Jenny Clark, an Arizona mother of five and Arizona State Board of Education member, joins the Students Over Systems podcast to discuss the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs). Jenny shares the education options her family uses, dispels ESA myths perpetuated by teachers unions and their supporters, and explains the importance of parent engagement when implementing education freedom programs. She also describes how her organization, Love Your School, helps families navigate school choice options in Arizona and beyond.
TRANSCRIPT
Ginny Gentles:
Today on Students Over Systems, we’re celebrating education freedom in Arizona and beyond. Jenny Clark joins us to discuss tools to help parents access Education Savings Account. Welcome to Students Over Systems, a podcast that celebrates education freedom. I’m your host, Ginny Gentles. At Students Over Systems, we talk with the creators, advocates and beneficiaries of education freedom. On today’s episode, we’re focusing on Arizona’s School choice story. For this important conversation, we’re joined by Jenny Clark, an Arizona native, mother of five children, and founder of Love Your School. Jenny attended her local Arizona District School from K-12, and then continued on to the University of Arizona. She was appointed by former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey to the Arizona State Board of Education back in January of 2022. She’s a member of the Conservative Education Reform Network, a 50CAN Fellow and a Club for Growth Fellow. Today, she utilizes a variety of schooling options for her family, we’ll talk about that in today’s conversation, and loves helping other families navigate their options to find the best fit for their children. Jenny, thank you so much for joining us.
Jenny Clark:
Thanks so much for having me. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, Jenny, before we delve into your personal experience with School Choice and a little more details as to what’s going on with School Choice in Arizona and beyond, I’d like to delve into the big issue that’s being talked about today, and that is Education Savings Account. Arizona kicked it off years ago. We talk about that a lot on Students Over Systems. But before we proceed, let’s not assume that everybody knows what an Education Savings Account is, or you guys call them, I think, Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Tell us a little bit about ESAs.
Jenny Clark:
Yeah, absolutely. So ESAs are essentially a scholarship that parents have access to for their qualifying students in Arizona. That’s kindergarten through 12th grade. Previously, those ESAs were limited and only open to families in certain demographics. Of course, now they’re universal. They allow families to take 90% of the state proportion, the state funding, and direct that scholarship to the education environment that works best for their kids. That can be a private school, that can be home education, that can be a micro school, a cottage school and anything in between.
Ginny Gentles:
All right, well, so does your family use ESAs?
Jenny Clark:
We do. We do. So all five of my children have benefited from an ESA. A little bit about my story getting into all that, when we first got on ESA, which has been, gosh, five years ago now, I was really disappointed because I found out, and at the time my kids qualified because they were students with disabilities, four or five of our kids are students with a qualifying disability, that we would’ve qualified for the ESA years before, and nobody told us about it. I had a child in the Arizona Early Intervention Program. We transitioned to services at the public school when he was three years old, and we would’ve qualified for an ESA way back then. Of course, we were struggling to pay for all those therapies and all those different things, and an ESA would’ve been really beneficial for us. We work really hard in Arizona at Love Your School to make sure that what happened to our family doesn’t happen to other families, that they know about what their options are for their kids.
Ginny Gentles:
We think about these programs being in existence for so long, and it’s surprised looking back that they stayed so small for so long. But ESAs in Arizona, no longer small in part because of the universal eligibility, but also in part because of what you’re doing to spread the word. So let’s see. You’re using ESAs. I believe that there’s a homeschooling background or at least support for homeschooling in your families. Can you tell us a little bit about why homeschoolers should support ESAs?
Jenny Clark:
Yes, absolutely. So we are former what we call capital H Homeschoolers. We were a homeschooling family with a homeschool affidavit on file prior to doing an online charter school and then joining an ESA for our kids. Again, that was five years ago. We really believe that homeschoolers should support ESAs because we should support choice. We should support the freedom of families to choose what’s best for their children. Of course, ESAs are just one of many options. So we have a lot of homeschoolers in Arizona that have chosen to leave the homeschool affidavit world and come over and receive an Empowerment Scholarship for their children and receive those dollars to educate their children. But we have some homeschoolers that decide that, you know what? They don’t want to participate for one reason or another, and that’s okay.
