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A look at education in Arizona: artificial intelligence, affordability concerns, and a political turn that could make a difference.

The Press Room starts now.

♪ UPBEAT BRASS MUSIC ♪ Hello, and welcome to The Press Room.

I'm Tony Perkins.

On this show, we put a special focus on K through 12 and higher education with our panel of journalists, Prerana Sannappanavar with the Arizona Daily Star, Shannon Conner writes for AZ Luminaria, and we have Noor Haghighi with AZPM News.

Arizona voters are going to make a decision next week on education leadership in the state's primary election.

Shannon, we'll be watching the Republican contest between incumbent Superintendent Tom Horne and challenger Kimberly Yee.

Tom Horne is seeking his third term as state superintendent.

He started in 2011, where he initiated the Empowerment Scholarship Account.

Kimberly Yee is the current Arizona State Treasurer, and they're really trying to distinguish themselves from one another.

And one of the biggest factors is the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts have really sort of taken over the conversation both in the election and K through 12, throughout K through 12 education in Arizona.

And right now, Horne would like to continue the program that he's built.

He says he needs another four years to do that.

He's grown it to over 100,000 students.

8% of K through 12 students in Arizona are now using Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.

And he would like that to continue, to expand the program.

Yee would like there to be some more accountability for how families spend that money.

And they are really just trying to, both being Republicans, distinguish themselves from one another.

Noor this is a huge age difference.

Tom Horne is 81 years old.

Kimberly Yee, much younger.

Is this a question and a debate about old ideas versus the new reality?

I mean, to some degree, you could say that Tom Horne, one of his major campaign points has been the anti-DEI, anti-critical race theory campaign.

He said multiple times that he's the only person who's trying to fight the 'liberal crazies.'

But at the same time, Kimberly Yee holds a lot of those values true as well.

Both candidates have said that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts undermine the power of merit-based achievement.

Now, let's check over on the Democratic side.

And Teresa Leyba Ruiz versus Brett Newby in the primary.

Ruiz is a former Glendale Community College president, Newby as a mental health worker.

The one thing that's interesting about this race is that Ruiz is the only teacher amongst the four candidates on the ballot next week.

Does the state need a teacher or an administrator?

Shannon, let's start with you.

Well, Teresa and the Democratic Party think so.

She is a certified teacher, the only one in the race.

She started out teaching math, and both her parents, she's a native Arizonan, both her parents graduated from Pueblo High School here in Tucson, and she has traveled the state over the last four or five months really trying to learn about it from very rural and tiny schools to central Phoenix.

Newby is a dad with two school-aged children, and he says he got in the race because as a participating parent, he wanted to make change.

And as a mental health worker, he primarily works with children.

So they are distinctly different.

One of the things about Ruiz is that she says on day one, she would like to have a rural and small schools liaison who is a person that people can go to direct contact with her and the Department of Education.

She also wants to get rid of what she calls the 'teacher snitch line,' where students, parents, educators can call and leave a message and potentially the Department of Education could investigate.

She has some very distinct defining characteristics.

Newby is younger and really comes at it from a more parent-centered perspective than an educator-centered perspective.

And again, the primary election day is next Tuesday.

A lot of good information is on the AZ Luminaria website, the terrific election guide there.

Now let's take a look ahead at the November general election and propositions, a ballot initiative to keep a closer watch on what's happening with the school vouchers program.

Shannon, let's start with you on that.

There's a couple of plans that voters will be looking at if everything is approved in time.

The legislature has one idea, Save Our Schools has another, sort of outline it for us.

Empowerment Scholarship Accounts began in 2011 during Horne's first term.

They initially could be used by military families, by families with special needs, students, by families on tribal lands to help fund education.

In 2022, at the beginning of Tom Horne's second term, those accounts were expanded universally.

Anybody could apply for them.

They now, the average amount that a family gets for their students' education is about $7400.

And we have now over 100,000 students in Arizona who are using them to go to school.

And that means they can use them to go, they can be homeschooled, they can go to private school, they could go to charters that charge money.

And this has become, we essentially have a two-payer system in Arizona.

This ESA program has been funded to the tune of almost a billion dollars last year and this year.

