The appointer in chief

MAGA public schools … Ripe legal questions … And heartwarming heists.

Voters ousted the Maricopa County School Superintendent in July amid an ongoing financial scandal over mishandling school funds. 

In November, they’ll have to pick a new superintendent. And their options could not be more different. 

The next Maricopa County Superintendent of Schools will either be a moderate Democrat or a MAGA Republican. 

Whoever wins will have to oversee schools’ governing board and bond elections, operate an accommodation high school for vulnerable students and provide education services in juvenile detention centers. 

They’ll also be charged with appointing new school board members when people resign or when there aren’t enough candidates on the ballot.

School board vacancies happen a lot. And the person who appoints them can have a profound impact on the makeup of school board members across the Valley’s 58 school districts by appointing people who share their ideologies. 

Oddly, the two candidates for the typically low-profile position are colleagues who generally get along, despite their severely clashing ideologies.

Republican Shelli Boggs defeated Superintendent Steve Watson in the Republican primary by less than 2,000 votes — surging from behind days after the polls had closed in a victory that turned the race for superintendent on its head.

Boggs is a former assistant to Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman (who is an indicted co-defendant in Arizona’s fake electors case) and the statewide outreach coordinator for a group that wants to “expose the radical indoctrination in K-12 education.” 

Democrat Laura Metcalfe is a longtime educator and school administrator who worked in the office under former Superintendent Don Covey. Schools lacked resources during her tenure, she says, but the news of financial mismanagement under Watson “made me angry, and that is why I'm running.” 

Both candidates serve on the East Valley Institute of Technology, or EVIT, school board. Metcalfe said the duo’s relationship has been “nothing but professional and collegial.” But the stakes are too high to keep playing nice. 

“What's at stake is that our school boards will become conservative, MAGA-focused leaders, and those agendas will be placed before our school district, teachers and superintendents and administration to carry out,” she said.

Boggs was formerly a cosmetology instructor at EVIT and resigned in 2014. She was elected to the EVIT school board in 2018 and talks frequently about cleaning out “corruption” there. 

Boggs says EVIT’s enrollment has doubled and administration costs decreased while she’s been a board member, and she saw “radical politics and activism removed from classrooms” under her leadership, per her campaign website. 

But her 2020 run for Maricopa County Community College District’s governing board shed light on why Boggs left her teaching career at EVIT six years ago. 

A mailer from a group that supports the school’s faculty showed Boggs holding an AR-15 and claimed she was “forced out” of the school “after scores of parents complained she was being ‘mean,’ ‘detrimental to the kids,’ ‘a bully.’” 

Boggs didn’t respond to our request for comment. But she told the Republic in 2020 the mailer was “full of untruths.” 

The AR-15 photo, however, was taken at an event for Republican women where she posed with the gun that was a gift for Donald Trump, she said. 

Boggs was hit with a “statement of charges” from EVIT in 2013, but an apparent settlement took place and she resigned. The Republic got a hold of that statement, which detailed allegations of bullying students. 

We got our hands on another document outlining allegations of Boggs’ behavior. She received a 2014 cease and desist letter from a law firm representing EVIT, demanding she stop making “false and malicious statements” against school administration, like that a superintendent was drunk at a school event and that EVIT paid her to resign. 

Boggs has been making the rounds on conservative outlets, including LD9 state House candidate Mary Ann Mendoza’s podcast, “Cactus Conservatives,” where she said “gender confusion has got to stop,” and “the most important thing we can do … is to take over the school board.” That comes with getting rid of DEI and CRT programs, or as Boggs puts it, “brainwashing and teaching racism.” 

Boggs is the state outreach coordinator for Moms for Arizona, a conservative education advocacy group aligned with Kari Lake that wants federal funds be withheld from schools “that engage in politicizing … and radical indoctrination.” 

Metcalfe used to work in the office that she’s running for and wants more financial oversight after Watson’s downfall. She has picked up endorsements from Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and several Maricopa County Community College District board members. 

Boggs earned endorsements from Republican state Sens. Warren Petersen and Justine Wadsack, and even Riley Gaines, a former competitive swimmer turned activist to keep transgender women out of women's sports. 

