Could Kirsten Engel’s passion for public education propel her to Congress?

It was the ‘draconian’ cuts in public education that so upset Kirsten Engel as a mom that she decided to run for political office, first as a member of the Arizona House of Representatives and then as a state Senator. Now, she aims for Congress.

When her daughter Helene, now a college student, was in an Arizona public school, Engel could see first-hand what years of siphoning taxpayer dollars into the private school voucher program had exacted on the state’s classrooms. She wasn’t happy about it.

“I saw they had a real shortage of teachers, so they were combining classrooms,” said Engel, who is now in a tight race to unseat Rep Juan Ciscomani in Arizona’s 6th Congressional District.

“I recall showing up on the first day of class and seeing that they were putting two classrooms together because they had just had a late cancellation of one of the teachers,” she told The Copper Courier in an interview. “And putting 35 first graders into one classroom is just not a great learning experience.”

On top of that, Engel could see through Helene all the ways the school was trying to save money to the detriment of enriching the students academically.

“Canceling things like field trips to the science museum and other things … So that kind of laboring under those restrictions, it just really, really sets the kids behind and makes it more difficult to excel. And right now, it couldn’t be more important to have those resources for our kids,” she noted.

“We’re just starting to build back after the pandemic and this generation of kids have been profoundly affected by the pandemic. Anything we can do to make sure they have the consistency, the stability of the teachers, the mentors, the counselors in schools will make a huge difference for their futures.”

Engel places the blame on Arizona former Governor Doug Ducey for leading the charge to gut funding for the state’s public schools.

“We have struggled for years here in Arizona and the Republicans and my opponent’s boss, Doug Ducey, cut millions of dollars out of K-12 as well as higher education,” Engel told The Copper Courier.

Arizona now rates 49th in state spending per public school student, which is just  $10,090 versus the national average of $17, 280 per pupil.

The state also suffers from a huge teacher shortage. Arizona has the third largest number of vacant teaching positions in the country and the state ranks 25th in terms of teacher pay with teachers earning just an average of $58,000.

Engel sees Ciscomani, who she is currently trying to replace, as complicit in the attack on public education. He was hired by Ducey as a senior policy advisor in 2015 and serves on the board and is also the former governor of The Patriot Academy, a private Christian fundamentalist organization that trains students.

When Arizona’s school voucher program, named the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (originally started in 1998), it only covered scholarships for students who couldn’t afford tuition, at that time. Then in 2011, it was expanded as a school choice program for qualified students to access private or special needs education.

But after former Governor Doug Ducey took office, along with a Republican-led legislature, he ended most of the requirements that students had to meet in order to qualify for subsidized private tuition.

Arizona introduced the most expansive school voucher program in the country in 2022 when Ducey signed House Bill 2853 into law. The result has been an explosion of spending on school vouchers to the tune of $822 million for the 73,000 students now receiving them and has created a massive hole in the state budget.

“Our public tax dollars should be reserved for our public schools,” Engel said. “They should not be going to private or parochial schools over which we have no oversight or monitoring.”

“There have been a lot of abuses of these voucher systems. They have not been tracked. There is very little oversight of how well children are doing in our private schools. There’s no school testing. All the checks and balances and accountability mechanisms that we have over our public schools are missing.”

Now, Engel hopes for the chance to fight for funding for public education at the federal level.

“Congress has an important role in higher education and I know that some of the budget bills that the Republicans had voted for, including my opponent, included some large cuts to public education funding such as Title 1,” she said.

Title 1 provides federal dollars to schools which have at least 40% of their student populations who come from low income families. Those dollars can be used for programs to serve the entire student body or to aid specific students who need help academically.

“A large number of our schools here in Arizona need that Title 1 funding, so we have to make sure that the funding is there and that we also have funding for special education, something that I don’t believe the government has always come through for.”