A D&S Reporting Project

AGabor

How Arizona’s School Boards Became a Cultural War Zone

By Dani Heba

Angry parents have called them pedophiles. The legislature has tried to ban their curricula. And constant competition from charter schools and voucher programs has depressed their enrollments. These are just some of the challenges recounted by Maricopa County school board members this April.

Verbal assaults and threats are probably the most constant battle for these Arizona school board members. But Arizona’s school boards also are at the forefront of America’s growing culture wars and the push for privatization.

“When I got on the board, I was labeled the Planned Parenthood plant,” said Lindsay Love, a school board member for the Chandler Unified School District. “I was the one that Planned Parenthood planted there to sexualize kids, to increase their abortion mill revenue.”

She even received death threats for advocating pandemic policies, such as COVID-19 mask mandates. The threats and harassment were so severe that Love has decided not to run for another term on the board.

To be clear, Love was not planted on her school board by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., the reproductive healthcare organization that provides women with access to a variety of healthcare services, including abortion. Nor is she the only one who reported being harassed.

“We had to have a police detail on our homes because they were threatening to come to our houses,” said Michelle Fahy, a school board member in the Kyrene Elementary School District.

(Left to right) Ylenia Aguilar, Lindsay Love and Michelle Fahy are school board members for different districts in the Phoenix area. (Photos courtesy of the subjects)

These stories, unfathomable just a few years ago, are reflective of growing school-board polarization nationwide.

In 2018, when the so-called Red for Ed movement peaked, parents rallied to teachers’ defense, advocating for increased school spending and better teacher pay. However, since 2020, when Christopher Rufo first weaponized critical race theory, legislators and parents have shifted their focus toward cultural conflicts.

Within months, the tables were turned on public schools, teachers and school boards. By 2021, education had emerged as voters’ top concern, even ahead of economic issues, with a majority of voters saying that public schools are on the wrong track.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education didn’t help. Schools shut down for long periods of time, and when they reopened, many children didn’t return and those who did were required to wear face masks.

In November 2021, concerns about education—both COVID-19 school closures and critical race theory–propelled Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee, to victory in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, despite Virginia voting solidly Democratic one year earlier. (Critical race theory isn’t actually taught in K-12 schools.)

“The pandemic really was their opportunity,” Love said, to attack school boards and to push both privatization and the culture wars.

Arizona continues to put forward new legislation that is likely to stoke the culture wars. The Arizona House passed a critical race theory ban in 2021; but it was struck down by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that the measure had been unconstitutionally added to the state budget. A new version of the bill was recently passed by the Arizona House and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate. At the same time, Arizona voters could be asked to vote on a ballot measure in November that would amend the state’s constitution to effectively include a ban on critical race theory.

Additionally, Arizona has passed laws requiring student athletes to compete in sports according to their biological sex, and is proposing a bill to change the state’s sex-ed curriculum to focus on biological sex rather than gender identity.

Brian Garcia, the president of Tempe Union High School District school board, said the situation got so tense in his district, at one point, that a school-board initiative aimed at providing school students with mental health resources was almost quashed when protesters tried, falsely, to tie the issue to critical race theory.

The program to improve mental-health services, including providing students with better access to counselors, was eventually adopted by the board.

However, not all Arizona school boards experienced such controversy. Board members in poorer neighborhoods, especially those that are majority Black and Brown, often experience less cultural controversy.

“We didn’t have those problems,” said Redeem Robinson, who recently served as a school board member in the Balsz Elementary School District, which also includes a sizable Somali immigrant population. “Our school district is working class,” he added, noting that families are too busy to pay attention to the culture wars.

Robinson, who resigned from his board in 2021, also mentioned that his school district taught “The 1619 Project,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times writer whose work is at the center of the critical-race-theory hysteria.

Ylenia Aguilar, a member of the Osborne Elementary School Board in Phoenix, says she celebrates the diversity of the district’s student body. (Photo courtesy of Aguilar).

