Gilbert Public Schools Board Member Julie Smith
We’ve been meaning to run a fact check on the claims made by Julie Smith on May 13th Gilbert Public School Board Meeting. We did not address her comments in the summary because we wanted to research some of the data to make sure that we are presenting the correct argument. Somehow during the course of several weeks, new bright lights caught our attention and we got sidetracked. Yes we are amateurs; we have an excuse for everything.
Just a quick back story, during a public comment session for one of the Agenda Action Items, Mike McClellan came to the floor and indicated how Senator Andy Biggs and company has been consistently defunding the public school systems since they got into office. If we are not mistaken, Senator Biggs’ wife, Cindy Biggs was in attendance that night. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps just due to her drive to ensure to correct what is wrong, she went on her now familiar rousing speech (rambling) that Mr. McClellan’s claim as “could not be more false.”
See 1:14:48 of the LiveStream Archive of the Meeting to watch Mike McClellan’s comment and Ms. Smith’s rebuttal (There was a presentation after Mr. McClellan’s comment and Julie Smith’s comments starts at 1:46.00),
Lucky for us though, one of our favorite bloggers, Blake Sacha already did some of the heavy lifting. In his blog entry (Fact Check – Andy Biggs and % school funding), he noted:
During the mid-May school board meeting, Julie Smith went to great length to defend Andy Biggs and public school funding. She claimed that public school funding has been flat at 41% of the total state budget for more than a decade.
The azleg.gov numbers tell a different story.
He presented a really simple chart that shows Julie Smith “could not be more false” in her defense of Andy Biggs, Eddie Farnsworth and Warren Petersen.
Gilbert Public School Board Observer 
What she did do was this: She noted that the percentage of funding for education has remained steady for “several years” at 41% of the overall budget. Of course, several years = 1. Last year, the k-12 budget was 35% of the overall state budget. And as Rob Robb in the Republic noted today, since 2008, the K-12 budget’s been cut by more than $500 million. What she tried to do was include federal funding in the overall K-12 budget. And she neglected to mention how much of the general fund is diverted to Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a considerable amount going from public funding to private schools.
Her explanation for this is about as valid as her “pot of money hiding somewhere in the GPS budget” is.