Arizona House speaker says school funding cap will be lifted before deadline

PHOENIX – Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers said Friday that lawmakers will address a funding cap in time to keep schools from losing access to $1.1 billion earmarked for education.

“Yes, that’s the short answer. Yes,” the East Valley Republican told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Mike Broomhead Show when asked if the cap would be lifted by the March 1 deadline. “We’ve had lots of discussions about it.”

School leaders, including Democratic Superintendent of Public Instruction Kathy Hoffman, have been fretting about the prospect of slashing budgets by 16% if the GOP-controlled Legislature doesn’t act.

“Teachers are worried about [whether] they will even have a job after March 1,” Hoffman told The Mike Broomhead Show on Wednesday.

“So this is having a significant impact, a very negative impact of causing a lot of disruption and worry in a time when we need stability where districts should be able to spend the money that’s already been budgeted to them.”

Schools can’t use $1.1 billion of appropriated funding unless lawmakers suspend a cap on how much K-12 schools can spend during an academic year. The limit was created as part of measure passed by voters in 1980 and has been lifted in previous years when necessary.

Republicans are hoping to get a ruling on a legal challenge to Proposition 208, an initiative to tax the wealthy for additional school funding passed by voters in 2020, before addressing the cap. They worry if they vote to raise the cap before a court decides the case, it could provide a lifeline to the tax on the wealthy.

“It’s been fodder for the Democratic Party to get up and beat us up every day and say the obvious, that that’s going to be bad,” Bowers said. “But we have been working to try to wait and secure some type of acknowledgement from the courts of the separation between Prop. 208 and this one,” he said.

Bowers said the legal case, and not an unwillingness to lift the cap, has been slowing the process.

“We have a short-term schedule and you should be seeing something soon very soon,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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