Ylenia Aguilar, a school board member from the Osborn Elementary School District, another poor district with a largely Black and Latino population, agrees. We celebrate “all histories, African American, Mex-American, Native American and Asian American histories,” said Aguilar who is serving her second term on the school board.

Fahy, the school board member from the Kyrene Elementary School District, notes that these controversies regarding the culture wars bolster state measures that undercut funding for Arizona’s public schools, which she argues is Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s ultimate goal: “To dismantle public education,” Fahy said.

Fahy notes that vouchers, which provide money for Arizona students to attend private and religious schools, can benefit children with special needs who cannot always get the services they need in the state’s underfunded public-education system. But, the vouchers principally subsidize the well-to-do.

As middle-class families use vouchers to send their children to private schools, Fahy’s school district has seen declining enrollment, a trend that she says is expected to continue.

“We’ve had our demographer predict declining enrollment for years,” Fahy said.

However, with schools returning to in-person instruction and the end of Covid-19 mandates, at least debates about the pandemic have subsided.

“I feel like we’re just now starting to talk about normal stuff again, which feels really good,” Fahy said. “We’re back to school, we’re not wearing masks, people are kind of adapting, we’re going back to doing normal stuff, normal promotion ceremonies, not so much Zoom.”

 

Microschools Are Arizona’s Latest School Privatization Experiment

Adamo hires teachers to work with students; that’s unusual for microschools.  (Photo courtesy of Adamo Education)

By Malina Seenarine

When it comes to school funding, Arizona public schools rank near the bottom of the nation. The state’s push to privatize education, which includes for-profit charter schools and voucher programs, has spawned a new way to funnel public-school funds to private hands—one that has gained traction during the pandemic: microschools.

A one-room learning experience that typically includes 5-20 students and takes place in a private home, microschools incorporate online learning programs supervised by an adult, typically a parent. Microschools operate in a “legal grey space” with “no regulatory framework,” said Charles Siler, a communication’s consultant and public-school advocate. Those who run microschools are not required to have any teacher training nor are the schools required to adhere to the state’s curriculum. In Arizona, most microschools are paid for by the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, a voucher program that diverts per-pupil funding from public schools.

Microschools got a big boost during the pandemic.

“Through the pandemic, I saw the need for parents and students to have a different school-choice option, one that really customized and personalized the learning for the parent and the student,” said Tamara Becker, creator of Adamo Education, which operates a K-8 microschool in Fountain Hills, outside Scottsdale, and is planning to open another one next school year.

While most microschools are run by lone operators, Becker runs her program through a large—and financially troubled–charter network, Edkey, for which she served as the assistant superintendent for eight years prior to founding Adamo Education.

Microschools have become increasingly popular since the pandemic began. (Photo courtesy of Adamo Education)

Becker became interested in the microschool movement in 2018 through a group that joined EdKey, Primavera Online School. Becker left the charter network, first, to become executive director of Primavera, and then, after two years, to found Adamo Education in 2021.

Unlike most microschools, Adamo hires teachers to teach cohorts of 12 students each. The teachers are expected to follow the same students as they advance from grade to grade. According to Becker, educators at Adamo need to have Arizona teacher-certification credentials and undergo a security check.

For the fall 2022 school year, Becker is expected to open another microschool location in Queen Creek, outside Chandler.

Microschools, however, are controversial. One of the biggest players in Arizona microschools is Prenda, a company that markets the microschool concept to families and provides an online curriculum for parents running them. In May 2020 Prenda had just three microschools operating in Maricopa County but, by the fall, the number had grown to 25. Prenda currently has over 400 microschools and 4,000 students in Arizona and a few other states.

According to an April 2021 report in The Arizona Republic, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office last year launched an investigation into the relationship between Prenda and one of its partners, Edkey, the charter-school network with which Adamo is also affiliated. The investigation, in turn, grew out of a fraud complaint by a charter-school watchdog and, at the very least, highlights the lack of oversight among microschools.

