Going to trial to "school" Arizona's legislature on funding education

In defense of our children's future

While the Trump trial verdict has our attention there’s a trial here in Arizona that will impact our state’s future for generations to come.

It is about the willful dismantling of public education by the radical racist right in our state by any means necessary.

Attorneys on the side of the angels will be arguing before a judge that Arizona, the Waco of the West, the Ruby Ridge of reversing public education’s gains, has not met its constitutional obligation to adequately fund public education, which, if you are sentient, might sound like arguing the sky is blue, tumbleweeds tumble and javelina stink worse the crackpot world-is-upside-down counterarguments the judge will hear.

For once we don’t have to go back to 1864. Our tale begins in 1994 when the Justices on the Arizona Supreme Court found the system of financing school construction and repair was a joke, a sham, pure bullshit, and in their eloquent phrasing “unconstitutional”.

(Allow me to go off topic here like a drunk driving an Arizona back road and veer into the cost of college here in the outback. Our Arizona Constitution specifies that university instruction shall be as nearly free as possible. Where in Hell’s oven is $12,000 a semester “Nearly as free as possible”?)

Back onto the main road and the skinning alive of Public education.

Our jackasses in the statehouse, our craven cave dwellers, decided the best way for them to shift the burden of educating Arizona’s young’uns was to shift the cost to each district. Because surely the Bumfuck School District in Sandbox Acres would be able to buy the same education for it’s seedlings as the Snottsdale School District in Beverly Boot Hills, right, Muffy? This bullshit resonates with the Karens of the Right and Trumps Toadies because not only are Republicans superior to you because they are colorblind but they are blind to reality beyond the high walls of the gated communities well stocked with brokers, televangelists and retired pillow salesmen. Way back in 1994, back when Tonya Harding kneecapped Nancy Kerrigan the court wheezed that some unfortunate districts had schools that “are unsafe, unhealthy, and in violation of building, fire and safety codes.” (Notice I left that quote in the present tense because nothing has goddam changed since 1994.)

There are still public schools here without libraries, labs or gyms or other elements one might find in third world hut schools while in Volvo City mummy and daddy’s dearests are likely to be dropped off by their chauffeurs at schools with pools, media studios and the finest computer systems.

Every time lawmakers have attempted to make things right as rain by making the state responsible for funding adequate schools a drought of political will swept through the land funded by fat cats who hate to pay taxes for anything. The only thing they do pay for is for the purchase of white Christian Republican lawmakers who naturally love the privatization of education so they can leave brown and black Arizona behind in our sense forsaken state's dust bowl barrios.

Attorney for public education, John Bullock, already argued before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Dewain Fox that our Legislature "eviscerated'' the funding system. I would have argued they disemboweled the guts, slashed the arteries and sucked the marrow out of the funding system.

And they use the ruse of ESA vouchers like vultures to gobble up the remaining tax dollars on the bones of public education just so they can fly away and rain golden eggs onto the private school industrial complex of elitists academies and Christian nationalist madrassas many of them are invested in.

The attorney defending this bullshit is William Richards.

He’s representing Republican Senate President Warren Petersen and Republican House Speaker Ben Toma. Both are proud members of the Party that lied about an election, sponsored the cyber ninja parade, backed the 1864 abortion ban, expanded the voucher program to bankrupt the state and harbors treasonous fake electors awaiting trial. And both of these titans say that every selfless thing their battalion of boneheads in bolas has done over the decades to render public education a shredded picked-clean-down-to-its-eye-sockets cadaver in an arroyo is perfectly legal, swell, and dandy.

Both Toma and Petersen sued the EPA to challenge its vehicle emission standards because, you know, climate change is bullshit, if the right lobby group has the right change in its pocket.

Laywer Richards argued if the schools are hellholes its the fault of the poor districts.

It’s the old Republican pull yourself up by your bootstraps and we don’t want to hear you whine that you don’t have any boots argument.

What are the odds Roma and Peterson’s boots are ostrich skin from a Scottsdale boot boutique? Objection! Irrelevant. Sustained, but up theirs if they can’t take a joke.

Here is their most galling puke in your graduation cap argument. Did you know that some districts are wasting the coins they scrape from their poor boxes? Yes siree. Those profligate public school scamps are squandering your tax dollars on pathetic attempts to attract students from other districts by actually being competitive! And, gasp, horror of horrors, poaching little peeps from their precious white-flight charter schools. You know the elite schools that their superior neighbors can freely choose to send their darlings at the public’s expense?

The private schools that jack up tuition costs to further profit from the grift that is universal vouchers.

The various voucher scams that are paid for by you with tax dollars for waterskiing lessons, home gyms and bouncing castle bullshit thievery?

Reluctantly (Kicking and screaming) Arizona’s Republicans created a “School Facilities Board”, a system to finance new schools as needed, and threw in $200 million a year for upkeep and of course, this being God’s country run by goobers, Arizona’s Republicans lawmakers just couldn’t seem to fund that formula for years, with schools foregoing school buses, textbooks, boots and bootstraps, because they were too busy working like the Devil to arm teachers (failed) and demand the Ten Commandments loom over the ingrates (failed).

So school districts have had no choice but to beg, ahem, I mean “raise funds with bonds”, to pay for their school buses, textbooks, boots and bootstraps, despite the Supreme Court screaming loud and clear funding our schools is a responsibility of the state’s legislators, the bumpkins who can’t hear the 21st Cenutry Express rumbling towards our children because their heads are firmly up their dark odiferous happy places.

So the students in Arizona’s property poor districts have been abandoned, the victims of the savage inequality that make us America’s Alabama with Saguaros, the state that’s Number One for “not giving a goddam”, year after year after year.

The Republicans dismantling public education tried to whack-a-mole the case from ever popping up on Arizona’s docket because there’s a chance it would ruin their scholastic slaughterhouse fun and besides, huff, huff, how can a court judge dare to tell them how to finance the starvation of Arizona’s Godless Marxist public schools?

Should last a month. Hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps up to three billion dollars that are long overdue, are at stake here.

Notice I didn’t argue the children of Arizona are at stake here.

Ladies and gentlemen of history’s jury I suggest to you the fact there is even a quarrel over this matter is evidence Arizona’s Republicans never gave a shit about the children of Arizona.

May a gavel strike a blow for our kids. At long last.

Reference:

Arizona School Trial Over Disparities By Howard Fischer

Universal ESA vouchers: Arizona’s $1 billion failed experiment By Beth Lewis, Melinda Iyer