And the Protect Education Act, which is a proposition coming up, potentially this fall, wants to cap the amount that families can apply, can make to apply for it at $150,000.

So we've got the Democratic side saying they would like to put guardrails, they're calling for accountability and transparency over these accounts.

And we've got the Republicans, essentially Horne and many of the Republicans in the state legislature who want to protect school choice in Arizona.

We were one of the first states in America that really, really wanted to provide that for people.

And they are doing everything they can to protect it at this point.

Noor, are the changes that they're talking about going to result in real reform or in so many cases politically, is it just something to make people feel good?

No, definitely they do propose some substantial reforms like Shannon said, the $150,000 income cap on voucher eligibility.

They're also wanting to implement standards for background checks and regular fingerprinting in voucher funded schools, as well as reverting unspent ESA funds back into the public ed system.

Whereas right now they can roll over in accounts year after year.

And there's also, the legislature has come in multiple times, it's been a tug of war between public school advocates and the legislature.

And so now it's at a bit of a questionable, ambiguous point.

Yeah.

(Shannon) Definitely.

It is a, at this point, there is a lot that we don't know and that is way more than what we do know at this point.

We don't know if this proposition that got over 400,000 signatures is gonna even make it on the ballot.

And we are waiting to find out next week, there's a hearing in Phoenix about it.

And it's all coming down to that sort of mid September point when we will know what is on the ballot on November 3rd.

All right, let's move over to higher education and Prerana, the new school year begins for the University of Arizona.

And one item that made news over this summer and continues to make news is an enrollment decrease, 2.7%.

What's the story behind that?

So actually enrollment at the University of Arizona and just in general nationally has been declining since last year and there's a lot of federal reasons to it as well in addition to the demographic cliff and just a national kind of decline that all universities are seeing.

But specifically when it comes to the University of Arizona, in addition to all the federal kind of targeting that has happened for international students, which has led to declining international students and then there's also declining out of state students, because students wanna stay closer to home, they don't wanna pay out of state tuition.

In addition to all of that, the U of A has publicly talked lots of times since last year about wanting to intentionally reduce their class sizes and they're talking about bringing in quote unquote the right sizes of classes.

And it's more also going along the lines of increasing graduation rates and retention rates because the new Provost Patricia Prelock, I mean she's not new anymore, she was in the role last summer, but she's talked about wanting to increase graduation retention rates, so they wanna bring in students who are more academically oriented to graduate.

So while there's a lot of like out of control things for the U of A like international decline and out of state decline, it's also very intentional.

So the 2.7 overall enrollment decline has led to net tuition revenue being down by 0.7% this next fiscal year.

This is the time of year when a lot of parents who have high school students are looking to understand like their kids to go to college.

We see a lot of surveys and reviews putting the U of A at the top of some of these various rankings.

There's usually a question though, Noor, about how those rankings are calculated.

Yeah, I mean I think it's a tough question, but we should take those rankings, I guess with a grain of salt, while one outlet might say the U of A ranks X in whatever subject, another might say something completely different.

And while those sort of things might help students and families decide where to go, I think the validity depends on which source the ranking is coming from and how that ranking is calculated, how it's decided.

But I'm not exactly sure how students might use those to decide.

I think like what I heard this spring and this summer, when students are talking about coming to school in the fall is obviously rankings matter.

And I think that results in the first initial list of where do I wanna go?

Because okay, my program is ranked really high at the U of A or my program is ranked high at ASU.

But I think the cost of college is also like an important significant factor because the U of A, like we were talking about enrollment, the U of A changed its admissions model from rolling admissions to early action, which meant that this time when students were applying for fall 2026, they had one hard deadline.

And this kind of led to lesser applications coming in and lesser enrollment again.

So when I was talking to, hearing from students and families, they were also talking about how they didn't get as much merit aid as they expected in this admission cycle.

So that kind of changed their reasoning.

So I think cost of college is also important.

And we talked about the high school kids and back to school time.

It also means time to pay attention to technology in the classroom.

Noor, you've been looking into the issue regarding cell phones in the classroom.

There's changes from year to year and some school districts have answers.

Some do not, some have different responses.

What have you learned?

So one, I guess to start off, about a year ago, Governor Hobbs signed into law a phone ban essentially, that leaves public school districts to decide what the rules and consequences are around personal device use in classrooms.