Boggs wants to bring conservative values to classrooms. And she knows the appointment process is an effective way to do that. 

“We need to bring the love of our country, family, God, back into our schools, and back into the homes. That's where the difference is going to be made,” she said on Mendoza’s podcast. “So anyway, I can do all of this stuff. I just need the votes.” 

Counties have all the fun: Mohave County supervisor Ron Gould will just have to roll the dice if he wants to find out if conducting a full hand count of election results is illegal after a Maricopa County Superior Court judge refused his request for preemptive legal immunity, declaring this issue is not “ripe” because the supervisors haven’t voted for a full hand count yet, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield notes. The Attorney General’s Office has already opined that it is illegal. Meanwhile in Pinal County, supervisor and failed sheriff candidate Kevin Cavanaugh will get his metaphorical day in court as the county starts an independent audit of the primary election over Cavanaugh’s suspicion that it was rigged because he lost the race for sheriff. And in evergreen news, Twitter owner Elon Musk is using his hellscape to push election misinformation, including about noncitizens voting in Arizona, while local election administrators like Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer suffer his digital fallout, the Washington Post reports. 

“This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen election officials and experts, some of whom spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to protect themselves and their organizations in a polarized election season. Most of them said it’s difficult to prove that Musk has caused the inundation of demands from misinformed voters but that it’s clear to them the two have coincided and are related,” the Post wrote. 

Welcome to Baja Arizona: Donald Trump is heading to Tucson on Thursday, marking what we believe may be the one-millionth visit by a presidential or vice presidential candidate so far this year. Vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz was in Phoenix yesterday ahead of last night’s presidential debate in Chicago, which came on the heels of vice presidential hopeful JD Vance's visit to Arizona last week. 

If we had a dollar for every time a wannabe president came to town this year, we would actually still need to ask you to upgrade to a paid subscription today. Sorry!

Judges are like dogs: All of Arizona’s judges are good judges, according to the Arizona Judicial Performance Review Commission, which is charged with vetting judges and making recommendations to the voters on whether to retain them in this year’s election, Capitol scribe Howie Fischer reports. And if voters approve Prop 137 on their November ballot, judges won’t even have to stand for retention elections in the future unless the performance review commission recommends they should. 

Innocent until posted to Insta: Arizona county sheriffs are finally ending the practice of posting online mugshots of every person booked in jail after a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling found Maricopa County’s mugshot lookup site violates the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, Arizona Public Media’s Hannah Cree reports. While many counties are changing their policies, it’s not clear what the Pima County Sheriff's Department will do yet. 

“The Pima County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t do what the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department was doing. No Personally Identifiable Information outside of name, photo, age, bond, and reference court case numbers are posted,” a spokesperson told Cree in an email. 

Dualities: Although both presidential candidates are promising to get tougher on the border, undocumented and mixed-status families would face vastly different realities under Trump, who promises to enact “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” and Kamala Harris, who promises to build an “earned pathway to citizenship,” Cronkite News’ Mia Osmonbekov reports. And Yuma’s mayor has a vastly different take on the border and which presidential candidate can fix it than his counterpart in neighboring San Luis, ABC15’s Nick Ciletti reports. One is on Team Trump while the other is pro-Harris, but if you can’t already guess, you’ll have to click the link to see which is which. 

January might be better: Gun safety advocates want Gov. Katie Hobbs to call a special session to pass gun safety legislation now, saying the issue can’t wait until January, the Republic’s Miguel Torres writes. It doesn’t seem like a sound strategy, considering Republicans at the Capitol have never even held a hearing about the bill that advocates want to pass, even though it has been introduced several times. 

In Graham County, even the crime stories are kind of heartwarming. 

The Eastern Arizona Courier’s Brooke Curley tells us of the muffin heist where a robber kicked down the door of a local school, ate some muffins, carrots and ranch dressing and stole $15. 

But the burglar left behind all the school laptops and computers, fundraiser sodas and other food, as well as the remaining $20 in petty cash in the drawer. 

“There are so many other things they could have taken,” school maintenance supervisor John McClaine told Curley.

Also, the image the paper used in the story was objectively perfect for the piece.