Arizona Education Savings

Niehaus v. Huppenthal 
Arizona Education Savings

	IJ client Andrea Robertson and her daughter, Lexie.

Once again in Arizona, the educational establishment has filed a lawsuit, Niehaus v. Huppenthal, to limit the educational options of parents—this time the parents of special needs children.  The Arizona School Boards Association filed a lawsuit seeking to block the nation’s first publicly funded education savings account program, a program that awards qualified parents of children with disabilities Empowerment Scholarships that can be used to pay for a wide variety of educational expenses, including tutoring, home school curriculum, private school tuition and textbooks.  The program would not only expand educational options for students with special needs, it would also save taxpayers money.

Thankfully for the parents, the Arizona School Boards Association’s legal claim is baseless, relying on a 2009 Arizona Supreme Court decision (Cain v. Horne), which struck down programs for children with disabilities and children in foster care because the program gave parents options only in private schools.  But that is not the case with the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which offers a wide array of educational options for parents.  Parents may spend the funds for a variety of educational services, including tuition to public community colleges and universities, private tutoring, private therapies, home education, as well as private school tuition.  And, as with all constitutional school choice programs, parents—and not the government—decide the best educational setting for their child.

The Institute for Justice, the nation’s leading legal advocate for school choice, has intervened in the case on behalf of three parents and their children in order to defend the Empowerment Account program from this legal attack by the School Boards Association.  The Institute will demonstrate that the Empowerment Scholarship Account program complies with the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision in Cain v. Hornebecause it gives parents direct control over their child’s education funds and it gives parents a wide range of choices of where to spend those funds when tailoring their child’s educational program to their child’s unique educational needs.