English Assistance for Arizona Students

Gov. Janet Napolitano unexpectedly vetoed a Republican-backed plan to help children who don’t speak English, triggering a late-night emergency session in which lawmakers passed a new bill before a midnight deadline to avoid $500,000-a-day fines last week.

Napolitano pinned her veto on a last-minute amendment allowing a tuition-tax credit for private-school scholarships. She called the tax credit a “poison pill” that would drain hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools instead of helping them teach struggling children.

Republicans responded quickly with a new, but similar, “English-learner” bill that capped the tuition-tax credit at $50 million annually. That move avoided for now daily fines from a federal judge for violating the deadline to fix the state’s instruction plan for English-language learners. The fines could grow to $2 million a day if lawmakers don’t get a plan to U.S. District Judge Raner Collins by the end of the legislative session.

More than 150,000 students in Arizona speak foreign languages, mostly Spanish, and are struggling to learn English. That has contributed to Arizona’s high dropout rate and sparked a class-action lawsuit 14 years ago.

Administrators in school districts with large immigrant populations have said they need extra money to shrink the size of classes, update materials and equipment, to provide individual instruction and to better train teachers.

Napolitano has a plan that would spend $45 million this year, and eventually up to $185 million a year, to help children learn English. Republican leaders have so far refused to consider the plan because they believe it spends too much and is not based on a credible cost study.

Source: Arizona Republic, Jan. 25, 2006

bh