Arizona's Budget Is Exploding Due to Unlimited Vouchers, Under the Leadership of This Woman.
Conservative parents pursuing "educational freedom" have discovered a taxpayer-funded option to withdraw from public schools. Additionally, other states are looking to replicate this approach.
TroibNews 
**PHOENIX, Arizona** — On a blistering Sunday afternoon in August, Jenny Clark, who leads the non-profit Love Your School AZ, welcomed families to the cool atrium of the Phoenix Art Museum, offering promotional items to those heading to story time and collage-making. “Do you want a pin?” she inquired, presenting bright blue and pink buttons featuring slogans in bold letters designed to catch the attention of children: You Rock. Too Cool. For parents, there was a playful “I love my kids” — “On certain days,” Clark added with a laugh, while handing a sample to a mother accompanied by two small children. Prominently displayed were the largest pins that read, “Ask me about ESAs.”
ESAs, or Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, represent the school voucher program that became available to all families in Arizona beginning in 2022. Initially aimed at students with disabilities requiring services unavailable at their public schools, ESAs have rapidly expanded into a complicated program now utilized by over 50,000 students — nearly 5% of school-age children in the state — many of whom were already attending private and religious institutions or being home-schooled. Families, primarily from affluent areas, have tapped into taxpayer funding for a wide variety of expenditures, including ski lift passes, trampoline park visits, a $4,000 grand piano, significant Lego purchases exceeding a million dollars, online ballet lessons, horse therapy sessions, and cookie-baking kits. Advocates defend such expenses as an expression of parental rights in education or by pointing to perceived waste in public school spending. This has led to ESA costs rising dramatically from the initial estimated $100 million over two years to over $400 million annually — a figure critics argue could account for more than half of Arizona's projected budget deficit for 2024 and 2025.
Playing a pivotal role in organizing this expanding group of parents and guiding their newfound interest in state education funding intricacies is Jenny Clark.
A veteran ESA participant and mother who homeschools her five children, Clark embodies the enthusiastic culture advocate at the forefront of the national “education freedom” movement — a modern evolution of “school choice,” a concept promoted by conservative influencers like Betsy DeVos, former education secretary under Donald Trump. Where school choice aimed to broaden access to charter schools and “open enrollment,” permitting families to send their children to schools outside their districts, proponents of “education freedom” seek to diminish the dominant role of public schools regarding educational funding, positioning them alongside private institutions, religious schools, and homeschooling.
Clark's non-profit, founded in 2019, operates through its website, social media platforms, and a 10,000-member Facebook group, serving as both an entry point for families navigating the complexities of ESA registration and a centralized hub to counter public criticisms of the program. She has emerged as the face of the growing number of parents leveraging taxpayer funding to educate their children outside the traditional public system.
Since Arizona enacted its universal voucher legislation in 2022, eight other states have adopted similar measures: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Indiana expanded existing programs. Meanwhile, Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa, and Utah joined West Virginia, which initiated its Hope scholarship program in 2021, in launching new programs aimed at providing universal access to vouchers. Clark's Love Your School AZ has since extended to Alabama and West Virginia, and she has initiated several related groups to strengthen the national pro-voucher network. Additionally, she has become a key spokesperson for the movement, bolstered by her appointment to the Arizona board of education and her visible role in opposition to public school advocates in the state.
During the museum's family fun day, Clark dressed casually in jeans and a pink button-down shirt, engaging in effortless conversations honed from extensive experience socializing at children's birthday parties. Alongside three staff members from Love Your School, she stood by a folding table with a vertical banner proclaiming “Celebrating School Options in Arizona.” Clark displayed an encyclopedic familiarity with the K-12 educational options in Phoenix, yet her inquiries consistently returned to the same topic. When a mother and her sixth grader paused to observe the event while passing a Keith Haring sculpture, Clark stepped away from the table to offer a pin and inquire about the boy’s school. “We’re Love Your School. We’re a school choice organization. We help families navigate your options,” she explained.
“That would be great,” the mother responded, mentioning her son's enjoyment of his current charter school but expressing anxiety that it wouldn’t continue beyond the eighth grade. “I’m panicking even though it’s like two years away.”
“Have you heard about ESAs?” Clark asked, brochure in hand. “If you did want to consider a private school, that could help you pay tuition.”
