Tom Horne Superintendent | Arizona Department of Education
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne criticized comments made by the governor’s spokesman regarding the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, calling them an insult to state employees. Horne said, “The governor’s spokesman has demeaned state employees by calling ESA professionals a ‘wasteful bureaucracy.’ Defining people as waste is a terrible insult. No matter what her personal opposition, the ESA program exists to give parents’ choice when local schools don’t meet their children’s needs, and people are needed to serve those parents. That is not wasteful; it is essential.”
During recent legislative testimony, John Ward, director of the ESA program, provided details about its scale and staffing. He stated that the program distributed $869 million in Fiscal Year 2025, which is $100 million more than what the Arizona Department of Education allocates for all federal programs across the state. The department employs 300 staff members to manage federal programs, while only 40 employees oversee the larger ESA workload.
Ward also described how enrollment in the ESA program has increased from around 11,000 accounts in 2011 to over 90,000 currently. Despite this growth and a budget that has risen from $100 million to nearly $1 billion, no additional staff have been assigned to support the expanded responsibilities.
Ward told lawmakers, “We are always in survival mode. Our main responsibility is to get students who want to be in the program into the program, to review their purchases and to provide customer service. That is our core mission, that is what we are focused on.”
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