Get your fix at Roosevelt 66
I’ve been taking requests to look at school district budget crises recently, making short videos on tiktok and writing posts here about what I find. Every time I look at a specific district, I feel like I get to know another little aspect of the complex terrain of school district political economy in the US. Usually, these videos have small audiences. But one of them on Michigan school finance went more viral than any tiktok I’ve ever done before. I don’t know why. The algorithm is a mystery to me.
In the almost 250 comments I got on it, people were asking me to look at a bunch of different school districts around the country. Some of them were in Michigan, but there were other districts in states I haven’t looked into at all. So I’m picking ones that I want to look at. (If anyone wants to help me do critical workups on these districts let me know! This is much needed analysis.)
Given that Arizona passed the country’s first universal school voucher program in 2022, which has become a big drag on the state’s budget, I was super curious when someone asked me to look at Roosevelt School District in Arizona. The comment was simple: “look at Roosevelt SD, in AZ.”
Usually there’s some hook or a specific reason someone asks me to look at a district’s finances. This person didn’t give me any clue. And when I looked up news about the district, I didn’t find any impending crises.
The district itself is pretty interesting. It’s an elementary school district with its own boundaries within the city limits of Phoenix, in the south of the city. The district can tax within its boundaries, even though its money is controlled by Maricopa County.
Roosevelt is also an old school district from the early 20th century, and is one of those districts that has a number associated with it. It’s no. 66, like the famous cross country highway and, well, the dark lord, lol. Here’s some interesting stuff I found about the district, including something I would never have expected: hope.
Estimates and enrollments
The only crisis-ish news I could find was from a budget mistake that school officials made in 2016 where they overspent their revenues and had to fire some people. The mistake involved skipping the amending process for the next year’s estimated budget.
"When you do your budget, you have to do an estimate when you start," Roosevelt Superintendent Jeanne Koba said, explaining what went wrong with the financial books.
Midway through the year, she added, each district amends their estimates to reflect their actual spending, something the district failed to do.
Koba, who just completed her first year as superintendent, said she was notified of the error in January. Because the money is already spent, the district must refund the state by taking money from next year's budget.
It was a $4 million mistake. That can certainly put a district on bad footing, but it was eight years ago. Audited financial statements from this year said the district had kind of overspent its revenues again, but it didn’t effect things because they have a good fund balance.
Among major funds, the General Fund had $81.1 million current fiscal year revenues, which primarily consisted of state aid and property taxes, and $85.7 million in expenditures. The General Fund’s fund balance decreased from $29.3 million at the prior fiscal year end, to $28.5 million at the end of the current fiscal year.
This is all groovy. “The District’s total revenues for the current fiscal year were $143.9 million. The total cost of all programs and services was $123.6 million.” Cool! And: “unrestricted state aid increased $8.6 million as a result of increased funding received from the State legislature.” Even better.
I couldn’t find anything suspicious or tangled in their current situation. The district does report dropping enrollments:
The District’s commitment to trying to accumulate fund reserves in the General Fund has been challenging, as the District has been encountering a steady loss of student population, which in turn, results in the loss of funding. District management has responded by undertaking austerity measures in an attempt to maintain learning opportunities for students, while at the same time, decreasing operational expenditures to offset the loss of funding.
They did lose a bit of money from enrollment decreases: “The difference between the original budget and the final amended budget was a decrease of $1.6 million or two percent due to actual student count figures being less than orginally estimated as well as a reduction in the revenue control limit.”
And yeah, enrollments have dropped pretty significantly number-wise. In 2014, there were 10,120 students in the district. Now, it’s 7,480. Average daily membership, another measure of students, decreased by a little less from 9,128 to 6,774. But I didn’t find anything else.
I kept looking into the district anyway, just for fun. And it turns out Roosevelt School District has been at the center of a lot of important school finance history in the state, which has interesting implications for the larger fight against voucher programs nationally.
Winning the capital battle
Roosevelt was the plaintiff in a school funding lawsuit called Roosevelt v. Bishop at the state level, begun in 1994. The legal team representing Roosevelt against the state pointed to the line in the state constitution that there must be a “general and uniform public school system.” The plaintiffs claimed Arizona’s financing violated that clause. And they won that lawsuit, Roosevelt getting victory in what one article calls the “capital battle” over school facilities (a turn of phrase I really like).