“The oversight is zero,” says Dawn Penich-Thacker, a public school advocate for Save Our Schools Arizona and a professor at Arizona State University. Penich-Thacker points out that even if the person who signs up to start a microschool receives training and a background check—and not all do–most microschools operate inside a private home, and there is no information known about the other people in the house.

Becker has heard the concerns about the lack of oversight. Recently she had the executive director and assistant director for the state board of charter schools visit her microschool. “They were very pleased to see all the things that we were doing, because it does align to what the State Board for Charter Schools expects from their charter operators.”

That’s not quite what the Arizona State Board of Charter Schools reports. “Our staff has visited Adamo briefly, but a full review has not been conducted at this time,” wrote Serena Campas, assistant director of policy development and government relations at the state board, in an email. An Adamo spokeswoman  confirmed in a follow-up email: the school’s “annual review is scheduled for next year.”

Microschools are typically a one-room learning experience that typically includes a mix of classroom and online schooling. (Photo courtesy of Adamo Education)

Still, some parents appreciate the personal attention their kids receive from microschools and feel that, especially during the Covid pandemic, they are safer in these small settings than in traditional classrooms. “It felt a little more safe because there was less students in the classroom,” said Kylie Chamblee, mother of two and education coordinator at Black Mothers Forum microschools, which her children attend.

Black Mothers Forum started as an advocacy group in 2016. Its original mission was to unite and educate mothers who said Black and Brown children in their community face police brutality. The members of the group came together to advocate for children who, they felt, also were being poorly treated by the school district. In 2021, the group began to build microschools in the Phoenix area, and currently has three locations.

When Chamblee moved to Arizona in June 2020 she enrolled her daughter in Primavera’s first-grade online program for a semester before discovering the Black Mothers Forum’s mission and the microschools they were launching. Chamblee, who has a master’s degree in education, saw her kids struggling in a virtual setting and wanted to get them into a classroom. “As a parent, it was really important that the kids got attention, closer attention,” she said, adding that they also needed to be back with their peers.

As the network’s education coordinator, Chamblee says most kids come into the Black Forum microschools behind academically. But, because of smaller class sizes, she is able to create “close-knit” relationships with the parents to understand the challenges students are facing. “What we really aim to do is really identify those foundational pieces where the students are struggling, and really catch them up,” said Chamblee, adding that she has “seen so much growth” with her own children

Even as restrictions put in place by the pandemic begin to ease, the long-term effects of school closures are likely to shape the future of children for some time to come. How microschools will fare in a post-pandemic world is still uncertain. For now, although they are still largely untested, they don’t seem to be losing momentum. Microschools are spreading nationwide.

Q&A: Rosetta Walker, a Native Activist Devoted to Getting Out the Vote

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Rosetta Walker, 62, volunteers hours every week to register voters in the Phoenix area. (Photo by Jahlil Rush)

The 2020 presidential election saw Native Americans and Latinos in Arizona voting in record numbers, with some counties in Indian country seeing 40-to-60 percent increases in turnout compared to the 2016 election.  Not only did Joe Biden win Arizona, the first Democrat to do so since 1996, Senator Mark Kelly also won, flipping a reliably Republican Senate seat blue.

High turnout among Native Americans and Latinos was driven in part by opposition to Donald Trump, but also by the availability of diverse voting options during the pandemic. Mail-in ballots, early voting and additional polling places made it easier than ever before to cast a ballot, especially for those who live in tribal areas where great distances and inadequate transportation infrastructure have made it historically difficult to vote.

However, in recent months, the Arizona state legislature has been working to restrict voting rights of Native Americans and Latinos. The voter suppression tactics include disqualifying tribal IDs as a valid form of voter identification, closing polling places in sparsely populated and rural areas, prohibiting ballots from being produced in languages other than English and requiring proof of citizenship.

We got the opportunity to speak with Rosetta Walker who has dedicated herself to fighting these restrictive policies and being the “moccasins on the ground” to mobilize voters statewide. Walker has been working for years to get out the vote in tribal communities and suburban neighborhoods around her home in Tempe. On many Wednesdays, she can be found registering student voters at Phoenix College.

