US Department of Education restores $29M in expired funding to Arizona schools

PHOENIX — The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has agreed to restore $29 million in expired funding to Arizona schools, officials announced Friday.

“I am grateful to the Arizona Department of Education staff who worked long hours to ensure this process was completed and that schools get all the funding they deserve,” Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said in a press release.

The federal school improvement money had to be returned earlier this year because Arizona schools missed the deadline to spend it.

As a result, the state education department reportedly notified about 150-200 public district and charter schools in July that their grants for the new school year were being cut.

The returned money was allocated for fiscal years 2021 and 2022.

Horne blamed the problem on an employee who was a holdover from when Kathy Hoffman was the state’s superintendent of public instruction.

He said the employee was fired — or resigned when termination was imminent — in March 2023.

How did Arizona schools get expired funding restored?

The DOE reached out to Horne in August and encouraged his department to apply for a waiver that would restore the lost funding.

Horne told KTAR News 92.3 FM at the time he believes the federal government reached out because Arizona wasn’t the only state dealing with the issue.

“I think what happened is the people who work for them took a while to calculate what got spent and what didn’t get spent and when they saw how much didn’t get spent nationwide, they figured they should give us another chance to spend it for the schools,” Horne said.

The Arizona Department of Education received notice from the DOE on Friday that the waiver request was approved.

State officials said they are working through the details to make sure all the money is effectively distributed.

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