That’s fine. We support those choices on either side, but what we want is for all families, including homeschoolers, to support the option, right, the choice. There’s been lots of fantastic writing and research out there. Goldwater Institute did a nice write-up about why homeschoolers should support ESAs and really took a deep dive looking at has it added increased restrictions to homeschooling families? No. Are they allowed to control your curriculum when you’re on an ESA, secular versus religious or these types of things? No, they’re not. Have any states increased regulations on homeschoolers because the state has an ESA? No, that’s not the case. So we really like to debunk those myths when we have homeschoolers come to us. But ultimately, we want families to have the choice.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, we’re all about debunking school choice myths, dispelling the myths here at Students Over Systems. We’re also all about bill design. You have to have an intentional effort to ensure that those protections are put into place when the programs are created. But a lot of the myths that are swirling around are perpetuated by people who probably didn’t read the bill or the law and don’t understand how things are being implemented. So I’d imagine that’s a big part of what you do, making sure that people understand what the protections are. So what are the specific protections in Arizona? Does it just happen that the state’s not controlling the homeschoolers curriculum, or is that an intentional part of the program?
Jenny Clark:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So in Arizona, the ESA students are actually a completely separate category under the law. That was a big piece of the original design 10 plus years ago that you have the legal statutes and the Arizona revised statutes in Title XV that talk about what is a homeschooler, what do they look like, how are they identified and what do they have to do? Of course, Arizona has a fantastic law and freedom around homeschooling, and then the ESAs are over here and they’re completely separate. So that’s a really important piece of any legislation and policy in the statutes is that you have those definitions and that they are separated, that they’re not in any way tied together.
Then Arizona statutes also talk pretty extensively about what the state can and cannot do as it relates to curriculum and guiding the curriculum for homeschooled or private school families and also then those apply for ESA families. So you have these very different categories, and you have those protections around how the scholarships can be used. Of course, with recent Supreme Court cases and different things like that, which are technical, we don’t have to get into, but with recent cases, we’ve seen, “Hey, you can’t say only secular curriculum or secular schools or these types of organizations are allowed to use government funds or apply for government grants or participate in those programs,” and some of that applies to ESAs as well.
Ginny Gentles:
Okay. So bill design, important. Dispelling myths, important. Unfortunately, you have a lot of opposition and a lot of myths swirling around in your state because the governor is very opposed to the ESA program. What’s going on there? I know that there was late breaking news, “Her office projects that ESA vouchers,” which, okay, that alone is not the right terminology, but, “ESAs costs will hit 943 million with 320 million in unbudgeted costs that will force cuts to public schools and more.” That’s from your friends over at, I think it’s called Save Our Schools Arizona. What’s going on with Save Our Schools Arizona and the governor there?
Jenny Clark:
Well, Save Our Schools Arizona is so interesting. They’ve been around since I’ve been around in this movement. When they were first trying to stop Universal ESA back in 2018, that turned into a proposition that failed at the ballot. Of course, now four years later, we’re almost a year in to Universal ESA. So the public has definitely shifted in their support of some of these organizations, and I think that’s important to know first. Second, a lot of these organizations really are fundamentally against the idea of parent choice. I don’t want to want to minimize their arguments, the main arguments that they have, which I think we have really great responses for on our side are that somehow these programs are going to hurt the Arizona State budget or somehow that they’re going to defund the public school system. So let’s take the public school system one. In Arizona, money has always followed the student. We have open enrollment in Arizona. I know not all states have that.
So if you leave one public school and go to another public school, the public school that that student left does not continue to receive funds for that student the next year that they’re not there. We know that, that’s basic. The exact same thing is happening with the ESA. The money is following the student, which we argue that it should. The only benefit actually to the state, or one of the benefits I should say, to the state is that it’s only 90% of the state funding. So every student that chooses to go on an ESA and maybe exits the public school system because it’s not the best fit for them, they’re actually saving the state money. So when we dig into the issue of the defining the public school piece, and of course we’ve got this separate argument about the state budget, we really have to ask ourselves why would one student leaving or even a couple students leaving a school district somehow defund that school unless that money was somehow being pooled in such a way where it wasn’t really about the money attached to the individual child’s education.
Then of course, in Arizona, our joint legislative budget committee just came out with numbers this week that talked about the total funding right now per student in Arizona, inflation adjusted is $15,000 a student. So the idea that somehow schools are being defunded because less than 1% of school eligible students are on an ESA, it really just doesn’t hold water. Then just very quickly on the Arizona State budget side, that can get a little bit more technical, but essentially, Arizona has continued to budget for a certain level of enrollment in the public school system. A lot of those students left the system during COVID, and they did end up homeschooling and they did maybe go to a private school. Some of them returned to public school, we know that, but some of them remained in these new and these different alternative environments.
But Arizona funding and our budgeting has still continued to increase as if those students are still enrolled in the public school system. So it’s just really inaccurate and not true to say that it’s somehow going to hurt Arizona’s budget. Essentially, if all of those students did go back to the public school system, they didn’t choose an ESA, they left the private school that maybe they’re going to, they left the home education environment and they all went back to the public school, we all know that Save Our Schools Arizona wouldn’t say a thing. They’d be totally fine and totally happy with that. So really, the heart of their argument is not about the funding, the defunding of the schools, or the state budget, supposedly, it’s really just about the location of the kids. They believe that those kids should only be in a public school environment and if they’re not in that environment, that they are somehow not worthy of the scholarship, and that’s really unfortunate.
Ginny Gentles:
Okay, so we are talking about less than 1% of Arizona students participating in the program at this point. There are 1.1 million K-12 students in the state, and the latest numbers I saw on the Arizona Department of Education website indicated that about 63,000 students are participating in the ESA program. A little bit more about those students. Before we dig into what Love Your School is offering and helping parents with, you have been very open about the fact that you have students with special needs. Looking at the quarterly reports on the ESA program, it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of students who don’t have special needs who are getting these ESAs. Then there are quite a few who have what looks like extreme special needs who are receiving larger amounts of funding with their ESA. Tell us how that works.
Jenny Clark:
Yeah, so Arizona’s ESA, I think, is one of the best designed ESA programs because our funding is not a flat amount just for any student like maybe some other states. It’s based on our state funding formula. So in Arizona, of course, if a child has a disability, that disability which has to be done through the Child Find process denotes that that school would normally receive additional funds for that student. The ESA is tied to that same formula. So for example, of one of my kids that has dyslexia, their ESA is higher than my neurotypical child with no disability or diagnosis by about 800 to $1,000. So if you look at those 13 disability categories, it goes all the way up to autism or MDSSI, which is multiple disabilities severe sensory impairment. So some of the families on an ESA do have students that are in those disability categories and they receive around $30,000 per year.
What’s really amazing is that, again, that’s only 90% and what those parents can do with those ESA awards compared to what maybe their child was getting in their traditional school environment or system, it’s absolutely incredible. They’re able to try all sorts of incredible therapies and tutors and programming for their students that quite frankly, their children would never have access to in the public school system and that only really wealthy families had access to. So that’s why those numbers are designated by category. It’s why unfortunately, sometimes Save Our Schools and opponents of the ESA program mix up the numbers and try to say that the average is higher than it is. They’re lumping in those kids with the higher award amounts, but that’s how it works in Arizona.
Ginny Gentles:
Okay. I am so eager to hear about Love Your School because as we started this conversation, programs don’t really matter if parents don’t know about them. It’s so important to get implementation, and a big part of getting implementation is informing parents. So what is Love Your School, and what are the services that you’re providing?
Jenny Clark:
Absolutely. So I started Love Your School after the loss of our Universal ESA battle the first time in 2018. I was brand new to the ESA program. The program was just completely revolutionary for our family, and then it was really small. There was only about 6,000 students on the program, and I was disappointed and discouraged about a few things. One, just the sheer negativity from anti-school choice groups like Save Our Schools, Red Fred, all the folks in Arizona, and I was disturbed by it. I really felt like parents need help and saying, “No, this is the only choice that you can have, and if you don’t meet these small little qualifying categories, you just can’t be on an ESA.” Because I had parents reaching out to me all the time. I was that mom on the playground making friends, and all of a sudden, we’re talking about ESA.
I had so many moms come to me and say, “Hey, my child has severe depression or anxiety or is being bullied, can they get on an ESA?” I would have to say, “Unfortunately, not right now. We don’t have Universal,” and they would struggle to get their children evaluated or to have a diagnosis that qualified them for an ESA. Even at the school level, these kids were really struggling. So it was very disturbing to me and I wanted to do something about it. I also felt like parents just need help. Our family needed help navigating the ESA, navigating our options, knowing what was out there. Like I said, we didn’t even know about the ESA and we qualified for it years earlier, and nobody told us about it. So we wanted to create a nonprofit organization that was hyper-focused on parents and supporting parents regardless of their socioeconomic status, regardless of their political background, regardless of what school environment that they believe is best for their child.
