Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540396
OUR UNION IN ACTION 6 ADVOCATE | FALL 2025 Broken air conditioners. Leaking pipes. Rotting wood. For decades, schools across Arizona have fallen into disrepair while underfunded districts struggled to keep the lights on and students safe. By 2017, we reached our breaking point. at year, AEA joined forces with several school districts and our community allies to file a landmark lawsuit challenging Arizona's deeply unjust system for funding building repairs, upgrades, and essential infrastructure. is summer, aer years of organizing and advocacy, we won. On August 11, Maricopa County Judge Dewain Fox ruled that the state's current funding system violates the minimum standards set by the Arizona Supreme Court. In the final ruling – which is still several months away – Judge Fox is likely to order state lawmakers to develop a new, equitable funding plan to ensure that every school building is safe and well-maintained. While lawmakers can still appeal the ruling, we hope they will accept this outcome as an important step forward to right historical inequities. Stay tuned for more information about what the judge's final ruling will mean for our schools. Judge Strikes Down Unfair Funding Model for Arizona School Facilities Less Testing, More Teaching: Tucson Education Association's Organizing Win You don't need a degree in education policy to know what over-testing does to students. Every hour spent on standardized tests is an hour lost for real learning. It means less time for instruction and student development, and more stress for students and educators alike. As testing days piled up in the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), union educators decided to organize for change. During the 2024-2025 school year, members of the Tucson Education Association (TEA) held community conversations and collected more than 1,200 signatures from colleagues who wanted to reduce district-level standardized testing. It worked. Aer presenting their petition to the TUSD Governing Board, TEA negotiated a groundbreaking agreement to reduce standardized testing by 50% for grades 2–8 and by 30% for grades 9–11. "We've already heard from elementary teachers in just the first couple of weeks of school, and they're just elated," Jim Byrne, president of the Tucson Education Association, recounted. "It's really a sense of relief." Education advocates across the country are taking note. "We latch onto test scores as the be-all and end-all," said Harry Feder, Executive Director of FairTest. "While these tests can tell you some basic things, they don't really push kids to think critically, and they don't test important skills for modern times like communication and collaboration." HISTORIC WIN FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS: