us to do better residency verification than we were doing in the past,” Ward said.
Previously, Horne announced they would move to auto-processing purchases under $2,000 with mounting wait times for families and not enough staff members. That move also drew backlash as data obtained by ABC15 showed some purchases were made for diamond rings and lingerie. Following that, the department has worked with its vendor, ClassWallet, to flag suspicious purchases under $2,000, implementing new technology that would help root out purchases that could potentially be in violation of the rules.
“Using this particular tool, we are able to run all purchases through it, and it evaluates purchases based on 27 different metrics that might indicate that these are high risk for being unallowable in the program,” Ward said.
As of Tuesday, Ward said that about 700 accounts were suspended for improper purchases, and the department is in the middle of clawing back $1.2 million in unallowable expenses.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
