Waste of the Day: AZ School Vouchers Used For Hot Tub, Wedding Gifts, More

Topline: More than 18,000 Arizona families used school vouchers to make an “unallowable” purchase in 2025, costing the state at least $10.3 million for banned items like condoms, Broadway tickets and wedding gifts, according to records obtained by the KPNX news station in Phoenix.

School vouchers didn’t go for schooling

Key facts: KPNX found that parents used school vouchers to buy $350,000 worth of tickets to live performances like Disney On Ice, The Lion King, Wicked and pop concerts. Some individual tickets cost $1,000.

Families also spent $77,551 on rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. One family used $6,000 to send their kid to Broadway camp in New York City twice.

KPNX identified 84,000 banned purchases in total, including electric dirt bikes, insurance payments, hotel stays, $1,500 gift cards, bounce houses and a hot tub.

In one audit of “high-risk” families obtained by KPNX, the state found that 20% of all purchases were for banned items.

The state told KPNX it has recovered $1.2 million of the improper spending. Six people were referred for prosecution.

KPNX reported last year that voucher money had paid for lingerie, diamond rings, babysitting, $500 LEGO sets and a $2,000 payment to a person listed as “me.”

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School vouchers became popular, but…

Background: In 2022, Arizona became the first state to approve universal school vouchers. Any family regardless of income can receive $7,000 to $15,000 per child for educational expenses like private school tuition, tutoring, homeschooling and more.

The program quickly grew in popularity and now serves 100,000 families with $1 billion per year. That was too many people for the state to monitor, and Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne told his staff to automatically approve any requested purchase of less than $2,000 beginning in late 2024.

Attorney General Kris Mayes’ office asked Horne to increase oversight in a January 2026 letter obtained by KPNX.

“You appear to contend that payment of public funds for unallowable purposes is not illegal … Respectfully, that does not make sense,” Mayes’ office wrote. “By publicly announcing that [Arizona] would automatically process all transactions under $2,000, [Arizona] and Superintendent Horne have given a road map of how to game the system.”

Horne did not change the policy.

Summary: Regardless of whether a state uses school vouchers or not, it must ensure education funding is actually reaching its schools

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This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.