Peoria Unified School District and many other public schools in Arizona again have dodged a bullet with a state legislature vote to lift the aggregate expenditure limit for this school year.
The AEL is a constitutional amendment passed by Arizona voters in 1980 that created a spending limit for public school districts based on the aggregate expenditure of all districts in the state.
Without this recent legislative override, which required a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and Senate by March 1, Arizona public schools would have had to reduce spending this academic year by a total of more than $1.3 billion. This equates to a reduction in spending of about $52 million for Peoria Unified School District, which would have been forced to be cut from its budget on April 1.
