Doomsday approaches for Arizona's schools and Republican leaders are banning books?

Arizona schools are scrambling to find teachers to fill classrooms, with the state Board of Education forced on Monday to pass an emergency rule so that anyone with a high school diploma or a GED can teach your kids for up to two years.

Meanwhile, the House Education Committee spent hours on Tuesday debating whether to ban classics like “The Great Gatsby” and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” from schools.

This spring, Arizona’s public schools will be forced to lay off teachers and close schools as they bump up against a 40-year-old spending cap and can no longer pay their bills.

Meanwhile, the House Education Committee on Tuesday was debating a bill to require partisan primaries for school board elections and to allow parent protests on campus.

Schools will soon hit a spending limit

Republican legislators are obsessed with ferreting out imagined cabals of teachers who they fear may be secretly indoctrinating our kids in all manner of sexual depravity. (The fact that they have no evidence that this is happening in Arizona schools is, apparently, beside the point.)

Meanwhile, our kids are about to be exposed to something real and damaging on April 1:

That’s the day Arizona’s schools will hit a constitutional spending limit set in 1980. Though school districts have money in the bank – money appropriated last year by the Arizona Legislature – they will no longer be able to spend it.

To avoid disaster, the Legislature must waive or raise the aggregate spending limit by March 1.

Yet, as Arizona Agenda points out, not so much as a single Republican legislator has introduced a bill to address the issue.

Democrats have, but they needn’t have bothered. Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers relegated their bills to the trash heap, declining even to assign them for to committees for hearings.

Republicans are in no rush to act

There’s a reason for that. If the Legislature raises or waives the spending limit, it could give new life to a voter-approved income tax on the state’s wealthiest residents.

In 2020, voters passed Proposition 208, which proposed distributing the tax proceeds to schools as “grants” to avoid the spending limit. But last summer the Arizona Supreme Court nixed that idea, saying the revenue must be included in the spending limit.

Once a Superior Court judge can determine that the tax – which is expected to bring in $827 million a year for schools – exceeds the aggregate spending limit, Proposition 208 will almost certainly be tossed out.

Thus, the Republican-controlled Legislature’s complete lack of interest in raising the aggregate spending limit.

And to heck, apparently, with what’s about to hit the public schools and a million or school children. (Charter schools are exempt from the spending limit, as they weren’t around in 1980 when it was established.)

Come April 1, each school district is going to have to cut 16% of its annual budgets to get under the $6 billion aggregate cap. This, with less than two months to go in the school year.

Not because they don’t have the money but because they don’t have permission to spend the money.

Permission they must get in the next 34 days.

Instead, let's ban books that may not be in schools

The clock is ticking and our leaders are spending their time … looking at dirty pictures.

Rep. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, passed around sexually explicit pictures from a book to his fellow legislators during Tuesday’s hearing, reportedly showing people having sex and a boy engaged in masturbation. Hoffman didn’t identify the books from which the pictures came or any Arizona schools that actually use the books.

His House Bill 2495 would bar public schools from showing kids sexually explicit material, which, by the way, already is illegal under Arizona law.

Hoffman’s bill also would bar schools from referring students to any material that depicts sexual conduct, which he defines as “acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks or, if such person is female, breast.”

After hours of heated debate, the committee did, at least, exempt classical and early American literature from the book ban, along with books required in courses to get college credit.

So the kids presumably still will be able to read “Ulysses,” “1984” and the Bible (check out Ezekiel 23: 20 and 21), but only if a parent first provides written consent.

And only if a school somehow manages to remain open.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona schools speed toward doomsday while GOP lawmakers ban books