As Arizona’s school voucher program grows, public dollars flow to private schools

The three oldest students at Majestic Grace Christian Academy — a third grader, a sixth grader and a seventh grader — huddled over their laptops on a weekday afternoon, reading the Gettysburg Address aloud for their history class.

“Very good job. Great reading," said their teacher Elizabeth Siegel, who then recapped what the students had just read. "So, what this means, is, talking about the bloody battle that was there, OK? A lot of men died. A lot of men lost their lives.”

Siegel then posed a question for the students to answer with online research: “Can somebody look up for me how many men died at Gettysburg?”

The students diligently searched the internet and compared their findings. Then, they moved on to the next passage of Lincoln's famous speech.

As a small private school that sprang up just this past school year, Majestic Grace exemplifies the private school revolution stemming from the universal expansion of school vouchers. It is one of many recently launched private schools taking advantage of newly available public money. But while Majestic Grace and other private schools accept public funds in the form of school vouchers, there is little public oversight of what students are learning, whether they are achieving at their grade level and the training their instructors receive.

The school’s founders, including a 35-year veteran of public schools and a retired Midwestern banker, want their Christian values infused throughout the school day.

“Kids are doing math right now — but there’s no connection to anything else,” said founder and teacher Debra Gasson, the veteran teacher who spent decades working for Phoenix-area school districts. “A lot of parents really want a Christian education, but they can’t afford a Christian school.”

Last year, the Legislature expanded Arizona’s school voucher program to all Arizona families with school-age children. School vouchers had been limited to select categories like foster families, military families and families with special education needs.

That has been a boon for some Arizona families but also for private schools. Previously, Majestic Grace families would have had to rely on personal finances, donations or tax credits to pay for tuition.

Now, the universal voucher program makes public funding available for any student's private school tuition. Families are only required to submit proof of residence and their child’s birth certificate, cementing Arizona’s voucher program as one of the most expansive in the nation.

Last school year, more than 35,000 families received between $6,000 and $7,999 from the program. Families with special needs students can receive upwards of $30,000 a year. A total of 5,143 students received that award amount last year, according to the Arizona Department of Education's most recent quarterly report about the school voucher program.

All the students attending Majestic Grace last year were school voucher recipients, said school founder Jed Harris, the retired banker. Majestic Grace is not the first school Harris has helped open in Arizona. He also worked to launch Tipping Point Academy, a private school in Scottsdale that promises to integrate a Biblical worldview into every lesson. Gasson was formerly the director of Tipping Point and helped develop its curriculum. Tipping Point did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

For his new venture, Harris said, he wanted to open a school that would help students he felt were being left behind.

“I said, 'Look, I don’t want to do Scottsdale,'” said Harris. “I want to do something like Detroit — in the 'hood.'”

It’s also not the first school on the site of Harvest Christian Fellowship, the Lutheran church near 27th and Glendale avenues that houses Majestic Grace. The same rooms housed a charter school, Edupreneurship Student Center Phoenix, that closed during the early years of the pandemic, said Harris.

The staff of Majestic Grace said their doors are open for visitors to come and see the fresh coat of paint in the school’s courtyard, listen to the quiet prayer the students say before jumping into their lunches and pose math problems to any student who walks by.

“I’d say, 'Come in and listen to them,'” said Gasson.

The school has high academic and behavioral expectations and the flexibility to teach a student above grade level if needed or to spend extra time helping them catch up, she said.

"There is a flexibility in the classroom if their ability level needs to be somewhere different," she said. "They are getting a really good education, and they are learning about God."

Attorney General: Arizona families using school voucher funds give up legal protections

A sea change for private schools in Arizona 

Grand Canyon Private Academy, an online school for students in grades K-10 that opened this past school year, notes prominently on its website that the Arizona school voucher program will cover all of the school’s tuition, which is up to $6,500 for the full year.

“It may seem like it’s too good to be true, but it isn’t,” said Janice Gruneberg, Grand Canyon Private Academy’s senior vice president and superintendent of schools, in a statement. “There’s no reason for parents who wish to send their children to private schools to not take advantage of this opportunity.”

Operators of many private schools — both in-person and remote — are seeing opportunities in Arizona because of the universal voucher expansion.

Optima Academy Online, an online school started by conservative education activist Erika Donalds, recently announced it is opening in Arizona. The school will offer students several hours of virtual reality-based instruction each day. Tuition will be set at the amount of each student’s school voucher, making it free to attend, said Donalds.

Donalds, the CEO of OptimaEd, the school’s parent company, said the school is coming to Arizona because of the universal school voucher program. In Arizona, school vouchers are called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts — ESAs for short.

“I have been a proponent of universal ESA’s for over a decade now, and I am very excited to see it making high-quality academic options available to families,” Donalds said.

Phoenix will also be the first city in the southwest to house an Independent Friends School, according to a press representative for the school. The Quaker school emphasizes conflict resolution, social action and experiential learning, and they expect most eligible students will tap into voucher funds when the middle school opens in September 2024.

The resource provided by Arizona’s voucher expansion makes the Phoenix Friends School even more accessible, said founder Willard White. According to the school's website, tuition will be $19,000 per year, or "effectively $12,000" if one takes into account the most common voucher amount of around $7,000.

Another example: one-n-ten, a nonprofit that provides programming and services for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults, is launching a school in August that relies on voucher dollars. The organization is aiming to create a safe educational space for queer youth amid rising attacks on the LGBTQ+ community, its founders said.

