Homeschool moms Velia Aguirre and Rosemary McAtee wanted to give their children the best education they could, and thanks to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, their kids were thriving. Then Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes twisted the law to change the rules of the program, imposing an absurd new burden on ESA parents blocking their purchases of everything from kids’ books to the Constitution. Now Velia and Rosemary are fighting back with a new lawsuit, and the Goldwater Institute is helping them do it.
ESAs allow parents to use a portion of their children’s allotted state funding to purchase books, school supplies, and other curriculum materials that they can use to educate their children. Under the law, parents can then submit their expenses to the state for reimbursement. But over the summer, AG Mayes conjured up an illegal new rule requiring that to qualify for reimbursement, each of those purchases must be explicitly called for in a curriculum. For Velia and Rosemary, that meant no pencils, no erasers, no poster of the periodic table of elements, no flashcards, and no classic educational books like “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?”—unless they could sink hours into tracking down or coming up with various “curricula” that explicitly call for each and every book title or material’s use.
“The law is clear: ESA families have the right to use these educational materials without being forced to justify to the Attorney General or state bureaucrats why they’re buying pencils or picking individual books for their children,” says Goldwater Institute Staff Attorney John Thorpe. Unfortunately, AG Mayes’ arbitrary action is now having a detrimental impact on thousands of Arizona’s ESA parents and their children.
“The government is changing the rules and putting impossible burdens on me,” says Velia, whose three sons have special needs. In a new Goldwater Institute video, Velia explains that she is “individualizing my child’s educational needs from minute to minute throughout the day,” meaning her curriculum is ever-changing. “It’s been really challenging and hard having to meet the expectations that the AG wants with a curriculum,” Velia says.
“All of a sudden, we have a government telling us, ‘Here’s one more thing for the list,’” adds Rosemary, who has nine children, seven of them on the ESA program. “I feel like the AG clearly doesn’t have any interest in what an education looks like for a homeschool child.”
This new glob of bureaucratic goop makes no sense. For one thing, public and private school curriculum documents don’t even necessarily list items like “pencils” and “erasers.” As Velia explains: “No other teacher in the state has to provide curriculum for purchasing things for their classroom.” So, requiring parents to jump through the hoop of documenting a “curriculum” for materials that are obviously educational does nothing to prevent abuse of the program beyond the extraordinary lengths parents already have to go to in submitting expense receipts for every purchase. It does, on the other hand, needlessly exacerbate a backlog of tens of thousands of purchase orders that state officials must now go through to ensure every single book title and school supply satisfactorily appears on a separate curriculum document.
What’s more, the AG’s new mandate simply ignores state law and violates the Department of Education’s own handbook, which safeguards the ESA program by requiring documentation for unusual purchases, but not for common-sense purchases of items that are “generally known to be educational.”
Now, Goldwater is suing state officials on Velia and Rosemary’s behalf: We’re challenging this wrong-headed new requirement and seeking a court order to ensure parents don’t have to run a gauntlet of paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles every time they want to buy books or pencils for their children.
Attorney General Mayes’ contrived “curriculum” requirement is a cynical, illegal attack on the ESA program, and it’s making life harder for parents and children alike.
“She just wants to shut down and eliminate this program,” Rosemary says. “The government should actually be supporting ESA parents and children so they can get the education they deserve.”
The Goldwater Institute is dedicated to ensuring Arizona remains the gold standard for school choice and to protecting families from this kind of government overreach. After all, it’s parents—not politicians or bureaucrats—who know their children best.
AG Mayes seems committed to dismantling Arizona’s ESA program, brick by brick. We won’t let her get away with it.
Watch Velia and Rosemary’s video here, read our complaint here, and read our case page here.
