Good morning!

Well, folks, we’re wrapping up the year.

And what a year it’s been!

We’ve covered a lot of ground since we launched the Education Agenda in January. Today, we’re looking back on the highlights of the year and some of the business that officials left unfinished for next year.

But first, thank you so much to everybody who’s been reading the Agenda, especially those who ponied up some cash for a paid subscription.

If you want the Agenda to stick around a while longer, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Prop 123 and school vouchers

The year began with a lot of talk about Prop 123, a financial lifeline for schools that needed to be renewed.

A decade ago, voters approved an amendment to the state Constitution to allow the state to draw about $300 million more per year from the State Land Trust to pay for public education.

The funding measure was set to expire in July if voters didn’t approve its renewal, which meant Arizona lawmakers had to hustle.

Back in January, there was so much bipartisan support at the Legislature for renewing it that it seemed like a done deal.

But just a few weeks later, lawmakers had given up on renewing Prop 123 this year. Instead, they were promising to put the measure on the November 2026 ballot and “backfill” the lost funding.

Then, a plot twist. GOP lawmakers came back in April, saying the Prop 123 renewal should be tied to a measure enshrining the voucher program in the state Constitution.

It didn’t fare well. By June, the plan appeared to be on life support.

While Prop 123 faded from the political discussion, vouchers were back on center stage as Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne took political jabs over voucher oversight from Treasurer Kimberly Yee, who is challenging Horne in next year’s GOP primary for superintendent.

The sparring between Horne and Yee became somewhat of a theme this year, including an October spat over whether to help out a tiny district in Maricopa County that needed a $3 million advance in state funding. Horne said yes. Yee wanted to investigate the district first.

The voucher program came under fire again in September when 12News started vetting $124 million in voucher money that parents used without any oversight from state officials. That kicked off in-fighting among GOP officials as they debated whether the voucher program should be free from regulation.

And Attorney General Kris Mayes got in the action, saying she might sue Horne for not putting guardrails on voucher expenses.

Local controversies

There was no shortage of local controversy at Arizona’s schools this year.

The Isaac Elementary School District found itself in a $28 million hole in January, with no way to pay its teachers. Several state lawmakers were furious and started pushing Mayes to investigate what they called “mismanagement and potential corruption” at the district.

Isaac’s financial problems led a nearby district, the Tolleson Union High School District, which had leadership problems of its own, to try to help out in February by loaning Isaac $25 million under a first-of-its-kind lease-leaseback agreement.

Lawmakers tried to punish local school boards for getting into financial trouble, but Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed that bill in June. She said the bill “appears to seek broad retribution,” rather than offering specific solutions for districts.

Over at the Cartwright Elementary School District, a voter filed a lawsuit saying the mother-and-daughter duo of Lydia and Cassandra Hernandez were violating state law by serving on the district’s governing board together.

They won the legal argument, but it wasn’t the end of their troubles.

The pair also made headlines in August when Democratic Rep. Lydia Hernandez reportedly brought a box cutter to Maryvale High School, which she said was a way to test campus security after a student was stabbed. The school district accused Cassandra Hernandez of being involved, but then had to issue an apology in November after it became clear she had nothing to do with it.

At the Capitol

This year’s legislative session generated a lot of education news.

Lawmakers pushed to expand the School Safety Program, block students from using smartphones during school hours, make students learn the history of communism, and many other measures.

Democratic state Rep. Alma Hernandez pushed a bill that would make it a crime for students to set up encampments on campus, as students had done last year during pro-Palestine protests. Hobbs signed the bill into law in May, over the protests of a handful of Republican lawmakers who worried it would be used against conservative groups like Turning Point or pro-life organizations.

GOP lawmakers pushed to get rid of DEI at Arizona’s schools, but Hobbs ended up vetoing the anti-DEI bill in May, saying the bill “lacks clarity.”

But much of the anti-DEI action occurred at the federal level, where the Trump administration told K-12 schools in Arizona and across the country that they would lose federal funding if they kept anything that even smelled like DEI.