“That would be even better!” the mother exclaimed.
Clark made similar suggestions to a grandmother whose grandson was in a specialized public school for kids with special needs; to an immigrant mother attempting to enroll her child in another district; and to a father of a gifted son nearing the limits of available mathematics instruction at Phoenix’s only free Montessori program. Throughout the afternoon, not one exchange occurred without the question: “Have you heard about ESAs?”
The experience that propelled Clark into her role as a voucher advocate began in the fall of 2013 when she became concerned about her five-year-old’s reading progress. “I mean, we would spend all day, like, on a letter, and then, like, the next day, he wouldn’t remember the letter or the sound. And I’m like, ‘What?’” Other mothers suggested getting a free evaluation at a local public school, which Clark described as humiliating, feeling that school staff implied that her teaching was the problem. "Basically, like, it’s your fault, you dumb home-school mom, you know?”
Following this experience, Clark and her husband opted for an independent evaluation at the district’s expense for their oldest and his younger brother. Both boys were diagnosed with dyslexia and dysgraphia. Armed with these diagnoses, they returned to the district to learn they would qualify for the previous version of the Empowerment Scholarship Account for students with disabilities, provided they first enrolled in a district school for a year. They opted for an online charter school for nine months and returned to homeschooling, this time with access to substantial public funding.
Clark’s engagement with ESAs coincided with the state legislature's early attempts to universalize the program, which ignited a movement in opposition. Beth Lewis, a public school teacher just outside Phoenix, dedicated the legislative session to mobilizing parents and educators against the bill while advocating for increased teacher salaries and pupil spending, with Arizona ranking 47th out of 50 states on the latter metric. Following the voucher expansion bill's passage along party lines in April 2017, Lewis and a few allies founded the non-profit Save Our Schools Arizona and gathered enough signatures to place the bill on the ballot the following year, hoping to challenge the legislature’s decision through voter intervention.
During this time, Clark's husband, Michael, was employed by the Center for Arizona Policy, a prominent voucher supporter, and she began to handle public relations for the pro-voucher side of the referendum, making appearances on television and radio to advocate for ESAs.
In 2018, however, the expansion of the voucher program was defeated at the polls by nearly 30 points, continuing a trend of unsuccessful pro-voucher measures in states such as Massachusetts and Utah. Clark believed she understood the reasons behind this defeat. Following the election, she met with the campaign funders behind the voucher initiative and argued that the efforts had failed due to insufficient support among parents. “Nobody’s out there helping parents actually get their kids evaluated, find a school for them. It’s almost like social work,” she said. Consequently, the Center for Arizona Policy and the Goldwater Institute agreed to help finance Clark’s non-profit: Love Your School AZ.
In contrast, Lewis perceives a more cynical narrative surrounding Love Your School's establishment, seeing it as a tool for conservative donors. “It’s not organic, it’s not grassroots,” she stated. “These people assessed the landscape and said, ‘Hmm, we need some moms, right? If we’re going to do this whole parental choice thing, if we’re going to really focus on these parental rights, and that’s what we’re doubling down on, we need some parents.’”
While the 2018 legislation aimed for universal eligibility, it capped the program at around 5,000 students statewide. The Republican-backed bill presented in 2022, however, represented a significant expansion, imposing no participation limits. Save Our Schools Arizona launched another effort to place universal ESA legislation on the ballot, this time contending with organized opposition from parents whom Jenny Clark had helped mobilize. Parents supporting SOS who were gathering signatures in supermarket parking lots encountered counter-protesters brandishing signs that read “DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING FROM SOS ARIZONA,” funded by the American Federation for Children, established by Betsy DeVos to promote voucher programs nationwide.
Much of Clark’s activity occurred in the digital realm. Love Your School AZ assisted parents within its network through the ESA application process while Clark produced bright blue and pink graphics along with cheerful Instagram videos, labeling SOS as an “anti-parent activist” group willing to “mislead and deceive the public.” With her upbeat, preschool teacher demeanor, Clark delivered even her harshest critiques with a friendly smile, conveying the tone of someone addressing small children. SOS’s materials characterized the universal ESAs as an “entitlement for wealthy families” that would “effectively dismantle public education,” opposing eligibility for children currently enrolled in private schools. In response, Clark stated on Instagram, “Let me just say that is disgusting and reprehensible and we should all call it out for what it is. All children deserve access to a great education and that’s what the universal ESA does.” By late September 2022, an announcement from the secretary of state indicated that SOS had failed to collect sufficient signatures for a second referendum; thus, the new law would go into effect, with over 10,000 applicants awaiting access to universal ESAs.