Before the 2022-23 school year began, the Empowerment Scholarship Account program served about 12,000 students. Now, more than 60,000 students receive funding through the program for private school tuition, tutors or educational materials.

While it is unclear how many of those students receive funding for private school tuition rather than special therapies or at-home learning supplies, the voucher vendor list includes many private schools.

As the school voucher program has grown so have concerns about public money supporting private schools that are poorly understood beyond their physical or virtual walls. Gov. Katie Hobbs’ office released a memo in July estimating the school voucher program will cost more than $950 million in the current budget year, leading to a budget shortfall of nearly $320 million.

Voucher opponent Beth Lewis, who heads the public school advocacy group Save Our Schools, wonders whether private schools serve students better or are just shielded from the scrutiny of public schools, which are legally bound to provide information for accountability's sake.

“Arizona’s ESA program is the least accountable in the entire country,” said Lewis. “Public dollars are going to strip mall private schools, popping up with zero accreditation and no requirements that they adhere to curriculum or state standards. In a public school, you need to have all of those things.”

State law requires the Arizona Department of Education to give every public school — district and charter — an A through F letter grade. It is based on factors including statewide assessment tests and graduation rate.

In contrast, Arizona law's academic requirement for a family's acceptance of a school voucher is that "a portion of the ESA must be used in at least the subjects of reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science," according to the 2023-24 school voucher parent handbook. Those subjects must also be taught in private schools under Arizona law.

Those demands do little to alleviate Lewis' concerns about academic accountability for private schools accepting taxpayer dollars.

“If you spend five minutes writing a sentence about grammar, that is not putting together a robust education,” Lewis said.

Furthermore, students lose legal protections when they leave public schools to accept a school voucher. For instance, private school students are not protected under a federal law that governs special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, like public school students.

Private schools also have less rigorous legal requirements for staff.

Most public school employees are required by law to undergo a form of background check to ensure they don’t have a criminal history that would disqualify them from working with children. That's not required for private schools or vendors accepting voucher dollars.

In addition, full-time, permanent classroom teachers in public schools must have at least a bachelor's degree. There's no similar requirement for private schools, and the voucher program only requires vendors, like tutors, to have a high school diploma when it's related to the service they're providing.

With school vouchers, private schools and other educational vendors are answerable to the parents, according to the head of the program, who recently resigned. While the state provides a list of vendors and schools approved to receive voucher money, it is the parent's responsibility to ensure a provider has satisfactory credentials and provides adequate services.

“The Legislature determined that the accountability would be the parents,” said Christine Accurso, who resigned in July from her post as administrator of the school voucher program after seven months in the role. “The parent chooses.”

Less accountability: Arizona's expanded school voucher system shares less data about users than other states' programs

Flexible attendance policy, Bible study and no state assessments

Many things about Majestic Grace Christian Academy make it apparent it's not a public school subject to the rigors multiple layers of government impose on public district schools.

The most obvious difference is the ubiquity of Christianity. There are worship songs, a Bible study first thing in the morning and an infusion of religion throughout the day.

"If they are doing geography, they may have some Biblical component to it," said Gasson.

Another thing that sets Majestic Grace apart: Sometimes, it's not just enrolled students in the school building. Gasson leads a weekly meeting for students — and several young people from the adjoining apartment complex — that she said teaches young women about boundaries and self-respect.

"It's just teaching them how to be in relationships: parent-children relationships, siblings relationships, friendship relationships," she said. "They have to learn how to be in those before they can go on to any boy-girl relationships."

The school also has unique attendance practices, which generously accommodate student health issues and family events. In many district schools, students are considered chronically absent if they miss more than 18 school days a year.

“We understand there’s a lot of things happening in these kids’ lives,” said Gasson. “They couldn’t succeed in a regular school.”

The attendance flexibility meant there were between 7 and 12 students at Majestic Grace on any given day during the past school year, Gasson said.

Some students have parents who are inconsistent about remembering to bring their kids to school, Gasson said. The students shouldn’t be punished for that, she said.

“We’re working with them on learning how to be the parent,” Gasson said. “We’re not only helping the kids; we’re helping the parents.”

Majestic Grace eschews state standardized tests, too. The school develops its own assessments using state standards, and teachers closely follow the progress of their student body, Gasson said. The school then communicates student progress to parents and adjusts their curriculum accordingly, she said.

“When you test them, if they miss an A in the sentence, then they get docked,” she said. “To me, if they’ve read the sentence and skipped the A, they’re probably a really good reader. Because half of us do that. We don’t read every single word.”

Next year, the school anticipates having about 20 students, nearly twice as many as this year's enrollment.

"We are making a push to go into the neighborhood and talk to parents," said Gasson. "They are thinking the ESA is really difficult to do, so we are talking them through it."

They will also plan to have three full-time educators. Harris said they make sure to hire educators who follow the values of their school and are committed to more than just teaching young people to read.

"We don't need to teach race in kindergarten. I was not racist in kindergarten," said Harris, who believes parental approval should be required to teach students about race, sexuality and gender. "My belief system is the American Constitution."

Those are the values they are hiring for, he said.

"It’s not just a career," Harris said. "It’s a calling."

Yana Kunichoff is a reporter on The Arizona Republic's K-12 education team. You can join The Republic's Facebook page and reach Yana at ykunichoff@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Private schools springing up as Arizona's school voucher program grows