That’s not pocket change. It would have cost Arizona schools $770 million in lost federal funds, and several Arizona districts had already paid the price.

Lawmakers didn’t spend a lot of time on vouchers this year, but vouchers were a huge deal in several other states that tried to follow in Arizona’s footsteps.

The all-important decisions about state funding for education were a sticking point at lawmakers tried to work out a budget in June. They ended up agreeing not to tie Prop 123 to the voucher program, while waiving the aggregated expenditure limit for 2026 and 2027.

By the time lawmakers stopped making laws for the year, they had introduced nearly 200 education-related bills. Hobbs signed about half of the roughly 50 bills that made it to her desk, including new laws for medical school applications, collegiate athletes who want to make money, school safety measures and much more.

Horne hasn’t let up on his push to add more police officers to schools. He asked lawmakers in September for $180 million to boost the School Safety Program, even as Hobbs said the state was in for a “tough budget year.”

Looming in the background

A declining birth rate keeps pushing down enrollment numbers at Arizona’s public schools. That decline hits districts in their pocketbooks. If enrollment goes down at a school, so does per-pupil funding from the state.

Horne pushed lawmakers to flunk students who miss too many days of school as he tried to address chronic absenteeism.

And a measles outbreak in west Texas was starting to worry public health and education officials in Arizona.

And Arizona continues to battle a teacher shortage. A survey released in November showed more than 1,000 teachers had quit since July, including nearly 300 who resigned after the school year started. That’s on top of 4,200 teaching positions that remain vacant.

And Donald Trump

But the Trump administration cast the biggest shadow over education in Arizona.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. The order didn’t come from nowhere; it was the fruit of Project 2025, which based many of its education policy goals on what Arizona officials had done in recent years.

Two months later, a federal judge eviscerated the Trump administration’s argument, or lack thereof, for trying to dismantle the Department of Education. But Trump officials were undeterred. Last month, they moved the department’s core functions to other agencies and pulled billions of dollars from the department’s budget, much to Horne’s delight.

Trump officials also took aim at individual universities, like Columbia and Harvard, while the University of Arizona quietly took steps, like removing DEI-like policies and programs, to make sure they didn’t upset the president.

Columbia finally paid $221 million to get the Trump administration off its back in July, while Trump officials started targeting universities farther from the East Coast, like the University of Louisville and the University of Michigan, which offered scholarships to undocumented students.

The Arizona Board of Regents also scrubbed DEI from its policy portfolio, while trying to figure out how the Trump administration’s cuts would affect Arizona’s universities, which Regent Fred DuVal told us in July could strip away more than $100 million from state universities.

International students at Arizona State University were among those targeted by the Trump administration’s purge. ASU President Michael Crow wrote an op-ed about it, without saying even one critical word about Trump. (When we criticized Crow for not taking a more proactive stance, his public relations team threw a fit.)

The UA finally popped up on Trump’s radar in October, when federal officials offered a compact to the UA and eight other universities. It was a bit of a Faustian bargain: Agree to Trump’s political agenda and get better access to federal funding, or don’t sign it and put that funding in jeopardy.

Three weeks after the UA got the compact offer, UA President Suresh Garimella said the school couldn’t agree to the compact in its current form. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Crow was upset that ASU didn’t get the compact offer. He even wondered if Trump officials mixed up the UA and ASU when they sent out the offer.

After Trump declared Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization,” the College Republicans United group tried to get ASU students to report Antifa sightings to the FBI. The turnout was less than stellar. Just four people showed up.

And of course, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September put ASU back in the national limelight. Kirk often spoke at ASU and the school offered up a 14,000-seat arena for Kirk’s vigil.

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Learn more about Education Forward Arizona’s impact by watching the video below.

We highlighted a lot of cool kids this year. We even devoted an entire edition to students tackling cancer research and the housing shortage, learning algebra when they’re only 8 years old or competing in a robotics championship.

We titled that edition “What it’s really all about” because that’s a key thing to remember as we talk about lawmakers and officials debating, or outright arguing, over the funding and issues that shape students’ lives.