Walker is a certified deputy registrar and Native vote activist and an advocate for the Native American community.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How strong is your connection to your tribe?

I’m a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. But at the age of two, I was adopted out to a white family. I’m the product of the removal from my tribe. It goes back to what they call the ICWA, Indian Child Welfare Act, when young children were forcibly removed from their Native American families and sent to residential boarding schools or adopted out to White families and removed from the reservation altogether.

I never grew up on the Native American reservation, I never grew up with my people. I don’t speak my language. I don’t practice my culture, I carry the name, I get nothing from my tribe, other than a census number. I don’t have a sense of belonging to my tribe.

When and how did you get involved politically?

I’ve lived here in Arizona since 1995. We moved here from Breckenridge, Colorado, which is in the Rocky Mountains, 90 miles to the west of Denver, and I was also doing voter registration in Colorado.

I got politically involved back in probably 1983 when my employer was running for the House of Representatives in the state of Colorado, and I helped him on his campaign. That’s where I got my feet wet with understanding the impacts of legislators and why they vote the way they do and the political sway, positive and negative, of big money.

Given the complicated history of your Native heritage, what motivates you to do the work that you do?

I feel that the system has worked. I’m 62. I’ve seen the impacts of voting. I’ve seen how voting down a bad bill worked for the better. I’ve seen how people’s opinions were swayed. Today abortion is a hot topic. Where we have states voting on women’s rights, if we don’t vote, what will happen? I like to feel in my heart and soul that my vote does make a difference. And I will vote every election.

It’s extremely important for people to understand that you are citizens and you’ve all been granted citizenship. And with that comes responsibility that you can exercise that right to vote, you can cast a ballot, you can go to your local polling place, and you can vote for your school board. You can vote for your city council, you can vote for the president of the United States. But that wasn’t always the case for Native Americans here in the state of Arizona. So I decided that I’m going to try to make a change. And so that’s when I became a certified Deputy Registrar.

The message is that you have to take charge of what’s given to you. And a lot of people don’t, and that kind of hurts my soul. But I will do what I can to change their minds. I feel that, you know, in my gut and in my soul, that what I’m doing is right, by encouraging the voter and doing voter registration, because I feel that you can make a difference.

What are the biggest struggles that you face in encouraging the Native American community to vote?

When you go out to the reservation, you will see, it’s not like here, it’s not neighborhoods, you have vast expanses between little communities. So when you take away a polling booth, a polling site, you’re taking away the opportunity to make it easier to vote, it’s now going to be cumbersome. You’re now going to have to rely on your neighbors to get by. You might not even want to vote anymore, because they took away that ease of voting. So that to me is heartbreaking. That to me is voter disenfranchisement. You’re taking away the opportunity to make it easier  to vote.

What is your take on the current state of political division in the country and the general distrust of the public?

Our household is split. I say that because my husband is 67. He’s a Black man, and he’s a Republican. I’m 62. I’m a Native American woman, and I’m a Democrat. Our daughter is 28, and she’s an Independent. People ask me, how do you guys get along? It’s just fine. There’s certain things that we just don’t talk about. And if things get a little heated and I have to listen to Hannity one more night, I go. But I tried to keep the peace. It’s not like I’m an ostrich burying my head in the sand, but I just know better. Because when something that causes discomfort and discord within your household, within my home, I just know enough to just leave it be. Because my home is where I have peace. We can go to the bar and hash it out.

When you and your husband have your disagreements, what brings you back together?

It’s a mutual respect, because I do respect that other opinion. Because it helps to see two sides of the situation, sometimes it really does. And I’m extremely thankful that my husband is very level headed. He won’t counter with something ridiculous, he helps to explain his opinion and where he stands, and I can explain where I stand. So it’s having that mutual respect to have good dialogue, to have good discourse because it just makes us better rounded people.