While Clark presents her arguments wrapped in positivity, Lewis is often more pointed and equally forceful. When we spoke, she described Clark as a “charlatan.” Nonetheless, Clark’s warm demeanor and “mom-next-door” persona help downplay her extensive political advocacy and connections to the conservative networks bolstering voucher programs nationally. Clark's appointment to the Arizona board of education by Republican Governor Doug Ducey occurred in April 2022, just two months before the legislature passed the universal ESAs, and she participated in the bill signing ceremony that August. She has been involved with the Club for Growth Foundation and spent part of her day at the museum reviewing her agenda for the Koch-funded State Policy Network conference in Phoenix, where she was scheduled to speak on a panel discussing the achievement of a “symbolic finish line” for universal vouchers and identifying the “next race for education freedom.”
This fall, school districts across the country are grappling with the fiscal fallout of the Covid pandemic, as a $190 billion federal funding boost from 2021 comes to an end. Although vouchers currently serve only a small percentage of the overall student population, advocates like Clark assert that students “taking their education dollars” elsewhere won't adversely impact the public schools left behind. However, evidence from Arizona and other states indicates that funding for public education often stagnates or declines as voucher programs proliferate. In Arizona, the governor's office anticipates that ESAs will redirect over half of incoming educational funding this year to just 8% of the state's children.
Other states have been drawn to Arizona's voucher initiative, partly because of its “extremely low” initial budget estimate. Mike Griffith, a researcher at the Palo Alto-based Learning Policy Institute, explained, “That initially got a lot of states interested because they thought, ‘We can offer universal vouchers in our state and it would only cost $60 million. We have $60 million.’” However, costs over the first two years have far exceeded expectations, leading advocates to realize that replicating Arizona’s approach may not be feasible. “There’s no limit to the cost of the program,” he added.
Alabama, observing both Arizona's example and the potential hazards of an unlimited voucher program, aimed for a more controlled approach in its legislation. Arthur Orr, the state’s senate appropriations chair, commented, “The history of Arizona fed into the proverbial smoky back rooms of Alabama’s state legislature. We wanted something that was manageable, and that we had control of.”
The CHOOSE Act, which Orr co-sponsored, passed in March 2024 and includes income limits for families in the program for the first five years. In a bid to avoid issues seen in other states, it also mandates regular audits of private schools and vendors and requires testing for participating students. Additionally, it caps homeschooling expenses at $4,000 per family. Orr emphasized the importance of aligning allowable expectations with public perceptions of education, stating, “We’ve all read the horror stories of the family going to Disney World with their voucher money to talk about velocity on the roller coaster. We wanted to avoid that categorically.”
Historically, voucher programs have tended to expand over time, as seen in both Florida and Arizona, with parents such as Jenny Clark defending the extremities of reform proposals. She argues, among other points, that religious schools receiving taxpayer funds should have the liberty to discriminate — for instance, allowing a Muslim school to exclude Christian students; that audits are unnecessary due to the inevitability of some waste in public programming; and that there’s no distinction between financing a wealthy family's public school attendance and covering the cost of their private education. Rather than advocating for stricter oversight of private institutions, she envisions a network of parental insights, coordinated by organizations like Love Your School. “That’s like Yelp, right? They’re like, ‘Don’t go to this restaurant. The service is really bad.’ That is good. That is competition.”
Clark contends that the term “voucher” misrepresents the nature of ESAs, as funds flow through accounts managed by parents rather than directly to specific schools. She maintains that the program ultimately saves state money for each student who enrolls. However, approximately half of ESA students had never attended public schools prior, representing a fresh cost to the state, averaging around $9,800 per student annually. When challenged on this point, Clark pointed to gaps in available data. Since estimates of prior public school attendance only cover the year prior to a student signing up for an ESA, she argued it is impossible to ascertain whether that student had genuinely never been in public schools or merely attended until the pandemic.
