By Larry Bodine, LD18 Chair
Pima County School Superintendent Dustin Williams spoke at the April 25, 2023 meeting of LD18 Democrats. He warned that disruptions of school board meetings are attacks on LGBTQ and trans students. He also said that 51,000 students have left public schools, to use school vouchers to attend private and religious schools. Vouchers are taking $400 million away from public schools, and the cost will rise to $1 billion in two to three years.
Disruptions at school boards
“Our office is very busy and very much in tune with what’s happening in our schools. And there aren’t a lot of voices that have spoken up for the schools because there have been a lot of voices speaking against schools, particularly our LGBTQ plus non-binary students. Also, with notions of certain types of teaching,” he said.
For further information, see:
• Pima GOP disrupts Catalina Foothills School District board meeting
• Threats of violence force Tucson school district to cancel board meeting
“There has to be another voice that’s louder than the other voice right now that’s happening. We can’t allow these people to dictate our meetings, and we, most importantly, can’t allow them to instill fear.”
“They’re this whole little click base that goes around just causing these problems. I, quite honestly, am not a hundred percent sure if they know what they are actually discussing. Sometimes the questions and voicemails that we’re taking in conversations at my office that I’ll get on a daily there’s no proof to any of this.
It is just so mind-boggling to me. Some of my good mentors are in the industry. They don’t want me to use the words, and I’m just going to say it because it’s Critical Race Theory will be one. They just don’t like us using that anymore. And they don’t want the politicians saying that because they say it’s validating what they’re trying to say.
And it could be, I don’t know. But the reality is I’ve been doing education for over 25 years, and the K-12 system, this is just non-existent. If there were really an issue, we would start to see some real truth, factual knowledge to this. The other thing is I was you go to schools and kids have been using bathrooms for however, they’ve wanted to use bathrooms for the last many years, and we’ve been doing just fine.”
So now that all of a sudden, we have this outcry. That we are grooming kids or we’re transforming the way a student thinks by talking about their social-emotional learning is, it’s really just flabbergasting, to be honest. How they just fully believe this ideology. But at the same token, if you look at the predominant person, they vote for president, which is more than likely Donald Trump. Sometimes talking to those people, it almost feels brainwashed, and the fact that you just can’t have a conversation, open dialogue.”
$400 million for school vouchers
“The number’s approaching 51,000 kids that are under the voucher system. Approximately 75% of them are probably private schools. I say probably because the Horne administration won’t give me that data, they will not break that data down from private school vouchers to homeschool vouchers. And that’s a transparency problem.
“But the problem is if I can’t track students knowing how they’re doing or if they’re not going to be set to the same standards and, rules as a district school for taking taxpayer dollars, I just don’t think that’s very fair.
“We’re approaching somewhere around $300 to $400 million. they talk about us approaching $1 billion in 10 years. It’s easily going to be somewhere around two to three years if this trend continues under these vouchers that just have absolutely no accountability whatsoever.
What we were trying to find out is what is that percentage, how many of the 51,000 are coming directly to a private school, and how many of those 51,000 are directly in the homeschool system?
But the reality is private schools still do not have to accept anyone. They don’t want. And then number two, poor families can’t pay the difference. So, if it’s $12,000 to attend the private school and you’re only getting $7,000, then who’s going to pay the difference between that 6, 7, or $5,000?