We live in a divided household, but I think, at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to fight the good fight.

 

 

Broadband Access Lags in Arizona’s Native Communities

By Geoffrey Shamah

Jaynie Parrish’s mother lives near a post office on the Navajo reservation and has no trouble accessing the internet. Her father, who lives about two hours away, gets no service at all.

“When I go to my dad’s place out on the res [reservation], I get no service; you try calling these companies and it’s like calling a void,” said Parrish, Executive Director of the Navajo County Democrats.

The Navajo Nation is one of 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona, and although the nation is larger than the state of West Virginia and has a population of around 400,000, about a third of its residents lack adequate internet access — defined by the Federal Communications Commission as speeds of 25 Megabits per second for downloads and 3 Megabits per second for uploads.

Arizona tribes have been lobbying for better access for years, but have been hindered by a slew of obstacles, including the cost of installing physical infrastructure on large, sparsely populated reservations—a problem akin to that faced by other rural areas. Other problems include a legislative history that sought to carve up the ownership of Native lands, as well as federal and independent studies that significantly overestimated broadband access on reservations.

The Navajo Nation reaches across 27,000 square miles, stretching across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. It has struggled to get broadband services to its 173,000 residents despite record federal funding. (Photo courtesy of Nokia Corporation and NTUA Wireless)

According to the FCC, 67 percent of people living on tribal lands in the contiguous U.S. have access to broadband. However, experts at the American Indian Policy Institute at Arizona State University say the real number is far smaller.

AIPI’s own Tribal Technology Assessment surveyed Native students and found that 35percent use the internet through a personal smartphone, with close to half of those students relying solely on a phone for their internet subscriptions. Another 36 percent of the students still rely solely on dial-up internet access. Of the students surveyed, only 12 percent responded that their main access to the internet was via a cable company, (which in most cases is a fiber-optic connection.)

Average speeds for people relying on dial-up, and even mobile devices, would not be classified as “high-speed” internet. “Fiber is the gold standard,” said E.J. John, a policy analyst at AIPI who is himself a member of the Navajo tribe, noting that fiber enables speedy movie downloads, gaming and streaming.

But when the pandemic hit, most tribal communities only had DSL, which “doesn’t have the kind of capacity to do remote learning,” adds John. He notes that it’s hard to use apps like Zoom on a typical DSL connection, which only runs at around 1-to-7 megabits per second— a fraction of what is necessary for video streaming.

During the pandemic, subpar internet access hindered students accessing online classes, professionals trying to work remotely, as well as political advocates, like Parrish, who has been trying to activate voters in Navajo County.

According to AIPI, one reason that the FCC overestimated broadband access on tribal lands was because it relied on census data surveys. If one house in a census block reported having internet access, the FCC considered the entire block served.

“Here in Arizona, you see rough terrain, you see the mountains, the valleys, what I have here is not going to be true two miles down the road,” explains John. ”That’s why this idea of looking at census blocks is just not the best way to gather this kind of data.”

Today, getting service to many tribal areas, or even updating existing groundwork, is hindered not only by the cost of running cable through rough terrain, but by aggressive treaties that date back to the 1800s when Native territories were carved up into a checkerboard of allotments under myriad of owners. The Dawes Act of 1887, in particular, split ownership of Native territory into public, private and tribal entities.

The effects are still felt to this day as building or upgrading a phone line, fiber optic cable or cell tower requires negotiations among these various entities at every step along the way.

As a result, many for-profit telecommunication companies have abandoned some tribal regions altogether, putting the burden on tribes themselves to get service to their members.

For example, after years of limited investment in rural areas, Frontier filed for bankruptcy in 2020 leaving many tribal residents without service.

“Frontier elected not to invest money in the area because they are a for profit company and it’s very difficult to run a profitable business in rural areas in the telecom space,” said John Champagne, project planner for the Navajo Tribal Utility Association. “So what you see is a lot of tribes have taken over the utilities from for-profit companies and are trying to run them themselves to improve the services.”