Griffith expressed frustration regarding the lack of quality public information pertaining to ESAs, noting, “If the data were available, it probably would have taken us just a couple of days to put together a cost analysis, but it took us several months to do it.” Currently, Arizona has not reported key details about ESA students, such as the proportion attending private education or transferring back to public schools during the academic year — data that the state education department collects.
Clark does not advocate for better data collection but opposes imposing standardized tests or financial accountability measures on private schools and parents utilizing ESA funds. “Any government program is going to have some sort of percentage of misuse,” she mentioned. “We just know that that’s the case. But I don’t think that we should look at ESA programs like we need to restrict them even more because we don’t want parents buying Legos.”
In different contexts, what appears as a state failure to some seems like a policy achievement to others.
After Florida’s Step Up For Students program discreetly added theme park entrance fees as approved voucher expenditures in 2023, the resulting outcry ultimately solidified Disney tickets as a valid expense. Earlier this year, a proposal to exclude such costs was overturned by an amendment passed just days before the legislative session concluded. “Many families contacted their lawmakers or testified at committee hearings opposing the changes, arguing they would limit their ability to provide arts and other enrichment opportunities to their children,” reported Step Up's spokesperson. Notably, both the reform proposal and the amendment that aborted it were sponsored by Republicans, reflecting ongoing debates about the limits of “school choice.”
Amid the various legislative discussions nationwide, Clark remains focused on the critical constituency — conservative families seeking publicly funded alternatives to public schools.
Love Your School extended its reach to West Virginia in 2022, coinciding with the launch of the HOPE scholarship program, which began accepting applications that same year and is set to become universal by 2026. At that time, Leah Peck, who was recruiting foster parents, struck up a strong rapport with Clark during their initial Zoom meeting, and she was astonished by the lucrative pay offered to her to join Love Your School — $3,500 a month for working remotely on a project whose specifics were unclear. “We were paid to kind of float around and publicize the HOPE scholarship,” she shared. “For what we were doing, I was like, ‘Where was all this money coming from?’”
In the following two years, Peck co-hosted a podcast, shared information about Love Your School across various Facebook groups, and conducted outreach throughout the state, distributing pens and stickers at churches, storefronts, and libraries. At most events, she reported speaking to fewer than five people. “It would be hunting for people to help.” Similar to experiences in Arizona, Love Your School aimed to offer neutral “navigation” services, though in practice, it focused heavily on the HOPE scholarship.
While impressed by Clark’s presence and ability to rally support among Arizona ESA families, Peck perceived a disconnect between Love Your School and West Virginia's local dynamics — most interested individuals appeared able to navigate the system independently or had received assistance from established local non-profits. She questioned the necessity of what a local school choice advocate referred to as “franchising a mommy group.”
In Alabama, Jennifer Wolverton, a homeschooling advocate, echoed similar sentiments regarding Love Your School’s expansion there. The group’s sole employee is a leader of the state Republican Party who began issuing op-eds defending Alabama’s CHOOSE Act, drawing from Clark’s strategies and rhetoric on Arizona’s ESAs. She expressed concern that Alabama might replicate the outcomes seen in other states where most voucher funds benefit pre-existing private institutions. “The powerful people of the school choice movement have decided to fund a franchise,” Wolverton remarked, pointing to the influence of the Koch brothers’ network and Ed Choice, a non-profit founded by conservative economist Milton Friedman, who first proposed school vouchers in 1955. This past October, Wolverton attended an intensive media training weekend at Ed Choice’s headquarters in Indianapolis, where participants were given feedback on filmed mock interviews. During the session, organizers featured one of Clark’s prior media appearances as a prime example, showing how she skillfully maintained her message during a “Good Morning America-type” setting. “I hear what they’re saying, and I want to answer,” Wolverton expressed her frustration about her own interviews. “She knows how to go into an interview and have your things you want to get out of it without getting derailed,” she noted. “She knows what the talking points are.”
Clark continues to look beyond Arizona, having written an op-ed for the *Louisville Courier-Journal* this past October and appeared on public television in Kentucky endorsing a constitutional amendment to facilitate a voucher program. On-screen, Clark was introduced not as a figure representing conservative funders advocating for vouchers for years, but rather as an Arizona mother stating, “school choice is working for her family.” Referring to how ESAs “completely transformed our lives,” she explained, “We were able to afford the best therapies, the best programs, the best tutors, and now all five of my kids are on an ESA because now, it’s universal.”
