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State auditor: Arizona relied on school promises, not proof for safety grants [1]
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Date: 2025-08-12
The Arizona Department of Education relied on written promises from schools that they were following School Safety Grant requirements, instead of documented proof, the state’s auditor general found.
In a report published Aug. 7, the Arizona Auditor General wrote that ADE “did not conduct some important monitoring activities (for the safety program) and instead relied mainly on schools providing written acknowledgments of Program compliance.”
Auditors wrote that lack of compliance “could limit these schools’ ability to enhance school safety personnel effectiveness and improve school safety.”
During the 2025 fiscal year, ADE awarded $128.3 million through the program to fund 1,086 police officers, counselors and other safety personnel at 1,153 Arizona schools.
In its response to the audit report, the Arizona Department of Education agreed that the auditors’ findings were accurate, but said that additional context was necessary.
“While there is always room for improvement, this four-person team has worked tirelessly to successfully administer the (grant program) to ensure that Arizona schools have the funding, resources, and training necessary to fill and sustain critical positions across our state,” the department wrote. “When unmet program requirements are identified, the team takes immediate steps to ensure schools are promptly brought back into compliance.”
Auditors recommended more robust oversight measures, to which the department agreed, but said in its response that it already “actively monitors schools’ compliance.” Auditors found that oversight to be lacking.
The Department of Education has cited inadequate staffing as the cause of multiple issues brought to light by the Auditor General’s Office in the past year. Those include a failure to ensure schools have adequate safety plans and the department’s refusal to meet with representatives from the Auditor General’s Office, as required by a new state law, to create procedures for risk-based audits of school voucher program purchases for months after implementing the audits.
The safety grant program currently has a staff of four, up from two in 2021, but the agency said it needs more workers because the program has grown quickly in the past several years. From 2020 to 2025, money awarded through the program quadrupled and the number of schools participating more than doubled.
In its written response to the audit findings, the Department of Education said that the massive expansion in the program since 2018, without a proportionate increase in staffing, had made keeping up with the same level of monitoring activities impossible.
In 2018, only 128 schools were awarded grants. That grew to 424 schools in 2020, when the program was expanded to cover counselors and social workers. After an increase in applications in 2020 that put 150 requests for school resources officers and 350 for counselors on a wait list, the Arizona Legislature increased annual funding for the program by $50 million.
“More personnel would be a better ratio,” Doug Nick, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Education, told the Arizona Mirror in an email. “Added administrative funding is not available.”
After the expansion in 2020, the department cut some of its monitoring processes, including requirements to submit documentation of safety team meetings and training certificates. The department told auditors that it did this to “reduce the burden on schools.”
The school safety grant program dates back to 1994, when it was created to fund the placement of police officers and juvenile probation officers at Arizona schools. It was expanded in 2019 to provide funding for counselors and social workers with the intent of supporting, promoting and enhancing “safe and effective learning environments.”
The purpose of the grant program is to fund police, safety and juvenile probation officers at schools to “deter delinquent and violent behaviors,” teach law-related classes and consult on emergency response planning.
Through the program, counselors and social workers are to identify students who might engage in harmful activities or who may have been subjected to bullying to provide them with support and referrals to outside services and to train school staff to recognize “signs of distress in students and managing crisis situations.”
The program funds safety positions in schools in all 15 Arizona counties, including 499 in Maricopa, 75 in Pima and 60 in Pinal.
In the report, auditors emphasized the importance of using the grant money properly, given school safety issues, with 221 school shootings across the country from 2018 and 2024 resulting in 140 deaths and 376 injuries.
In Arizona, multiple people — including elementary, middle and high school students, as well as one adult — have been caught bringing a gun to school campuses in the past 15 months.
In addition to approving applications for grants, the Department of Education is tasked with visiting the schools to verify the accuracy of information on applications, evaluating the program’s effectiveness and distributing money to schools — but only if they comply with the program requirements.
Auditors found that 15 out of 16 schools that they reviewed failed to comply with all the requirements of the program. But ADE distributed more than $1 million to those schools anyway.
Some of those grant requirements include conducting a school safety needs assessment to review throughout the year for improvement; developing an operational plan that addresses school-specific safety risks and identifying three safety priority areas such as bullying, drug use and fights, and developing ways to curb them.
Nine of the 16 schools reviewed by auditors didn’t develop operational safety plans and two others had incomplete plans.
“These schools were at risk of being unaware of and thus unable to prioritize and address their most pressing safety risks,” auditors wrote.
One school that had an incomplete plan identified top safety risks, but didn’t create a plan to deal with them. Auditors wrote that, absent this information, it’s unclear if grant money was used to “address the schools’ most pressing school safety risks.”
And the department inconsistently required the schools to submit reimbursement requests to ensure that the grant money was actually spent on school safety. In 2022, the department reimbursed one school more than $43,000 for a school counselor without receiving any expenditure reports, “potentially increasing the risk for fraud, theft, waste, and/or abuse.”
Instead of implementing site visits and desk reviews, as required by the program’s grants manual, the Department of Education simply required schools to say that they would comply with program requirements.
In its response to the auditors’ report, the Department of Education wrote that the current staffing of the grant teams won’t allow for desk reviews of all participating schools, but it was working to develop protocols to review a representative sample of schools each year.
“The Department also required schools to complete an end-of-year report that includes an affirmation that they met Program requirements but did not require any documentation to corroborate the schools’ affirmations,” auditors wrote.
All 15 of those schools that failed to comply with some of the grant requirements had promised in writing to comply, and that they read and understood the requirements.
It wasn’t until the 2025 fiscal year that the Department of Education began developing and implementing plans and procedures for school visits to ensure program compliance. The department conducted four of those visits that year and plans to do more in 2026.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne agreed with the findings of the Auditor General’s Office and had already implemented some of the suggested changes or had plans to do so as of July 30, when the department responded to the audit report.
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[1] Url:
https://azmirror.com/2025/08/12/state-auditor-arizona-relied-on-school-promises-not-proof-for-safety-grants/
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