We support parents in the public school system all the time through evaluations and navigating what their choices are, just so they know. Sometimes they do choose to stay in the public school system. Other times they may want to try different option like an ESA. So that was the vision behind Love Your School. I just knew that I needed help and I’d wished I had it, and thankfully, now we get to help thousands of families a year know what their choices are. We walk through really difficult situations with them, but we educate them through that process so at the end of our service with them, they know their choices and their options. We’re really multiplying the number of families across the state that know how to talk about school choice.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, I’ve seen some program statistics that you’ve put out there, and you’re not joking when you say thousands of families. You indicated it’s about 31 a day, over 6,000 families helped by Love Your School in the last six months and then over 4,000 family concerns solved by Love Your School. 20 a day. Who are they reaching when they contact your organization? You have parent support specialists?
Jenny Clark:
Yes. So I remember back in the day when I first started that first year, and honestly through the second year, it was just me. I would be taking phone calls all the time, in the evenings, on the weekends, on Sundays. A lot of times it would just be someone texting me saying, “Hey, I got your phone number from somebody else.” So we really bootstrapped it those first couple of years, and I used to do all those parent calls. Thankfully, moving into year three, which was 2022, we were able to start getting some contractors and some more parents that were able to help just with all of the intake of calls that we get. I remember when I was looking at my stats and I’m like, “Okay, when I calculate all this up, I’m talking with and supporting an average of two families a day and I’m exhausted.”
Now if you look at our numbers, it’s just crazy, but it’s very exciting. So families reach out to us several different ways. A lot of families actually reach out to us through social media. They send us a DMM on Instagram or Facebook Messenger. We have a lot that go to our website, and then we have forms. We’ve rechanged our website a million times based on parent needs and usage, but now we have it right there in front, like, “If you need help, click here, we’ll get it to you.” Then we’ve got a really great CRM on the background. So when all of those requests come through, those phone calls, those referrals, we immediately find out what the core issue is that the parent’s coming to us about. Are they coming for basic school search? Do they have questions about school options?
Do they need to know about ESAs or tax credits? Are they wanting to walk through the special education evaluation process and just curious about that? Then our team, we ticket those to the appropriate team member that has an expertise in that area. Then we follow up with all families within 48 hours to just start the conversation. Sometimes families we talk to for 15 minutes on the phone, they’ve got what they need, and they’re on their way. Other families we work with months and months and months. We’ve had families that we’ve worked with for over nine months because they’re navigating really difficult, extremely challenging situations in the school system, and they need support for that long. We are just honored to be able to do that and to be able to do it for free for those families.
Ginny Gentles:
All right, so Love Your School is primarily in Arizona. Are you expanding to other states?
Jenny Clark:
Well, we hope so. We are in West Virginia also. We launched there in January of 2022 as well because of the fantastic Hope Scholarship there and the need for more marketing around the Hope Scholarship, the need for more parents support in West Virginia. Our team in West Virginia also launched a really fun podcast in West Virginia called We Have Hope to just help expose families to the choices, to the diversity of options that are out there and start to build a culture around school choice and bridge the imagination gap is what we like to call it.
We’ve had an Arizona for a long time. We’ve got a lot of really neat things here. We want to make sure that other states are aware of those choices, and we want to get some of these amazing education service providers in other states too, to serve these ESA families. So right now, Love Your School is in Arizona and West Virginia. We are hoping to launch into three more states in the coming year, but we’re waiting on all sorts of things. Of course, funding being a big part of that as anyone in the nonprofit space is aware of.
Ginny Gentles:
Definitely. All right, let’s get a little bit wonky before we wrap up with our final question. Stakeholder involvement is important-
Jenny Clark:
Yes.
Ginny Gentles:
… when you’re talking about any good public policy or high-quality implementation of programs. It’s also really hard, especially when you’re talking about parents and figuring out at a state level how to engage appropriately and regularly with parents. You sit on the state board of education, so you’re seeing this from all angles. What is your recommendation for Arizona and beyond in stakeholder management, particularly when it comes to parents?