NTUA, which has been providing essential utilities like gas and electricity to the Navajo tribe since the 1950s, decided to enter the telecom business in 2012, when it created NTUA Wireless.

The tribe’s leap into telecom was made possible, at the time, by a $42 million federal aid grant, under the Obama administration.

Obama’s American Rescue and Reinvestment Act of 2009 invested around $8 billion into broadband nationwide. Tribal governments used federal subsidies and grants to establish some broadband infrastructure where for-profit companies have failed in the past.

Since its inception, NTUAW has gotten fiber connections to schools, hospitals and libraries, and has also built a wireless network.

Champagne explains that the network the company built in 2012, with the help of government grants and a public-private partnership with ComNet Communication Networks, only covered about 40 percent of the Navajo reservation, but has been growing every year.

Now, the Biden administration’s American Recovery Plan Act of 2021 has promised over $350 billion in federal grants and funds in an attempt to further expand broadband infrastructure nationwide.

Additionally, the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program has been assisting low-income households across the country to pay for internet services.

However, NTUAW has yet to lay any fiber directly to homes. A pilot project in Window Rock, using ARPA funding, that will connect about 30 of the more-populous communities on the reservation to fiber, within the next 18 months, is expected to test adoption rates and gauge how much it will cost the company to build out a more expansive fiber system.

“There’s a tremendous amount of development and growth on the telecom side right now; there’s never been more development in terms of telecom on the Navajo nation, ever, than in the last two years,” said Champagne.

While the increase in funding has improved broadband access on Navajo land, there are still areas on the Nation that lack essential utilities like running water and stable electricity. Experts like EJ John believe that it will still take years and billions of dollars more to close the digital divide in Indian country.

“In the last couple pieces of legislation, there was $2 billion made specifically available for tribes,” said John. “According to our own tribal technology assessment, the need is probably closer to $10 billion. So $2 billion is a good start. But it needs to be more, there needs to be more investment, and just more resources for tribes.”

Could Toilet-to-Tap Recycling Technology Help Combat the Megadrought in the Southwest?

By Karina Aslanyan

In Scottsdale, AZ, the city’s Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant – otherwise known as the Water Campus – sewage water flows in and drinking-quality water flows out. Although the recycled water is not likely to flow through household taps anytime soon, the plant is now demonstrating a small but important answer to recycling water in drought-plagued Arizona.

“We are one of the most advanced indirect potable reuse facilities in the world,” said David Walby, Water Reclamation Services Director at the Treatment Plant.

David Walby, Water Reclamation Services Director at the Scottsdale plant, demonstrates how filters are used to purify water. (Photo by Tahreem Ashraf)

Arizona is at the fulcrum of two important and clashing trends: it is both one of the fastest growing states in the country and it is at the center of a water crisis in the American Southwest that is having rippling effects nationwide.

In May, the federal government announced plans to keep more water in Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, instead of releasing it to Lake Mead in Nevada—the first time the government has taken such action, which will lead to cuts in water people can use in Arizona and elsewhere. Officials say that both reservoirs are at their lowest points ever.

Amidst this crisis, recycled water has become a key part of the water-shortage solution for many cities. Every year, the Water Campus returns over 1.7 billion gallons of purified recycled water into regional aquifers, via the Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. AWT can treat up to 20 million gallons of water a day, making it one of the largest indirect potable water reuse facilities in the world. The AWT takes so-called tertiary effluent water, which has already been recycled for irrigation purposes, and further purifies it using membrane ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet photolysis.

Scottsdale’s Water Campus includes large, warehouse-like rooms filled with filtration systems. (Photo by Tahreem Ashraf)

To understand the problem that the AWT plant is trying to address, it’s important to understand where Arizona’s water supply comes from and why those sources are now endangered. Today, Arizona is in the midst of a 20-year megadrought, brought on by the decline of the Colorado River, the state’s main source of drinking water. Additionally, the river supplies water to seven other states and Mexico. Around 40 million people rely on the river as a primary source of water for both indoor and outdoor use. Produce like lettuce, vegetables, and fruit are all reliant on the Colorado River, which irrigates over 5 million acres of agriculture in Arizona, California, and Mexico alone.