The amendment in Kentucky did not pass, mirroring the rejection of pro-voucher measures in Nebraska and Colorado. However, Clark remains undeterred, asserting, “The future that parents overwhelmingly want is one full of choices for their kid’s education.” If that sentiment is accurate, it seems to have yet to translate into ballot victories. But based on Arizona's experience, that may not be a necessary precondition for success.
Olivia Brown contributed to this report for TROIB News
ESAs, or Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, represent the school voucher program that became available to all families in Arizona beginning in 2022. Initially aimed at students with disabilities requiring services unavailable at their public schools, ESAs have rapidly expanded into a complicated program now utilized by over 50,000 students — nearly 5% of school-age children in the state — many of whom were already attending private and religious institutions or being home-schooled. Families, primarily from affluent areas, have tapped into taxpayer funding for a wide variety of expenditures, including ski lift passes, trampoline park visits, a $4,000 grand piano, significant Lego purchases exceeding a million dollars, online ballet lessons, horse therapy sessions, and cookie-baking kits. Advocates defend such expenses as an expression of parental rights in education or by pointing to perceived waste in public school spending. This has led to ESA costs rising dramatically from the initial estimated $100 million over two years to over $400 million annually — a figure critics argue could account for more than half of Arizona's projected budget deficit for 2024 and 2025.
Playing a pivotal role in organizing this expanding group of parents and guiding their newfound interest in state education funding intricacies is Jenny Clark.
A veteran ESA participant and mother who homeschools her five children, Clark embodies the enthusiastic culture advocate at the forefront of the national “education freedom” movement — a modern evolution of “school choice,” a concept promoted by conservative influencers like Betsy DeVos, former education secretary under Donald Trump. Where school choice aimed to broaden access to charter schools and “open enrollment,” permitting families to send their children to schools outside their districts, proponents of “education freedom” seek to diminish the dominant role of public schools regarding educational funding, positioning them alongside private institutions, religious schools, and homeschooling.
Clark's non-profit, founded in 2019, operates through its website, social media platforms, and a 10,000-member Facebook group, serving as both an entry point for families navigating the complexities of ESA registration and a centralized hub to counter public criticisms of the program. She has emerged as the face of the growing number of parents leveraging taxpayer funding to educate their children outside the traditional public system.
Since Arizona enacted its universal voucher legislation in 2022, eight other states have adopted similar measures: Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, and Indiana expanded existing programs. Meanwhile, Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa, and Utah joined West Virginia, which initiated its Hope scholarship program in 2021, in launching new programs aimed at providing universal access to vouchers. Clark's Love Your School AZ has since extended to Alabama and West Virginia, and she has initiated several related groups to strengthen the national pro-voucher network. Additionally, she has become a key spokesperson for the movement, bolstered by her appointment to the Arizona board of education and her visible role in opposition to public school advocates in the state.
During the museum's family fun day, Clark dressed casually in jeans and a pink button-down shirt, engaging in effortless conversations honed from extensive experience socializing at children's birthday parties. Alongside three staff members from Love Your School, she stood by a folding table with a vertical banner proclaiming “Celebrating School Options in Arizona.” Clark displayed an encyclopedic familiarity with the K-12 educational options in Phoenix, yet her inquiries consistently returned to the same topic. When a mother and her sixth grader paused to observe the event while passing a Keith Haring sculpture, Clark stepped away from the table to offer a pin and inquire about the boy’s school. “We’re Love Your School. We’re a school choice organization. We help families navigate your options,” she explained.
“That would be great,” the mother responded, mentioning her son's enjoyment of his current charter school but expressing anxiety that it wouldn’t continue beyond the eighth grade. “I’m panicking even though it’s like two years away.”
“Have you heard about ESAs?” Clark asked, brochure in hand. “If you did want to consider a private school, that could help you pay tuition.”
“That would be even better!” the mother exclaimed.
Clark made similar suggestions to a grandmother whose grandson was in a specialized public school for kids with special needs; to an immigrant mother attempting to enroll her child in another district; and to a father of a gifted son nearing the limits of available mathematics instruction at Phoenix’s only free Montessori program. Throughout the afternoon, not one exchange occurred without the question: “Have you heard about ESAs?”
