Corruption Is Part of Why School District ‘Democracy’ Is Rigged and Wasteful
28th April 2026
In 2019, the Scottsdale Unified School District in Arizona spent over $20 million to tear down and completely rebuild a school named Pima Elementary. This year, it voted to close the school.
Pima Elementary, designed for up to 840 students, reopened at less than 60% of that capacity, and it continued to decline. This fall, just seven years later, the school building won’t contain a single student.
Far from a one-off tale of district mismanagement, the closing of a brand new $20 million school building illustrates how easy special interest groups find it to manipulate school districts.
A nationwide baby bust had begun eight years before the bond election, meaning that there were already fewer students to go around. Likewise, the high price of housing in Scottsdale became a significant deterrent to young families locating there.