The case itself is worth reading since it articulates exactly what’s wrong with the current school finance regime for infrastructure. It’s full of gems. Like this one:
A property-poor district with high tax rates may generate less revenue for the capital needs of the district than a property-rich district with low tax rates. For example, in 1989-90, the Roosevelt School District in south Phoenix had a composite tax rate of $4.37 per $100 of assessed value, while the Ruth Fisher School District had a tax rate of $.11 per $100 of assessed value.
Ruther Fisher School District (RFSD), by the way, had a nuclear power plant that generated millions of dollars of revenue per pupil, meaning that RFSD had lower taxes and more revenue, while RSD had higher taxes and less revenue.
In response to the court’s ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, Arizona created a program where districts could apply for state funds for their facilities. But then the 2008 financial crisis hit and conservatives defunded this program. Recent reporting notes that the impact of the 2008 financial crisis had a very long and painful echo:
After the recession in 2009 the state legislature slashed the formula for what’s known as "district additional assistance." Lawmakers began restoring that fund in 2017 but the plaintiffs in the case argue it remains inadequate.
So, in 2017, other districts got together and decided the state wasn’t doing enough to comply with the 1994 ruling and brought another case. The trial ended last month and we should have a verdict soon. The issue, they say, is that the program put in place in 1994 isn’t good enough:
Arizona has grant programs in place for districts to apply for money to make repairs and construct new buildings. But the plaintiffs allege the application process to access those funds is often too slow and cumbersome. They say the system creates a gap between the "haves" and "have nots."
"A huge problem right now is if districts don’t have bonds and overrides, districts are taking money that the legislature says is supposed to go to classroom instruction, and they’re having to use it on other things," Adelman said.
I’m wondering now if this trial could spell trouble for the school voucher program? Like, strategically, could the legislature could be pushed to comply with this ruling by weakening that program? There’s a Democratic governor who could really make a big change with that legal imperative. Seems like a potential path, but Arizonan school finance folks would know better.
Green and glam!
As a coda, it was notable to me that there’s no mention of the voucher program in the district’s financial documents. That law passed in 2022 and has been very controversial. I expected the district to report losses in state funding, but they actually report an increase! At the same time, they’re losing students. But again, at the same same time, they’re getting millions in infrastructure money for electric school buses and there’s a potent lawsuit for the inequity of facilities financing working its way through the courts.
One thing about this district is what it maybe says about the vouchers threat to public education. Rather than an ontologically immutable threat, a force that’s like the weather, it’s rather a formidable phenomenon that’s subject to the forces on its terrain. There’s no guarantee.
Vouchers will certainly hurt public education. Critics of the policy are right when they it will destroy public education. But it might not destroy it in the way we think. Because the vouchers are basically a property tax refund by the state, the per pupil funds will still arrive from the state and municipality for public schools. But the students will decrease, decreasing the funding meant for facilities that have a much greater capacity, just like we’re seeing in Roosevelt.
The district might slowly suffocate, downsize, until it becomes something like a special services district for a small number of students whom the private schools, now dominant, can’t or won’t serve. In other words, the existing structure of property taxes-school board-single payer schools that are free at the point of service will desiccate rather than go out in a bang. Over ten years, we’ll find ourselves in a situation more like 1824 than 2024 in terms of institutionalized public education.
But at the same time, if we pass legislation to destroy demand for these private schools, if we green and glow up our public school infrastructure and attack privatization from that angle, we can fight back structurally. That’s the conceit for book that’s coming out and Roosevelt is an interesting case in point.
Postscript: Demographitis
As a methodological epilogue, I found something kind of enraging about the demographics of the district. They write in their district documents that “our student population is diverse, with about 82 percent of the students representing Hispanic ethnicity, about 12 percent African-American, three percent white and over three percent identifying themselves as another ethnicity, with more than 35 world languages spoken by our students throughout the District.”
But when you look them up on the National Center for Education Statistics, it says Roosevelt’s white students are 40% of its population. C’mon! If this pattern were to hold, then everything we know about school district racial demographics would be called into question, particularly research that uses NCES numbers.