Kristin McReynolds Sister Kirsten Ivy English 101 24 October 2016 Budget Cuts to Arizona’s Education A recent study has revealed that the state of Arizona is 49th in the nation for per pupil spending in their public educational system, spending only $28.35 per student per school year (Per). This is due to the budget cuts to education that the state has been dealing with over the last several years. After much research on this topic, the main way my understanding of budget cuts to Arizona’s public educational system has evolved is seeing that there are multiple sides of this dispute; not just the popular opinion that any cut to education is a negative one. This is because politicians are arguing that budget cuts are helping the schools by making …show more content…
In 2010 a “lawsuit was filed… after the state failed to adjust the base level per-pupil funding according to inflation as required by a 2000 voter-approved proposition” (Jung). The lawsuit went back and forth with no definite conclusion. In March of 2015 the battle between the state government of Arizona and the state’s public educational system heated up when “Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a budget that cuts K-12 funding by $113 million (5 percent)” (Arboleda). Alexandra Arboleda informs the reader that following the approval of the cuts, Governor Ducey made a comment saying it was an attempt to restore monetary balance without raising taxes to try and ease the communities worries. She argues that this is not true because the “budget cuts… for K-12 funding fell by 21 percent between 2002 and 2011- the largest decline in the country” (Arboleda). Despite this comment, the budget cuts sparked outrage in education community because other schools in similar circumstances have seen a significant drop in test scores, increases in classroom sizes, and decrease one-on-one teaching opportunities according to Arboleda. While Arboleda expresses that budget cuts are bad for the schools and the students in them, Colman, Walker, and Lawrence show that budget cuts to education do not necessarily have to be cuts that will cause those specific …show more content…
They offer multiple reasons why budget cuts can actually end up benefitting the school along with our outside environment. The first reason they give is that budget cuts makes schools “look at areas where they are spending large sums of money and find more efficient ways of using it” (Coleman). The most common ways that schools do this are by cutting back on as much as they can and in whatever area they can. Coleman and his team suggest that one way of accomplishing this is by shortening the bus routes to conserve gas. They then go on to suggest the cutting of paper usage and embracing the technological era by moving a lot of the classroom over to an online environment. They state that this will prepare the student to work with computers, which they will be continuing to see after school is over. This change, they say, has been reported to “save between $8,000” and $9000”