Two West Valley school districts asking voters to keep overrides

By Madeline Ackley
Twitter: @Mkayackley

Two Southwest Valley school districts are asking voters this November to continue their 15% maintenance and operations budget overrides, which provides millions every year in funding. 

Both Litchfield Elementary School District and Agua Fria Union High School District have overrides on the ballot for a special election on Nov. 2.  

Without that funding, districts warn critical programs could disappear. 

If passed, the overrides would continue to provide between $8 million and $9 million in funding, which is used to supplement teacher and staff pay, fine arts programs, alternative education and career and technical programs. 

Both districts emphasize that the overrides are not a new tax, but a continuation of the tax already in place for residents of both districts for nearly 30 years. 

At LESD, voters approved a maintenance and operations override of 10% every four years beginning in 1992 until 2013. 

A 15% override was passed in 2017, with the condition that the additional 5% would go toward teacher pay. 

The current ballot measure would continue to provide LESD with roughly $9.4 million a year for maintenance and operations, including maintaining staffing of special area teachers, instructional coaches, school nurses, student advisors, behavioral coaches and athletic programming. 

The money also will increase teacher pay and help with teacher recruitment and retention, according to the district. 

At AFUHSD, an approved override would continue to provide an estimated $8,224,899 for maintenance and operations purposes. 

Without an override, funding for programs such as fine arts, International Baccalaureate, JROTC, summer school and career and technical programs could be in jeopardy, the district said. 

 “I saw what that did to our community”

Kathryn Prusinski is chair of Continue the Quality, an organization campaigning to keep the overrides in place in the Litchfield and Agua Fria districts. 

Her role is a volunteer position, and though she’s now an empty nester, Prusinski remembers when a budget override failed in her daughter’s district seven years ago. 

In 2014, residents voted not to continue a 15% override in the Dysart Unified School District, resulting in a $6 million budget deficit.

“Within a matter of months, I saw what that did to our community,” Prusinski said. 

The district fired more than 140 teachers and slashed all-day kindergarten. At the time, Prusinski’s daughter was heavily involved in the arts, which was funded by district overrides.

The arts and other programs may have ended up on the cutting room floor, had the district not been able to pass another override the following November. 

But the damage had been done, Prusinski said. 

Parents started leaving the district and enrolling their kids in better-funded schools. 

“We lost so many great families to other educational options,” Prusinski said. “It took the district about five to six years...to fully recover from that.”

While Prusinski supports public education in its own right, she also thinks passing overrides makes sense from an economic standpoint. 

“It isn't a matter of politics...we all know that strong schools are foundational to strong communities,” she said. “Businesses want to move where there's a highly educated workforce.”

Goodyear resident Michael Finnegan is not moved by these arguments.

Finnegan relocated from Delaware to the Southwest Valley in 2017, and said he started paying closer attention to Litchfield Elementary School District governing board meetings in January. 

It was around that time that parents and community members began packing LESD governing board meetings in response to the district’s proposed equity statement, which was largely crafted behind closed doors.

This appearance of secrecy roused the suspicions of some parents, who accused the district of attempting to sneak critical race theory into the curriculum.   

The LESD governing board has denied its intention was to teach students critical race theory, but it was later admonished by the Arizona Attorney General's Office for not acting more transparently. 

This was one reason Finnegan has taken issue with the override. He finds the LESD governing board--the body largely in charge of dictating how district funds are spent--untrustworthy and incapable.

“After watching and listening, I’ve found the school board dysfunctional,” he said, adding that he believes the district should focus on making sure students understand reading and math rather than “the current ideology that’s in fashion.”

Aside from his issues with the board, he also said public school districts are “addicted to overrides,” and are not underfunded, but “flush with funding,” mentioning the tranches of federal dollars school districts received to make up for learning loss during the pandemic. 

“They’ve been well-funded by taxpayers for so long, and taxpayers haven’t gotten the results they’d like to see,” he said. He thinks if the override fails, it could serve as a wake-up call for the district. 

Finnegan also said he believes claims that positions and programs will be eliminated if the override fails are tactics to scare parents into voting ‘yes.’ 

“Stop the overrides, stop funding their addiction for more money...make them stop and pause,” he said.

“I don’t think that more money is the answer to the problem of improving academic performance, and I don’t think money has been the bottleneck to it either,” he said. 

Prusinski has heard these ideas before--that districts have enough money but are simply wasting it or spending it on things that aren’t beneficial to students. 

“One of the arguments that people always make is that the schools have all this money and they’re mismanaging their funds, Prusinski said. “I would challenge anyone who believes that to get involved and look at the budget.”

“School districts are not wasting funds,” she said. “They're simply underfunded”

Madeline Ackley can be reached at mackley@iniusa.org or found on Twitter @Mkayackley.