In the Catalina Foothills district, just north of Tucson, that's kind of been the case for a long time.

No phones, phones are like off and away at all grade levels.

But they, once Governor Hobbs enacted that law, they decided to make the consequences a lot more clear cut.

There are no warnings.

As soon as you see a phone, a teacher sees a phone in class, it's an immediate confiscation.

And that's been something that's been most impactful in the middle schools.

They recently brought a survey, survey results out that said about 40% of middle school students saw that they were able to pay attention more easily in class without the phone at the ready.

And teachers saw better peer to peer interactions.

So I'm not, I think that's also the TUSD's policy as well.

But I took more of a look at the Catalina Foothills District.

Now what about artificial intelligence?

Yeah, that's definitely a talking point right now.

The latest that we know on AI policy from TUSD is that roughly a month ago, they passed a revision to a first draft of a new policy that extends the use of educatio to middle schools instead of just high schools.

And while some members of the governing board have been philosophically like they're anti-AI, others have acknowledged that it's so ubiquitous, especially with things like the Google AI overview, search tools, you plug anything into Google and it's using AI.

So you can't really avoid it.

And they're saying a policy that would kind of level it out and have some oversight on that use can help to control how much it's being used.

Shannon, let's talk a little bit about the new dual enrollment fee that's affecting students at Pima Community College.

We don't hear a lot about what's going on at Pima, but in this case, it's a plan that helps high school seniors take college level courses for high school and college credit.

Pima used to offer this for free, but not anymore.

What's happened?

This was a smoking deal.

And it still is by many standards.

There are about 7,000 high school students in Southern Arizona and about 43 high schools who use this program.

It is tremendous across the board.

Students take, high school students take college level courses taught by their high school teachers who have been specially certified.

And typically this has been free to earn college credits.

And Pima decided--Pima that doesn't get any money from the state of Arizona to operate and needs funds--said, we can't do this anymore.

So they are going to charge $10 per credit for students.

Now they came to the superintendents of districts throughout Southern Arizona and said, we wanna do this.

But Pima wanted to charge more money.

And the superintendents said, wait a second.

We're going from zero, let's do a slow roll.

So they voted to do $10.

Now, if you have multiple students taking multiple courses and you are a family that needs that, that's still significant amount of money over the course of a school year.

But compared to the $100 per credit at Pima Community College taking a course or the $500 per credit at the University of Arizona taking a course, the $10 is still a smoking deal and you can, this is a pathway for many students that might not otherwise go to college or go to trade school.

They are getting, they are coming out, the Sunnyside School District had five students who graduated last May.

A few days before they graduated, they got their associates degrees.

They had enough credits through dual enrollment to take, to enter college as juniors essentially.

That's remarkable.

So this is a, this, we're gonna look, it's probably gonna go up from here, but the $10 will not start until the 27-28 school year.

So we've got a year.

Right, huge deal there.

Let's go back to the University of Arizona for this one.

There's a growing pushback against the changes the Trump administration wants for research funding.

Prerana, what's that about?

So basically the White House Office of Management and Budget is proposing a change to federal regulations, which is basically federal rules on how agencies distribute federal research funding.

So the University of Arizona is obviously a land grant institution, R1 university, research intensive.

So we compete for a lot of grants on a federal level.

So this kind of changes how those federal grants are distributed.

And there's pushback coming from the U of A, the Senior Vice President for Research and Partnerships, Tomás Díaz de la Rubia.

He wrote to the Office of Management and Budget and pushed back on a lot of the different changes saying that it was unclear and it wasn't clearly defined.

And also the rollout that they want, OMB put this out publicly on May 29th.

And there was about more than a month, like July 13th was the end date for people to send in public comments, but it's going to be implemented if implemented, it's gonna start on October 1st.

And that is a very, very short timeline for this kind of rollout.

So he talked about how this is too small of a timeline for a rollout and they should wait at least a year to roll this out.

But what are the different kinds of changes?

So they're saying that federal research agencies, let's say for example, the National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation, these are my examples that I'm using, they have research experts sitting on the research agencies who decide which research grants get funding.

But now this change is going to bring in political appointees who are going to do like a political review process.

