The Daily Agenda: The sky isn't falling. Yet.

School vouchers are growing quickly in the Tucson area ... Lots of tax dollars at stake ... New revelations in the Pioneer Hotel fire lawsuit.

A new batch of receipts for Arizona’s school voucher program shows it’s getting more popular in the Tucson area.

That might set off alarm bells for people concerned about public education funding, but school district officials in Tucson and Marana say they aren’t losing students to the voucher program.

Instead, there’s a pattern that appears to be holding — at least locally — of vouchers being used far more by parents whose kids already attend private school or home school than those whose kids are enrolled in public schools.

This wasn’t how Republican legislators sold vouchers to the public when they expanded the Empowerment Scholarship Account program to every student in Arizona last year.

There was supposed to be an exodus of students whose parents were upset at failing public schools. Maybe in time that will happen, but a year after they expanded the program no such exodus has materialized.

Still, the voucher program is growing quickly. Roughly 8,300 local students were using vouchers as of June 30, according to the Arizona Department of Education’s Sept. 1 quarterly report. That’s a big jump from about 1,800 in June 2022. Statewide, the program grew from 12,000 students to 62,000.

Source: Arizona Department of Education quarterly reports

Those vouchers represent a lot of money. The ADE puts the average value of a voucher at $9,500, making the total for the Tucson area about $78 million and the statewide total about $589 million.

Before we get into the details, it’s important to note that the ADE’s quarterly reports are still evolving. In the chart above, we used the district names as they appear in the reports. But that doesn’t mean schools in those districts lost that many students. It just shows how many students who use vouchers live within the boundaries of those districts.

This is a great example of how the ADE reports fail to inform the public conversation about the financial impact of vouchers, despite that impact being of obvious interest to millions of Arizonans. Just look at how they labelled the charts in their reports that show where ESA students came from (we added the bold).

• Q1 and Q2: “Students by Associated School District or Charter School”

• Q3: “School District or Charter that ESA Students Attended”

• Q4: “School District or Charter School that ESA Students Reside in”

They started out by saying how many students were “associated” with each district, without defining what that meant. Then they switched to saying how many “attended” schools in each district. Now they’re saying how many “reside in” each district.

The ambiguity about vouchers is frustrating officials at Tucson Unified School District, where 3,352 students who reside in the district’s boundaries are using vouchers. At a town hall last Saturday at Amphitheater High School, TUSD’s Chief Financial Officer Ricky Hernandez had some passionate words about how vouchers, aka ESAs, are discussed.

“So the first thing that you’re gonna hear is that an increase in ESA population means there has been a decrease in the overall public school population,” Hernandez said. “That is complete garbage. It really is.”

He referred to ADE statistics that showed statewide public school enrollment grew by about 1,600 students, while the voucher program grew by nearly 50,000 students.

“Those 50,000 students were already in those private schools, in those homeschool settings,” Hernandez said.

TUSD CFO RIcky Hernandez speaks at a town hall on Saturday at Amphi

Over at the Marana Unified School District, where about 1,200 students who reside within the district’s boundaries are using vouchers, Superintendent Dan Streeter was adamant that the district wasn’t losing students to vouchers.

“The ESA issue is simple. This is not costing us students. Marana is not losing students to ESA. Marana is a growing district. We continue to grow, we’re building schools. That’s not the issue,” Streeter said at the town hall on Saturday. “The issue is that ESAs are impacting our funding in a negative way. The size of the pie is not changing, we are just increasing the number of people that are taking a bite out of the pie.”

That just won’t work, according to Streeter, who said either the size of the pie needs to increase or there needs to be some type of safeguard put in place to cap the number of people eating said pie.

TUSD spokeswoman Karla Escamilla made the point succinctly to us, saying “the state will need to fund these scholarships and this will potentially funnel state General Fund money away from school districts and charters.”

That’s the burning question as state officials watch the voucher program balloon to a projected 100,000 students and a $950 million price tag by the end of the year, which is about $300 million more than the state budget can handle.

We’re hoping state officials hash this out before it causes a budget crisis. At the very least, they need to improve their quarterly reports.

There is some hope that the public will get a better view of how the voucher program is playing out in a few months. The Republican leadership in the Legislature struck a deal with Gov. Katie Hobbs during budget negotiations this summer that included more accountability in the voucher program.

