Journalists’ Roundtable: GOP Teacher Pay Raise Plan, Legislative Panel on Vouchers, Kari Lake Endorsements and more

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for another edition of Journalists’ Roundtable. To discuss the week’s top stories, we were joined by Jeremy Duda with Axios Phoenix, Laurie Roberts with The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, and Ray Stern with The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com.

This week’s Journalists’ Roundtable covered:

• GOP teacher pay raise plan
• Legislative panel on vouchers
• Kari Lake endorsements
• Shaman to run in Congressional District 8
• Rep. Leezah Sun rebuts ethics complaint
• Univision embracing Trump?

GOP teacher pay raise plan: Prop 123

Jeremy Duda: “Republicans want to keep this thing going but with one major change. The money instead of going to a lot of other things that schools need to spend money on, it’s going to go all to teacher’s salaries, where Arizona is notoriously lacking compared to other states.”

Laurie Roberts: “As it’s been explained to me, the money would be earmarked for teachers about $300 million which would supply an average of four thousand a year raise. According to the Republicans, their plan is to backfill that $300 million from the general fund budget, so they insist that would be new money towards the schools.

Ray Stern: “The money that they raised if the voters pass this new plan would be new money. But there’s a couple of caveats to that. If the K-12 budget gets to be 50% of the overall budget, then they can actually cut this money.”

Arizona has no idea on how to regulate school vouchers?

Laurie Roberts: “This was a panel that was created as part of a budget compromise. They met exactly between May and now only twice about whether or not there is a need for more accountability of the ESA program. They came up with no ideas.”

Ray Stern: “It’s not as expensive as some have feared, the overall K-12 budget is so gigantic that you can find $40 million potentially among the billions they already get.”

Jeremy Duda: “This is something that legislative Republicans have been building towards for many years. They started this program for disabled students and every year added new groups. They finally reached this expansive, school choice program.”