Arizona pays $1M to private school linked to pro-Trump Christian nationalist group: report

Matthew Chapman
June 17, 2024


Silhouette of crosses held up at sunset (Shutterstock)

Arizona's school voucher program is not just subsidizing private education, Mother Jones reported on Monday — it's giving money to a Christian nationalist institution affiliated with a pro-Trump megachurch.

Specifically, money is flowing to Dream City Christian Academy, a school established by Dream City Church which sees a 21,000-attendance congregation each week, and where Trump held a town hall-style campaign stop earlier this month.

The church has hosted a number of Christian nationalist and far-right figures, including some with ties to former Trump administration official and QAnon activist Michael Flynn.

"In 2022, Arizona became the first state in which all students are allowed to use state vouchers to cover a portion of tuition at any private school, secular or religious. Through Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, each participating family receives about 90 percent of the money the state would have spent on the child’s public school education — around $7,000 per student per year — for private school tuition," said the report.

That amount covers up to two thirds of tuition for the school's 800 students. "Dream City Christian Academy received almost $1 million in tuition voucher money last year, the Arizona Republic recently reported."

Dream City Christian Academy is part of a network called Turning Point Academy, a project of the pro-Trump student group Turning Point USA which has seen a number of controversies over racism and extremism.

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Turning Point Academy describes itself as “an educational movement that exists to glorify God and preserve the founding principles of the United States through influencing and inspiring the formation of the next generation” — and much of its material appears to explicitly endorse the revisionist history that America was founded as a Christian nation with law based on Biblical principles.

"When Arizona passed the legislation that allowed for private school vouchers, the program was projected to cost $65 million in 2024 and $125 million in 2025. But the most recent estimates put that cost at a staggering $940 million per year, more than 1,000 percent of he initial estimate," the report continued.

"A report last month from Brookings Institution, the nonpartisan policy think tank, found that Arizona’s program was disproportionately used by wealthy families — even though it was designed to boost the academic achievement of students from families in underserved school districts. As it turned out, families in the highest poverty areas were five times less likely than people in the wealthiest areas to use vouchers."