2026 State of Education address covers increasing school resource officers, teacher pay

PHOENIX — Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne’s State of Education address on Tuesday focused on school safety, teacher pay, literacy rates and DEI policies throughout the state.

As part of school safety, Horne asked members of the House Education Committee for more funding in order to hire more school resource officers.

“Schools are calling on law enforcement in response to students making gun threats an average of 500 times per year,” Horne said. “In schools without police officers, we are playing Russian roulette with a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

The superintendent added that in the past three years the number of school resource officers has increased from 190 to 565. He noted that five more districts have already approached the Arizona Department of Education about getting officers.

Horne also spoke about the importance of increasing teacher pay in the state, specifically calling for the renewal of Proposition 123. If renewed, Prop. 123 would take money from the Permanent Land Endowment Trust Fund to add an additional $300 million in funding for schools.

“Currently, we are losing more teachers than are coming into the profession,” Horne said. “This is a true emergency, and we’ve got to increase the income of teachers.”

Tom Horne provides DEI policy update during 2026 State of Education address

Horne also provided an update to committee members on the state’s compliance with federal DEI policies , claiming there are a number of schools that are not in compliance but noted there’s not much he can do.

“I don’t have authority to force them. We’re a local control state,” Horne said. “But what I do have is a website that shows ‘A’ through ‘F’ grades, and for every school, I show whether or not they’ve eliminated DEI or CRT and so on. And that way parents can know what’s going on in the schools near them and if they don’t like it, they can choose a different school.”

The superintendent also touched on how literacy rates across Arizona are not up to par, adding that testing a student before they’re allowed to move on to the next grade needs to be a focus in 2026.

“We’re going to have to do a better job of having a higher standard before a student goes to fourth grade,” Horne said. “It’s the opposite of punishment. The worst thing to do to a child is to send him to fourth grade if he’s not proficient in reading.”

Horne is running to be reelected as Arizona’s top education official.

Funding for this journalism is made possible by the Arizona Local News Foundation.

Related

Arizona teachers face difficult decisions about careers due to low payDeadline approaches for Arizona schools to comply with DEI policies or risk losing federal fundsA new literacy plan lays out steps to improve Arizona’s reading rates by 2030Arizona voters to choose Republican and Democratic nominees for top education positionFormer Mesa High School official claims that an inaccurate police report destroyed his careerFormer ASU President, who elevated university’s status, dies at 89