Maricopa County school boards likely to get more conservative in the next 4 years

School boards across Maricopa County are likely to gain more conservative members over the next four years.

Republican Shelli Boggs won her race for Maricopa County superintendent in the 2024 election. Her campaign website said she “got started in Arizona politics” when she saw “the invasion of radical politics into the classroom.”

She supports removing taxpayer dollars from public education, supports universal vouchers, and was endorsed by anti-trans rights activist Riley Gaines.

She also now has the ability to appoint replacements on all school boards within the county.

How school board vacancies are replaced

Every school district in Arizona has a governing board. Those positions are elected, and those who serve as school board members are unpaid volunteers. When those volunteers leave their positions before their terms are over, there isn’t an immediate election to name a successor.

A similar power to fill vacancies is held by the governor. If Sens. Mark Kelly or Ruben Gallego were to resign or were otherwise unable to serve the rest of their term, Hobbs would appoint their replacement.

Arizona law states that the appointee in those cases must be of the same political party as the person vacating the office. This prevents Democrats from replacing Republicans with Democrats and vice versa.

However, school board elections are nonpartisan. Voters don’t choose Republicans or Democrats to serve on the board. They have to dig a little deeper to know who the candidate is and what they stand for—and superintendents can fill vacancies with people they agree with, no matter who last held the position.

What’s happened so far

Dajana Zlaticanin, the chief deputy school superintendent, said Boggs is prioritizing appointing people to vacant school board seats when possible.

Boggs first focused on filling the vacancy she left at the East Valley Institute of Technology (EVIT) when her campaign for superintendent started. She appointed Jayson Hunt and Jared Hancock on Feb. 11 to fill the two vacant EVIT board seats.

With the EVIT vacancies filled, Boggs will start to accept letters of interest and schedule interviews for the Queen Creek Unified school board, Zlaticanin said.

“She wants somebody who is dedicated to the betterment of education and wants to make sure they have a history of interest [in education],” Zlaticanin said. “The goal is to reduce the high turnover in school boards and ensure school boards know what they’re doing.”

It’s possible that Boggs could appoint liberal people to vacant school board seats, but it’s likely she will appoint other conservative people with similar anti-public school and anti-LGBTQ+ rights beliefs.

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Beth Lewis, executive director for Save Our Schools Arizona—a nonpartisan, pro-public education advocacy group—said former county Superintendent Steve Watson didn’t appoint egregiously anti-public education people to school boards, but she believes there will be a shift in that under Boggs.

Boggs has stated strong support for school choice. Right now, Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program allows any of Arizona’s 1.2 million K-12 students to use public tax dollars that were initially allocated for public education to pay for private school tuition or to use in their homeschool program.

“When those decisions are made by someone who doesn’t support public education it’s very dangerous,” Lewis said. “We’ve seen what happened in those school boards with anti-public education school board members. It leads to chaos.”

“I think it’s fair to say that a baseline qualification for school board [candidates] is supporting public schools,” Lewis said.

Right-wing ties

Boggs is listed as the state outreach coordinator for Moms for Arizona, a right-wing education advocacy organization. It is part of the nonprofit Moms for America.

Moms for Arizona says on its website that part of its mission is to “advance thought-provoking practices and stop the anti-intellectual and anti-American movement we see in education today.”

Boggs was also in Washington DC on Feb. 5 when President Donald Trump signed the latest in a series of executive orders targeting transgender Americans. This one aims to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports.

In Boggs’ Moms for Arizona bio, it says she made the decision to leave teaching due to the “extreme rise of far-left politics taking over the school districts after COVID shut down the country.”

“Should appointments go south and anti-public education people get appointed, I think it’s important to get engaged and make sure people are able to shine a light on what’s happening,” Lewis said.