Arizona Voucher Programs

Gov. Jen Brewer signed into law the Empowerment Scholarship Account in July 2011, which allows the parents of students covered by the Individuals with disabilities Education Act and Section 504 to sign up for the account to pay for tuition and fees in a private school, online classes, tutoring, classes at home, etc. Parents receive 90 percent of what a public school would have received to educate a particular student. The amount varies by child depending on the type of disabilities, ranging from $5,000 a year to $30,000 a year. The program begins in the 2011-2012 school year and all of the state’s 17,000 students with disabilities are eligible to sign up for an account so long as they were 1) full-time students who attended a public school for at least 100 days of the previous fiscal year; or 2) receiving a voucher from a school tuition organization, which is funded by donations made for private school tuition in exchange for tax credits.

In April 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s tuition tax credit program, which has diverted millions of dollars of public money to private religious schools. The program subsidizes tuition at private, largely religious schools, and lacks any public accountability measures. In 2009 the Arizona Supreme Court struck down two smaller voucher programs enacted in 2006 – one for students with disabilities and one for foster children, ruling that those programs violated state constitutional prohibition on using public money in support of private or religious schools.