And whether it's Díaz de la Rubia or, I looked at the comments section of the federal regulation and everyone's basically talking about the fact that the scientific review process to decide which grants get funding has to be scientific.

It cannot be political.

Whichever grant is the best and has the most innovative research and the most important research for the US and the world is the one that should get funding.

So that could change a little bit.

They're also trying to put in restrictions on international collaborations.

They've also said that universities that might have lesser indirect cost rates, like the costs that they get in addition to grant funding for administrative costs, those universities would get more research grants, but again, it's not the right metric for which universities or which research grants should get awarded.

You've been doing some work also looking into restructuring of Health Sciences at the U of A. What's the latest on that?

So the latest is still that the Health Sciences unit, which has been a unit since 2019, roughly, and it houses the Colleges of Medicine in Tucson and Phoenix and the Nursing, Pharmacy and Public Health Colleges.

This unit is kind of being dismantled since its operations are being dispersed across the university.

And there was a lot of confusion in the beginning.

About 28 people were laid off across different departments, finance, administration, communications, events.

And there was a lot of confusion in the beginning and also fear about the fact that, does the Health Sciences brand go away and do the functions change?

But whatever U of A public officials, sorry, U of A officials have said publicly, and I also spoke with a former regent on the Arizona Board of Regents.

And all they're saying is that this is like an administrative restructuring.

Nothing changes, the building stays the same, the functions stay the same.

They're just kind of tightening the administrative budget and they're making sure that it's as efficient as possible.

So that's where we are right now, the same number that I heard of in June.

(Tony) All right.

Let's pause for a second and go around the table and see what you guys were working on in upcoming weeks and months during the school year and heading to the end of the calendar year.

Noor, let's start with you.

Yeah, on the topic of ESAs, I visited several micro schools in Tucson, which are schools that house less than 20 students.

And I'm seeing how ESA funds have helped those families find alternatives to public schools.

And once the school year starts back up again, I wanna get a look at what preschool and childcare landscapes look like and what's missing in rural Arizona.

(Tony) Mhm.

Shannon?

I will be up in Phoenix for the election on Tuesday, hanging out first as outside some polling places here, and then up in Phoenix, that will be a lot of next week.

And then really working on a big project on teacher retention and how Arizona can do better to, and specifically Southern Arizona, to keep its teachers, both ones that are brand new and starting this school year and ones that have been around a while.

Now regarding elections, we haven't heard a whole lot during this campaign season about teacher pay.

That was a big issue in previous elections.

Has this issue seen a pause?

You know who's been talking a lot about teacher pay?

Is Tom Horne.

Tom Horne is, he knows he needs to get some teachers behind him in this election.

And he has really been pushing saying that it is one of his largest priorities.

He wants to protect the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts and he wants teachers to be paid more.

And he hopes that they are paying attention.

(Noor) Yeah, that's something I was gonna mention.

All four candidates have talked about how teachers deserve more respect, better pay, because we lost about a thousand just from last July to November.

And 8,000 in the previous school year.

So, yeah, big, big gaps.

(Shannon) Yes.

- Yeah.

(Tony) Prerana, what do you have coming up?

I think I'm still very interested in looking at the Office of Management and Budget's role out of this federal regulation because it's gonna be like really huge.

And I think this is the second part of the White House Compact in higher education that they did last year.

And the U of A declined to sign it and pushed back on that as well.

But I'm very interested to see if this does get to campuses, then it's gonna be really, really big.

Like the U of A has to come out with more measures to protect research funding.

Like last year they did the Bridge funding programs to kind of fill the gaps that federal funding was bringing in.

In addition to that, I also really wanna look at the enrollment numbers because the U of A hasn't come out with exact enrollment numbers for fall 2026.

So I wanna see how that translates into, you know, the kind of on-campus environment and the class sizes and if that really does help in graduation and retention.

All right, great.

That'll do it for The Press Room.

Thanks to our guests and to our staff and crew here at The Press Room.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

♪ UPBEAT BRASS MUSIC ♪ Support comes from Banner Health, a nonprofit healthcare system with an integrative health plan committed to giving back to Arizona.

Last year, Banner reinvested $1.1 billion into the Arizona community.

Learn more at bannerhealth.com.

This has been an original production of AZPM News.