In the meantime, the voucher program has a new chief, John Ward, who took over after Christine Accurso resigned following a data breach scandal. Ward told the Arizona Republic’s Yana Kunichoff last week that he wants to have a “whole bunch of metrics at the push of a button.”

If Ward would start including information about which schools lost students, it would go a long way toward helping parents understand the impact, or lack thereof, the voucher program has on their neighborhood school.

Vouchers are a big deal in Arizona, which is why we write about them! If you have any friends who are trying to stay up to date on vouchers, why not share this story with them?

Get on your feet: A newly released study by University of Arizona and University of Southern California researchers shows that adults 60 and older who spend more time engaging in sedentary activities, like driving or sitting while watching TV, may have a higher risk for developing dementia, according to UA News. The study shows the risk significantly increases among adults who spend more than 10 hours a day engaging in sedentary behaviors, which researchers say is notable since the average American is sedentary for about 9.5 hours each day.

Document dump: Lawyers representing Louis Taylor, the man convicted in the 1970 Pioneer Hotel Fire, have received records from the Pima County Attorney’s Office that show previous plans to exonerate him,  KVOA’s Chorus Nylander reports. The roughly 500-page filing includes a drafted motion to vacate Taylor’s charges, dated May 30, 2022. Taylor spent 40 years in prison for the hire, which killed 29 people, but was released in 2013 when a re-examination of the available evidence concluded that the origin and cause of the fire could only be considered undetermined. Pima County Attorney Laura Conover told KVOA that her office reviewed the original case but found nothing new, resulting in her closing the case. She’s set to be deposed Sept. 26.

We’re still a two-person operation and we don’t have a lawyer to hook us up with documents or offer legal advice. If you’re enjoying the Tucson Agenda and happen to know some attorneys, how about sending them our way?

Facebook follies: Tucson’s largest school district is joining hundreds of others in a lawsuit against social media companies, filed on the heels of the U.S. Surgeon General’s warning about the dangers of social media use on youth mental illness, Arizona Public Media’s Paola Rodriguez reports. The district claims it’s experiencing significant problems with student use of social media and officials are hoping to “send a message that these intentionally addictive products need to have some kind of protection for younger users,” said TUSD General Counsel Robert Ross.

“This lawsuit is just way to hold social media companies accountable for the damage they are doing to an entire generation in our community,” said Board President Dr. Ravi Shah. “When we win, funds will help TUSD better support students and families that are struggling with mental illness.”

Bicycle Boulevards incoming: The City of Tucson is hosting public outreach events this weekend to review plans and gather input about several proposed west side Bike Boulevards. The boulevards, located in the Menlo Park, El Rio-Dragoon, Golden Hills and Ontario-Mecedora neighborhoods, are traffic safety projects that use low-speed, low-volume streets to expand Tucson’s biking network by creating north/south and east/west routes to jobs, schools, parks and greenways. Community members can learn more about the projects at Friday night’s free screening of the movie “Luca” at Menlo Park, with free ice cream and bike repairs, or at Saturday morning’s pop-up café at Joaquin Murrieta Park, with free coffee, breakfast burritos and bike repairs. Click here for specific times and more information about the projects.

For the children: The Sahuarita Food Bank and Community Resource Center is getting ready to open the doors on its new Family Resource Center, the Green Valley News’ Jamie Verwys writes. The center is located inside Good Shepherd United Church of Christ and will include designated space for classes, room for kids to play and help with services like DES. The center will offer activities for kids and parents or guardians in both Spanish and English, provide services and family support services and host activities like “Stay and Play,” where parents and their babies share play time with a resource person to help guide them.

Not so fast: Construction plans for a lithium phosphate battery factory in Tucson are delayed until November, after preliminary data determined the need for an additional level of geotechnical assessment and surveying work, the Arizona Republic’s Sarah Lapidus writes. The American Battery Factory was originally planned to begin construction earlier this month on 267 acres of Pima County’s Aerospace Research Campus. The facility’s two million-square foot site will require $1.2 billion in capital investment.

Can you imagine the kind of news we could produce with $1.2 billion? Luckily, quality local news comes with a much lower price tag.

Curt was on KJZZ’s The Show Friday, talking with Lauren Gilger about Monday’s story in the Tucson Agenda detailing how Arizona’s loss of federal immigration funds to New York City could have dire consequences in the end. Listen to his interview here.