In a major victory for Arizonans, the state legislature has sent to the ballot the Goldwater Institute’s Military Family Protection Act, a measure to protect Arizona military families and the state’s signature school choice program.
If approved by voters in November, the Act will nullify the politically motivated efforts to harm military families and dismantle the state’s landmark Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, which more than 100,000 Arizona students now use to receive an education that works best for them. Today, the ESA program provides educational opportunities for 1,000 children whose parents served on active duty or were killed in the line of duty.
Testifying at the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday, Goldwater Institute Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg noted that the threat to military families is real.
“There is a current ballot measure being proposed to attack the scholarship funds and confiscate the scholarship funds of children, including military families,” Beienburg said. “These families should not be treated as a piggy bank to raid. These are families who have protected this nation.”
The measure’s sponsor, Rep. Michael Way, testified on the floor of the Arizona House of Representatives that the act “would strike down every provision of any measure that treats military families as collateral damage.”
“This measure asks a very simple question: should Arizona be allowed to take scholarship money from military families after we promised them? My answer is no,” Way said.
Sadly, leftwing lawmakers disagreed. Several progressive legislators admitted during committee and floor testimony that their anti-school choice ballot measure would be disallowed by the Military Family Protection Act precisely because their measure is designed to confiscate scholarship funds from military families.
Rep. Nick Kupper, a veteran, testified that his children were able to join the ESA program because of his military service. His children, he said, were failed by a public school system that would have forced his young daughter with special needs into screen-based learning, rather than provide the in-person support she required.
“In the Air Force, our very first core value is integrity. Integrity means being a person of your word,” Kupper said. “And we as a state have given our word to not just my children, but the children of all active-duty service members that this is a program for them. We gave that commitment. This HCR holds us to our word… I have faith in the people of Arizona that they will vote ‘Yes’ on this when it’s on the ballot. Because the people of Arizona, I believe, are good for their word. The people of Arizona care about children. The people of Arizona care about our veterans, and the people of Arizona care about our students having the best opportunities they can have wherever that opportunity is.”
Despite such pleas from service members, not a single Democrat lawmaker voted in support of military families, making it clear that the real intent of those lawmakers and their union benefactors is to stop families from accessing educational options beyond those offered by failing, government-run schools.
In fact, killing the most successful school choice program in the country is more important to them than protecting the rights of Arizona’s veterans. The Goldwater Institute’s Military Family Protection Act will ensure our military families are afforded the respect they deserve.