Jenny Clark:
Well, first of all, you can never have too much stakeholder involvement and engagement. I know that as these programs grow, that can feel scary and daunting for appointed officials, elected officials because it’s a lot. But parents that are in these programs, they know what they need more than anybody else. I’ll never forget just being so new to this movement, and I was in a situation once where people were like, “Oh, yeah, this one system is amazing. It’s fantastic, it’s wonderful.” I’m like, “Hey, I’m an actual ESA parent, and that particular thing doesn’t work for me,” and everyone was surprised. So that’s the whole point here, right? It’s like we want to hold the government accountable and the government is the one that’s running these programs, and we want them to do it well. We want it to be efficient, but ultimately, it needs to work for the families that it was designed for. So that’s the whole value of the stakeholder engagement.
So at the state board meetings the last couple of months, there’s been a lot of challenges with Arizona’s ESA program. Parents came out by the hundreds, and they gave written feedback, they gave in-person feedback, and they’ve just been amazing. I may not agree even with all the parents that are giving feedback or the things that they’re worried about or concerned about, may not always be my concerns, but they need a place to be able to do that. They need to share because they know the program better than anyone else. So a few just practical things, I love, love, love surveying parents and having really detailed and good surveys that can produce really good metrics. You do that on a very regular basis, every two weeks or every four weeks to your customers. That’s what the private world does. You have a customer, you have to keep the customer, you want to know what’s working and what’s not working. That’s really important.
Actual virtual or in-person events with these families where you’re getting to talk to them hopefully face-to-face so you can understand the intricacies of their situation and how they’re utilizing the program, it may be only 500 parents are having the issue, but it’s still 500 parents and their voice deserves to be heard. Sometimes a very small tweak in a law or in a rule can just unlock something that’s really important for their family. We’ve seen that in Arizona in the past related to rulemaking, which falls under the state board and some of the ways that things were worded that were really hindering families that had a student with a disability and what they could purchase and what they could access for their student. So stakeholder meetings, gathering actual surveyed feedback, and then really providing a public place for families to be able to give their feedback. Arizona did not always have that option. A couple of years ago, certain aspects of Arizona’s ESA program came under the Arizona State Board of Education.
It provided an opportunity for families to have their voices heard publicly instead of just giving feedback to a department who at the time really wasn’t interested in the feedback. We were able to air our concerns publicly, and that made a huge difference. Arizona also has one final thing, we have an appeal process where a parent is allowed to appeal a decision that’s made by the department, an administrative decision made by the department if they disagree with it. It goes through our Office of Administrative Hearings process, that’s really important too. Because again, and I’ve done that process twice for my own kids, there’s ways that you want to use the program and sometimes the government says no. But when everyone really digs down into the process and something like an appeal happens, then we can really get to the root of it of, “Is this actually disallowed based on the law or rule? If it’s not, it should be allowed.” So those are three or four things that I really recommend for other states.
Ginny Gentles:
All right. Thank you for that. Final question we always ask our guests, and we’ve been touching on this topic throughout this conversation, what is the school choice or education freedom myth that bothers you the most and that you want to dispel today?
Jenny Clark:
Oh, my gosh, there’s so many, Jenny, I can’t pick just one. I think the biggest one for me is that ESA programs, even though they call them vouchers, we know that that’s not the case, that they somehow hurt or through funding or other things, that they somehow hurt the kids that are still left at the public school. I went to public school, I graduated from my public school that’s just like five miles down the street, and I love public schools. Public schools can be a fantastic fit for thousands of families, but they’re not the right fit for everybody. If we really drill down into those arguments and we really understand how these ESA programs work, how they benefit students, how our state funding works, there’s no reason to be fearful that somehow kids are just going to be leaving the public school system in droves the moment that an ESA program happens or goes into place and that that somehow might hurt your students that’s in a public school system and that system’s working for your child.
You get to keep your student there in that public school system, but other kids need choices and options and ESAs don’t hurt those students left behind. In fact, there’s been a lot of really great reports that talk about the state and local dollars that are actually still going to the school even when enrollment drops, so that when ESA students depart that there’s actually more funding per student that’s left behind. Of course, there’s a lot of studies out there too about student performance and different things in school choice state. So that’s probably my number one.
Ginny Gentles:
Well, Jenny, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you for all that you’re doing for parents and students in Arizona, and it sounds like eventually, across the country.
Jenny Clark:
I hope so. Thanks so much for having me, Ginny.
Ginny Gentles:
We hope listeners found today’s conversation informative and encouraging. If you enjoyed this episode of Student Over Systems, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to share the episode with your friends. To learn more about the Independent Women’s Forum Education Freedom Center, please go to iwf.org/efc. Thank you for listening to Students Over Systems. Until next time, keep celebrating education freedom and brighter futures.