In Arizona, water coming from the Colorado River, as well as ground water, follows a strict allocation system that gives priority to large cities – like Phoenix and surrounding Chandler and Scottsdale – as well as Native American tribes. The latter won their allocations via the 1908 Supreme Court decision in Winters v. United States. Despite this, many tribes still suffer from water scarcity due to issues such as lack of water infrastructure. As a result of a complicated history of agreements with the state government, farmers in Arizona are last in line for Colorado River water and bear the brunt of the drought.

The Central Arizona Project includes a network of canals that deliver Colorado River water to Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties.(Photo by Karina Aslanyan)
The canal system delivers water to more than 5 million people. (Photo by Tahreem Ashraf)

“There’s a need to move away from relying on Colorado River supplies as the primary supply of water,” said Sarah Porter, Director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Morrison Institute of Arizona State University. “We have to somehow make an adjustment to having a lot less water from the Colorado River, and that’s tough.”

Outside of recycled water, Arizona has also turned to ground water, which is being rapidly depleted, leaving a grim impact on the environment. The extraction of ground water creates fissures and subsidence – land sinking when the water that was filling a void within the ground is removed. “We have some areas in the valley where we have subsidence of upwards of 15-16 feet,” noted Walby.

To prevent the depletion of groundwater, Arizona passed the Groundwater Management Act in 1980. The act limits the use of mining water and requires that water taken from the ground be replaced to prevent subsidence.

One of the treatment plant’s major objectives is to replenish the aquifer holding ground water. What may come as a surprise, however, is that their only other objective is supplying water to golf courses. Through what is a public-private partnership known as the Reclaimed Water Distribution System, the Water Campus delivers 20 million gallons of recycled water to 23 golf courses in northern Scottsdale.

Golf courses are the biggest water users in Scottsdale and many other cities throughout Arizona; thus, they represent the Water Campus’s greatest opportunity for helping the municipality conserve water, according to Walby. One standard 18-hole golf course requires approximately a million gallons of water per day.

While Scottsdale’s golf courses may be its biggest users of outside water, they are also a huge economic engine, bringing in an estimated $500 million a year through tourism. While some golf courses have looked at introducing synthetic turf as an alternative to the high-maintenance grass, turf is not suited to the Arizona climate because it absorbs heat much more than grass.

Cities throughout the state have created incentives to encourage residents to preserve water used in outdoor irrigation, which accounts for about two-thirds of Arizona’s water usage, such as tiered water rates. That, in turn, is intended to reduce the prevalence of grass lawns, which require immense amounts of water to survive Arizona’s desert heat, which can reach as high as 122°F in summer.

“It’s a built-in incentive to go ahead and use the water that you need for indoors, but after a certain volume the next level of water is much more expensive,” explained Porter.

Additionally, cities like Scottsdale have been pushing residents to turn to native gardening. The city has introduced tax rebates for residents that choose to remove grass lawns and replace them with native vegetation, synthetic turf, or gravel.

The one place where the Water Campus’s recycled water is unlikely to flow, however, is in residential taps. In 2018 the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality permitted recycled water for direct potable reuse, which is defined as “the treatment and distribution of water without an environmental buffer.” (By contrast, indirect potable reuse means using “an environmental buffer, such as a lake, river, or a groundwater aquifer, before the water is treated at a drinking water treatment plant,” according to the EPA.)

A drinking water fountain dispenses purified recycled water at the Scottsdale Treatment Plant (photo by Tahreem Ashraf)

Eighteen months later, in September of 2019, Scottsdale’s Water Campus was issued the state’s first permit for direct potable reuse. However, for now, Scottsdale is choosing to focus on replenishing its outdoor water supplies, perhaps a more palatable recycling goal for local residents.