The experience that propelled Clark into her role as a voucher advocate began in the fall of 2013 when she became concerned about her five-year-old’s reading progress. “I mean, we would spend all day, like, on a letter, and then, like, the next day, he wouldn’t remember the letter or the sound. And I’m like, ‘What?’” Other mothers suggested getting a free evaluation at a local public school, which Clark described as humiliating, feeling that school staff implied that her teaching was the problem. "Basically, like, it’s your fault, you dumb home-school mom, you know?”
Following this experience, Clark and her husband opted for an independent evaluation at the district’s expense for their oldest and his younger brother. Both boys were diagnosed with dyslexia and dysgraphia. Armed with these diagnoses, they returned to the district to learn they would qualify for the previous version of the Empowerment Scholarship Account for students with disabilities, provided they first enrolled in a district school for a year. They opted for an online charter school for nine months and returned to homeschooling, this time with access to substantial public funding.
Clark’s engagement with ESAs coincided with the state legislature's early attempts to universalize the program, which ignited a movement in opposition. Beth Lewis, a public school teacher just outside Phoenix, dedicated the legislative session to mobilizing parents and educators against the bill while advocating for increased teacher salaries and pupil spending, with Arizona ranking 47th out of 50 states on the latter metric. Following the voucher expansion bill's passage along party lines in April 2017, Lewis and a few allies founded the non-profit Save Our Schools Arizona and gathered enough signatures to place the bill on the ballot the following year, hoping to challenge the legislature’s decision through voter intervention.
During this time, Clark's husband, Michael, was employed by the Center for Arizona Policy, a prominent voucher supporter, and she began to handle public relations for the pro-voucher side of the referendum, making appearances on television and radio to advocate for ESAs.
In 2018, however, the expansion of the voucher program was defeated at the polls by nearly 30 points, continuing a trend of unsuccessful pro-voucher measures in states such as Massachusetts and Utah. Clark believed she understood the reasons behind this defeat. Following the election, she met with the campaign funders behind the voucher initiative and argued that the efforts had failed due to insufficient support among parents. “Nobody’s out there helping parents actually get their kids evaluated, find a school for them. It’s almost like social work,” she said. Consequently, the Center for Arizona Policy and the Goldwater Institute agreed to help finance Clark’s non-profit: Love Your School AZ.
In contrast, Lewis perceives a more cynical narrative surrounding Love Your School's establishment, seeing it as a tool for conservative donors. “It’s not organic, it’s not grassroots,” she stated. “These people assessed the landscape and said, ‘Hmm, we need some moms, right? If we’re going to do this whole parental choice thing, if we’re going to really focus on these parental rights, and that’s what we’re doubling down on, we need some parents.’”
While the 2018 legislation aimed for universal eligibility, it capped the program at around 5,000 students statewide. The Republican-backed bill presented in 2022, however, represented a significant expansion, imposing no participation limits. Save Our Schools Arizona launched another effort to place universal ESA legislation on the ballot, this time contending with organized opposition from parents whom Jenny Clark had helped mobilize. Parents supporting SOS who were gathering signatures in supermarket parking lots encountered counter-protesters brandishing signs that read “DO NOT SIGN ANYTHING FROM SOS ARIZONA,” funded by the American Federation for Children, established by Betsy DeVos to promote voucher programs nationwide.
Much of Clark’s activity occurred in the digital realm. Love Your School AZ assisted parents within its network through the ESA application process while Clark produced bright blue and pink graphics along with cheerful Instagram videos, labeling SOS as an “anti-parent activist” group willing to “mislead and deceive the public.” With her upbeat, preschool teacher demeanor, Clark delivered even her harshest critiques with a friendly smile, conveying the tone of someone addressing small children. SOS’s materials characterized the universal ESAs as an “entitlement for wealthy families” that would “effectively dismantle public education,” opposing eligibility for children currently enrolled in private schools. In response, Clark stated on Instagram, “Let me just say that is disgusting and reprehensible and we should all call it out for what it is. All children deserve access to a great education and that’s what the universal ESA does.” By late September 2022, an announcement from the secretary of state indicated that SOS had failed to collect sufficient signatures for a second referendum; thus, the new law would go into effect, with over 10,000 applicants awaiting access to universal ESAs.
