Homeschool moms in Arizona are suing the state over pencils, and books, and flashcards, and erasers.
They are just some of the standard classroom materials needed – that the state suddenly and arbitrarily banned them from purchasing with their state-allotted Empowerment Scholarship Account funds.
It is the Goldwater Institute that is helping them.
“ESAs allow parents to use a portion of their children’s allotted state funding to purchase books, school supplies, and other curriculum materials that they can use to educate their children. Under the law, parents can then submit their expenses to the state for reimbursement. But over the summer, AG [Kris] Mayes conjured up an illegal new rule requiring that to qualify for reimbursement, each of those purchases must be explicitly called for in a curriculum,” the legal team said.
For homeschool moms Velia Aguirre and Rosemary McAfee “that meant no pencils, no erasers, no poster of the periodic table of elements, no flashcards, and no classic educational books like ‘Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?’—unless they could sink hours into tracking down or coming up with various ‘curricula’ that explicitly call for each and every book title or material’s use.”
The charges include that Mayes “twisted the law to change the rules of the program, imposing an absurd new burden on ESA parents blocking their purchases of everything from kids’ books to the Constitution,” the institute reported.
“The law is clear: ESA families have the right to use these educational materials without being forced to justify to the attorney general or state bureaucrats why they’re buying pencils or picking individual books for their children,” explained Goldwater Institute lawyer John Thorpe.
Aguirre noted, “The government is changing the rules and putting impossible burdens on me.” She said she is “individualizing” her children’s school days, meaning her curriculum is constantly changing.
“All of a sudden, we have a government telling us, ‘Here’s one more thing for the list,'” said McAfee.
She has nine children, seven in the program.
“I feel like the AG clearly doesn’t have any interest in what an education looks like for a homeschool child.”
The legal team pointed out that public and private schools don’t list “pencils” or “erasers” in their curriculum, either.
Further, the institute noted, “the AG’s new mandate simply ignores state law and violates the Department of Education’s own handbook, which safeguards the ESA program by requiring documentation for unusual purchases, but not for common-sense purchases of items that are ‘generally known to be educational.'”
The lawsuit challenges the “wrong-headed” demands and seeks a court order to allow parents to run homeschool classes without undue paperwork.
