Fully Funded Public Education

High-quality public education is a right of every Arizonan. There simply is no public investment as crucial and meaningful for our families. When our legislature robs us of millions of dollars in funding for our public schools year after year to offer corporate giveaways and tax breaks to the rich, the damage has a reverberating effect. I believe in the right for all of Arizona’s children to attend a public school that provides the best possible learning environment; one that fully funds all-day kindergarten, school lunch programs, and the arts. I believe our children deserve to go to school every day with highly trained, fully staffed, and fairly paid professionals, ready to instill in them a lifelong love of learning. We know that is what will serve them best for their careers and their lives as empowered citizens.
Our students and their families deserve public schools where counselors, nurses, speech and hearing pathologists, reading specialists, special education instructors, and ESL experts are readily available to help them thrive. In our times, we have the ability and the moral responsibility to create the best education in the world for our students. THAT is how we create a strong Arizona.

Picketing with Tucson’s #REDforED teachers.

Having served for several years on the CTE Quality Skills Commission for the Arizona Department of Education, and the Pima County JTED Business and Industry Council, I know how powerful the opportunity for unique career and technical training can be for our kids. While I believe every youth should be able to attend public universities and community colleges for “as nearly free as possible” as our Arizona constitution states, I also recognize that providing our children with additional pathways to paid apprenticeships, gives many students the ability to work while learning a trade and avoiding our increasingly crippling college debt. High-quality public schools build community equity, provide lasting economic opportunity and contributions, while nurturing our families. As your Representative, I will champion the restoration of our state’s education funding to pre-recession levels and invest our taxes to reflect the proper role of our public schools. I will demand that every public education employee who has the opportunity to touch the lives of our children has the resources they need, at the wages they deserve. From the hall monitors, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers, to our counselors and teachers; an investment in them, is an investment in our children’s future. Together, we must not only fight to restore lost funding, but boldly forge ahead to shape the future of public education in our state. It is time to work to create the public school system that our children deserve. &nbsp This is a fight I have prepared years for!

I answer your questions:

Not a nickel of taxpayer money should ever go to private or for-profit schools. Ever.
When greedy corporations and fake non-profit companies rake off profits from our taxes instead of spending every penny on improving educational outcomes for our students, that is immoral. Cloaking those parasitic, self-serving companies with a veneer of respectability by calling them charters is deceptive.

Turning our public services over to for-profit companies is how to make greedy people richer while corroding our efforts to educate. Good schools serve the students first. Corporations serve their investors and shareholders first. Good public schools are accountable to the community. Corporations are accountable only to shareholders. To pretend otherwise is deliberately wrong and deceptive. For-profit and privatized schools create apartheid and the return of segregation: one school for the rich, and another for the rest of us. Guess which schools are better? I won’t stand for that, and neither should you.

We have the money to invest in our public schools, but our Governor and his privatizing majority and donors are looting our treasury.