It’s time to give money to a public school — $200 for an individual, $400 for a couple — and get 100 percent of it back at tax time. It won’t cost you a penny. It’s a tax credit, meaning you deduct it from the total you owe the state. If, for example, you do your taxes and find you owe the state $950, subtract your tax credit from that amount, and that’s how much you’ll pay. If you gave $400, you’ll only pay $550. See? No cost to you.

So, who can you give the money to? Any district or charter school. You can even divvy your credit up among a number of schools.

What is the money used for? Schools can only use it for extracurricular or character education programs, not for classroom-based education. I don’t much like that restriction, but that’s the way the law was written. Still, lots of important education and recreation happens in schools outside the classroom—sports, music, art, science, field trips, clubs. Especially in schools with lots of children from low income families, the donations can be the difference between the kids participating or being left out.

How do you give? Most school districts have a link on their website’s home page which has all the information you need. You can pay online with a credit card or download a form and mail in a check.

How do you choose the school or schools to give your money to? The answer is probably easy for people whose children are in school. For everyone else, my suggestion is, give it to school with lots of low income students. If parents and community members pay little or no state taxes because they don’t make much money, they can’t take advantage of the credit, which means their schools don’t get a whole lot of this extra money, while schools in more affluent areas get many times more.

If you want to give to Tucson Unified, which has plenty of schools with low income students, here’s where to start. The district even supplies a list of the 25 schools that got the least money last year—between $5.58 and $20.22 per student. The district average was $54.09.

Schools in Sunnyside Unified are also a good choice. Its schools have anywhere from 70 to 94 percent of their students on free or reduced lunch, so they all can use the financial boost. Here’s the Sunnyside tax credit page.

Two Notes: First, you can earmark the money you give to be used for a specific child, your own or someone else’s. Second, though I recommend you give your tax credit money before the end of the year, you actually can give all the way to tax day, April 17, 2018, and still take it off of your 2017 taxes. But don’t wait! Give it now so schools know how much they’re getting. Begin the new year with that warm feeling you get when you know you helped out some school kids.

This article appears in Dec 21-27, 2017.

8 replies on “Give Money to a Public School, Get It All Back”

  3. Giving money to the current Public School System in Arizona would be essentially supporting a Failed System of Public Education. It needs to be fixed!!!!

    The Control of the Political System by Republicans here in Arizona and the “Election” of Donald Trump are tragic examples of the Failure of our System of Public Education with the inability of Citizens to Critically Evaluate the suitability of Candidates for Public Office.

    Our Constitutional Democracy is based upon private property rights, a market economy, and the accumulation of wealth. These are the tools that our society uses through which individual and national ambitions for freedom and happiness may be reached. Could all this be illusionary and productive of neither, and, in fact, destructive of both when pursued in contradiction to community interests and achieved on the miseries and credulity of others?

    There needs to be a national recognition that the fundamental role of our Democracy, via a System of Public Education, is to produce citizens that cherish their own individuality, rights and responsibilities and have a respect for the individuality, rights and responsibilities of others;

    That: it is not a privilege for a citizen to be healthy; it is not a privilege to be safe in your environment; it is not a privilege to have food, clothing, and shelter; it is not a privilege to be gainfully employed and self sufficient; and, it is not a privilege to pursue your talents and interests through an educational system.

    These are all fundamental needs for life, liberty and happiness that our System of Public Education should inculcate to Citizens in our Democracy!

  4. Look how fast a tax credit article turned into wish list for socialism. Interesting. Also, the idea that we punish the kids because of a political party. Is that a right also?

  5. “Giving money to the current Public School System in Arizona would be essentially supporting a Failed System of Public Education. It needs to be fixed!!!!” Quoting from comment above.

    Depends on your definition of failed. Stanford just released perhaps the most sophisticated education study of all-time. They ranked every school district in the nation based on academic gains, using five years of cohort data (same student, year to year) as a basis. The process overcomes a lot of the shortcomings of using just one year’s worth of growth.

    Here is a list of Arizona school districts that finished in the top 10% of the nation:

    100 Ajo Unified DistrictARIZ.6.3 yrs.100th-
    100 Saddle Mountain Unified School DistrictARIZ.6.7 yrs.100th$69
    99 Eloy Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.1 yrs.99th$25
    99 Gadsden Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.2 yrs.99th$31
    99 Littleton Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.2 yrs.99th$
    99 Phoenix Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.2 yrs.99th$22
    99 Riverside Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.1 yrs.99th$43
    99 Santa Cruz Valley Unified DistrictARIZ.6.1 yrs.99th$41
    99 Wilson Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.2 yrs.99th$26
    98 Altar Valley Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.1 yrs.98th$34
    98 Crane Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.0 yrs.98th$46
    98 Osborn Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.1 yrs.98th$27
    98 Santa Cruz Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.1 yrs.98th$41
    98 St Johns Unified DistrictARIZ.6.0 yrs.98th$76
    97 Heber-Overgaard Unified DistrictARIZ.5.9 yrs.97th-
    97 Litchfield Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.9 yrs.97th$76
    97 Pendergast Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.0 yrs.97th$52
    97 Picacho Elementary DistrictARIZ.6.0 yrs.97th$41
    96 Florence Unified School DistrictARIZ.5.9 yrs.96th$62
    96 Round Valley Unified DistrictARIZ.5.9 yrs.96th$67
    96 Stanfield Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.9 yrs.96th$43
    95 Chandler Unified DistrictARIZ.5.8 yrs.95th$83
    95 Fort Huachuca Accommodation DistrictARIZ.5.8 yrs.95th$46
    95 Higley Unified School DistrictARIZ.5.8 yrs.95th$83
    95 Laveen Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.8 yrs.95th$55
    95 Snowflake Unified DistrictARIZ.5.8 yrs.95th$60
    94 Murphy Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.8 yrs.94th$27
    94 Whiteriver Unified DistrictARIZ.5.8 yrs.94th$34
    93 Blue Ridge Unified DistrictARIZ.5.7 yrs.93rd$61
    93 Tolleson Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.7 yrs.93rd$42
    92 Avondale Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.7 yrs.92nd$61
    92 St David Unified DistrictARIZ.5.7 yrs.92nd$67
    92 Willcox Unified DistrictARIZ.5.7 yrs.92nd$60
    91 Benson Unified School DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.91st$54
    91 Bullhead City School DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.91st$31
    91 Mohave Valley Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.91st$57
    91 Peoria Unified School DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.91st$70
    91 Red Mesa Unified DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.91st$32
    91 Safford Unified DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.91st$59
    90 Cottonwood-Oak Creek Elementary DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.90th$40
    90 Gila Bend Unified DistrictARIZ.5.6 yrs.90th$27

    By the odds, if we were an average state, you would expect that we would have 14 school districts in the top ten percent, given that we had 140 districts large enough to be ranked.

    Instead, Arizona had 41 (I didn’t list two of them).

    By comparison, we had only one school district at the tenth percentile or below. A small school district completely isolated from the competition by geography.

    Note, the Chandler Unified District was singled out for attention by the New York Times. Of the 200 largest school districts in the nation, their academic gains were the second highest in the nation. Peoria and Washington Elementary ranked in the top ten also.

    Note, we had two school districts finish in the top one percentile of the nation. Thus, we can use Einstein’s theory of relativity to calculate the speed of light in education. These two school districts, Saddle Mountain and Ajo, gained 6.3 and 6.7 years in 5 years of school. That’s an extra 1.7 years, which divided by the five-year span is 0.34 extra years per year. The typical gain in 3rd through 8 is 25 points on the Azmerit exam, thus .34 extra multiplied by 25 standard equals an extra 8.5 points per year.

    The speed of light in education equals 25 points plus 8.5 points = 33.5 Az Merit points per year.

    The ramifications of this study are infinite. The number one large school district in the nation achieved their gains with a larger ethnic achievement gap than the nation at the 8th-grade level (their school district is one of the large urban districts participating in NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress).

    If every minority child were to achieve the speed of light gains and the rest of the nation was to stick with status quo, the gap would only close by 40%.

    In other words, we can’t get there from here.

    If a teacher were to deliver “speed of light” education gains in a highly at-risk school, she could easily be subject to reprimand and perhaps even be fired. The vast majority of at-risk students are more than 34 points below standard, thus that teacher could easily have a class that doesn’t have a single student meet standard, despite her delivery of speed of light results.

    Most school district administrators do not have a working knowledge of the math of academic achievement.

    Outside of Chandler, Peoria and Washington which were featured in the NYTimes story, I doubt that a single one of these school districts know they are on this list. The first three I contacted to congratulate them, didn’t know.

  8. Hey Thuckwad! How come you’re not commenting on the “Mexican American Studies: What’s Next?” article. Perhaps this is the reason:

    “It’s a fitting irony that the tactics used by Tom Horne and John Huppenthal against MAS were repudiated in a court of law while both men have seen their reputations tarnished one could even say, destroyed because of a string of personal and professional improprieties compounded by their publicly exposed racism.

    This judgement is a triumph of our legal system over racism and its use by cynical politicians. At the end of a year when racism and anti-semitism have turned mainstream, condoned by our president and echoed by venal politicians and street mobs, Judge Tashima’s unambiguous condemnation of the motivations behind 15-112 is a breath of fresh air.”

    Let’s hear what you have to say Thuckwad. Inquiring minds want to know!

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