While Clark presents her arguments wrapped in positivity, Lewis is often more pointed and equally forceful. When we spoke, she described Clark as a “charlatan.” Nonetheless, Clark’s warm demeanor and “mom-next-door” persona help downplay her extensive political advocacy and connections to the conservative networks bolstering voucher programs nationally. Clark's appointment to the Arizona board of education by Republican Governor Doug Ducey occurred in April 2022, just two months before the legislature passed the universal ESAs, and she participated in the bill signing ceremony that August. She has been involved with the Club for Growth Foundation and spent part of her day at the museum reviewing her agenda for the Koch-funded State Policy Network conference in Phoenix, where she was scheduled to speak on a panel discussing the achievement of a “symbolic finish line” for universal vouchers and identifying the “next race for education freedom.”
This fall, school districts across the country are grappling with the fiscal fallout of the Covid pandemic, as a $190 billion federal funding boost from 2021 comes to an end. Although vouchers currently serve only a small percentage of the overall student population, advocates like Clark assert that students “taking their education dollars” elsewhere won't adversely impact the public schools left behind. However, evidence from Arizona and other states indicates that funding for public education often stagnates or declines as voucher programs proliferate. In Arizona, the governor's office anticipates that ESAs will redirect over half of incoming educational funding this year to just 8% of the state's children.
Other states have been drawn to Arizona's voucher initiative, partly because of its “extremely low” initial budget estimate. Mike Griffith, a researcher at the Palo Alto-based Learning Policy Institute, explained, “That initially got a lot of states interested because they thought, ‘We can offer universal vouchers in our state and it would only cost $60 million. We have $60 million.’” However, costs over the first two years have far exceeded expectations, leading advocates to realize that replicating Arizona’s approach may not be feasible. “There’s no limit to the cost of the program,” he added.
Alabama, observing both Arizona's example and the potential hazards of an unlimited voucher program, aimed for a more controlled approach in its legislation. Arthur Orr, the state’s senate appropriations chair, commented, “The history of Arizona fed into the proverbial smoky back rooms of Alabama’s state legislature. We wanted something that was manageable, and that we had control of.”
The CHOOSE Act, which Orr co-sponsored, passed in March 2024 and includes income limits for families in the program for the first five years. In a bid to avoid issues seen in other states, it also mandates regular audits of private schools and vendors and requires testing for participating students. Additionally, it caps homeschooling expenses at $4,000 per family. Orr emphasized the importance of aligning allowable expectations with public perceptions of education, stating, “We’ve all read the horror stories of the family going to Disney World with their voucher money to talk about velocity on the roller coaster. We wanted to avoid that categorically.”
Historically, voucher programs have tended to expand over time, as seen in both Florida and Arizona, with parents such as Jenny Clark defending the extremities of reform proposals. She argues, among other points, that religious schools receiving taxpayer funds should have the liberty to discriminate — for instance, allowing a Muslim school to exclude Christian students; that audits are unnecessary due to the inevitability of some waste in public programming; and that there’s no distinction between financing a wealthy family's public school attendance and covering the cost of their private education. Rather than advocating for stricter oversight of private institutions, she envisions a network of parental insights, coordinated by organizations like Love Your School. “That’s like Yelp, right? They’re like, ‘Don’t go to this restaurant. The service is really bad.’ That is good. That is competition.”
Clark contends that the term “voucher” misrepresents the nature of ESAs, as funds flow through accounts managed by parents rather than directly to specific schools. She maintains that the program ultimately saves state money for each student who enrolls. However, approximately half of ESA students had never attended public schools prior, representing a fresh cost to the state, averaging around $9,800 per student annually. When challenged on this point, Clark pointed to gaps in available data. Since estimates of prior public school attendance only cover the year prior to a student signing up for an ESA, she argued it is impossible to ascertain whether that student had genuinely never been in public schools or merely attended until the pandemic.
Griffith expressed frustration regarding the lack of quality public information pertaining to ESAs, noting, “If the data were available, it probably would have taken us just a couple of days to put together a cost analysis, but it took us several months to do it.” Currently, Arizona has not reported key details about ESA students, such as the proportion attending private education or transferring back to public schools during the academic year — data that the state education department collects.
Clark does not advocate for better data collection but opposes imposing standardized tests or financial accountability measures on private schools and parents utilizing ESA funds. “Any government program is going to have some sort of percentage of misuse,” she mentioned. “We just know that that’s the case. But I don’t think that we should look at ESA programs like we need to restrict them even more because we don’t want parents buying Legos.”
