(The Center Square) – Arizona Senate Democrats are still calling for an audit into the Arizona Department of Education’s management of $29 million in Title I funds.
The funds in question were leftover from the Title I school improvement funds for years 2021, 2022 and 2023. In order for these funds to be used, they have to be allocated by the Arizona Department of Education. Twenty-four million dollars of those funds were not allocated to any district and $5 million had been allocated, but the districts did not spend them in time.
In a September Joint Legislative Audit Committee meeting, legislators played a partisan blame game and facts were muddled, with Democrats claiming that Horne mismanaged these funds and Republicans stating that the potential loss of these funds was due to the prior administration. Democrats in the committee meeting argued that even if it was the prior administration’s fault, Horne had a responsibility to be aware of this and inform the school districts on what was happening.
During the committee meeting, Horne said that the deadline to get a waiver for these funds was in July 2022 which was before he took office. That ended up not being true. Recent clarification from Doug Nick, director of communications for the Arizona Department of Education, said that the date listed by Horne was actually an internal deadline for allocation of the funds that the DOE had implemented.
The allocation deadline was missed due to the misconduct of an employee who was dismissed in March 2023 at which point it came to Horne’s attention that these funds were never allocated.
Under federal restrictions, there was no deadline for the funds to be allocated. The only deadline was September 2023 at which point the funds expired. Nick said that it would not have been possible to allocate and use any of those funds within those six months due to the Department’s own deadlines.
ADOE was able to retain that $29 million by requesting a waiver for the funds from the U.S. Department of Education. According to Nick, while the process of waivers has been in place for a while, a waiver application for these particular funds did not exist until the U.S. Department of Education announced it in August of this year.
Arizona Senate Democrats released a statement saying that although the waiver application for these funds did not exist, Horne should have reached out to the U.S. Department of Education at some point after the September 2023 deadline.
“It was clear during the audit committee that Tom Horne never had any intention of being forthcoming with truthful information regarding the missed deadline,” Sen. Catherine Miranda stated. “I applaud the U.S. Department of Education for informing the Arizona Department of Education that there was a mechanism to retrieve the funds and for reviving the $29 million expired Title I funds, despite the failure of Horne’s leadership.”
At this time, the ADOE is still determining how they will allocate the retained funds, but Sen. Juan Mendez said that he will be keeping a close eye on how the ADOE utilizes federal funds from now on.
“I am grateful these dollars have been revived by the federal government and I can promise that our caucus will be watching intently over the process that ADE will use to disperse them,” Mendez said. “Our schools must be made whole again.”