In different contexts, what appears as a state failure to some seems like a policy achievement to others.
After Florida’s Step Up For Students program discreetly added theme park entrance fees as approved voucher expenditures in 2023, the resulting outcry ultimately solidified Disney tickets as a valid expense. Earlier this year, a proposal to exclude such costs was overturned by an amendment passed just days before the legislative session concluded. “Many families contacted their lawmakers or testified at committee hearings opposing the changes, arguing they would limit their ability to provide arts and other enrichment opportunities to their children,” reported Step Up's spokesperson. Notably, both the reform proposal and the amendment that aborted it were sponsored by Republicans, reflecting ongoing debates about the limits of “school choice.”
Amid the various legislative discussions nationwide, Clark remains focused on the critical constituency — conservative families seeking publicly funded alternatives to public schools.
Love Your School extended its reach to West Virginia in 2022, coinciding with the launch of the HOPE scholarship program, which began accepting applications that same year and is set to become universal by 2026. At that time, Leah Peck, who was recruiting foster parents, struck up a strong rapport with Clark during their initial Zoom meeting, and she was astonished by the lucrative pay offered to her to join Love Your School — $3,500 a month for working remotely on a project whose specifics were unclear. “We were paid to kind of float around and publicize the HOPE scholarship,” she shared. “For what we were doing, I was like, ‘Where was all this money coming from?’”
In the following two years, Peck co-hosted a podcast, shared information about Love Your School across various Facebook groups, and conducted outreach throughout the state, distributing pens and stickers at churches, storefronts, and libraries. At most events, she reported speaking to fewer than five people. “It would be hunting for people to help.” Similar to experiences in Arizona, Love Your School aimed to offer neutral “navigation” services, though in practice, it focused heavily on the HOPE scholarship.
While impressed by Clark’s presence and ability to rally support among Arizona ESA families, Peck perceived a disconnect between Love Your School and West Virginia's local dynamics — most interested individuals appeared able to navigate the system independently or had received assistance from established local non-profits. She questioned the necessity of what a local school choice advocate referred to as “franchising a mommy group.”
In Alabama, Jennifer Wolverton, a homeschooling advocate, echoed similar sentiments regarding Love Your School’s expansion there. The group’s sole employee is a leader of the state Republican Party who began issuing op-eds defending Alabama’s CHOOSE Act, drawing from Clark’s strategies and rhetoric on Arizona’s ESAs. She expressed concern that Alabama might replicate the outcomes seen in other states where most voucher funds benefit pre-existing private institutions. “The powerful people of the school choice movement have decided to fund a franchise,” Wolverton remarked, pointing to the influence of the Koch brothers’ network and Ed Choice, a non-profit founded by conservative economist Milton Friedman, who first proposed school vouchers in 1955. This past October, Wolverton attended an intensive media training weekend at Ed Choice’s headquarters in Indianapolis, where participants were given feedback on filmed mock interviews. During the session, organizers featured one of Clark’s prior media appearances as a prime example, showing how she skillfully maintained her message during a “Good Morning America-type” setting. “I hear what they’re saying, and I want to answer,” Wolverton expressed her frustration about her own interviews. “She knows how to go into an interview and have your things you want to get out of it without getting derailed,” she noted. “She knows what the talking points are.”
Clark continues to look beyond Arizona, having written an op-ed for the *Louisville Courier-Journal* this past October and appeared on public television in Kentucky endorsing a constitutional amendment to facilitate a voucher program. On-screen, Clark was introduced not as a figure representing conservative funders advocating for vouchers for years, but rather as an Arizona mother stating, “school choice is working for her family.” Referring to how ESAs “completely transformed our lives,” she explained, “We were able to afford the best therapies, the best programs, the best tutors, and now all five of my kids are on an ESA because now, it’s universal.”
The amendment in Kentucky did not pass, mirroring the rejection of pro-voucher measures in Nebraska and Colorado. However, Clark remains undeterred, asserting, “The future that parents overwhelmingly want is one full of choices for their kid’s education.” If that sentiment is accurate, it seems to have yet to translate into ballot victories. But based on Arizona's experience, that may not be a necessary precondition for success.
Olivia Brown contributed to this report for TROIB News
