We’re back!

A month of madness … In our best lives, we still work … And we can say that, you can't.

As we wade through the flood of push alerts and press releases that we mostly avoided during vacation, we figured we’d loop you in on the biggest and wildest stories we missed.

Consider it a highlight reel of what the local news cycle can accomplish in a month, although it’s only a fraction of our unread emails.

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The boxcutter incident

Arizona’s political news cycle wouldn’t be complete without some Hernandez-related weirdness.

The Phoenix Union High School District alleged that Democratic Rep. Lydia Hernandez and her daughter, Cassandra Hernandez (who both sit on the Cartwright Elementary School District Governing Board), tried to get a boxcutter through Maryvale High School’s weapon detection system.

Phoenix Union’s statement said Lydia was recording the incident to test the school’s security while employees found the boxcutter in Cassandra’s bag. The duo denied it, but the district said it’s reviewing the evidence and “will pursue all legal options.”

A week earlier, 16-year-old Michael Montoya II was fatally stabbed at Maryvale High School.

The Hernandez mother-daughter duo is calling Phoenix Union’s bluff. Cassandra said she was working at EOS Fitness during the incident, and Lydia said she was at the school to help out some constituents, and wasn’t trying to test the school’s security.

Cassandra and Lydia’s time on the Cartwright School Board has been riddled with chaos, and constituents have been calling for them to resign since Cassandra joined the board this year. Now, politicians like state Schools Superintendent Tom Horne and two Phoenix City Council members have joined the resignation demands over the boxcutter allegations.

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Victoria’s Secret? School vouchers

Turns out that school vouchers, also known as Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, are empowering parents in the bedroom.

12News’ Craig Harris found parents bought lingerie, kitchen appliances and diamond rings with school vouchers.

Since last November, when Arizona’s Department of Education started automatically approving ESA requests, taxpayers also paid for more than 200 iPhones, 50 smart TVs and more than 300 purchases at The San Diego Zoo and SeaWorld.

The Fourth Estate 48 found more specifics revealing insane purchases like a steampunk corset and a 28-cubic-feet LG refrigerator.

In response, AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda suggested the program could use some “guardrails.” The far-right faction of her party was pissed. Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman, who is coordinating Freedom Caucus campaigns for the midterms, called for her resignation or removal.

The state’s public education system, however, scored a win when the Maricopa County Superior Court ruled that the way Arizona funds school facilities is unconstitutional. The Legislature will eventually have to pony up a lot more money if the ruling stays, but Republican legislative leaders promised to appeal the decision.

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Elections (under review)

August was overflowing with election news, so here’s the rapid-fire version:

• While an Arizona appeals court shut down Republicans’ challenge of how the state verifies the signature on mail-in ballots, President Donald Trump announced he’ll try to get rid of the entire mail-in ballot process anyway. More than 80% of Arizonans vote by mail.

• Secretary of State Adrian Fontes fired three of his top staffers¹ due to budget cuts, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield reports.

• Republican Congressman David Schweikert is considering running for Arizona governor, per Axios’ Jeremy Duda.

• Politicians are flocking to Massachusetts’ Nantucket Island for campaign cash, Capitol Media Services’ Howie Fischer writes. At Gov. Katie Hobbs’ reelection campaign fundraiser, a $2,800 contribution made attendees a “sponsor,” but they had to contribute the maximum $5,500 to be a “host.”

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Honorable mentions

• Senate President Warren Petersen, who’s running for AG next year, went on disgraced former lawmaker David Stringer’s show, the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod MacDonald-Evoy reports. Stringer didn’t interview Petersen, but he runs the platform where the interview was published. The former lawmaker’s rap sheet includes child sex crime charges and a lot of ongoing racism.

• Former Republican state Sen. Justine Wadsack could be held in contempt of court for missing a hearing in her $8 million lawsuit against Tucson over a March 2024 traffic stop, per the Republic’s Sarah Lapidus. Wadsack announced she was “sitting front & center” for a Charlie Kirk appearance instead of attending her court hearing.

• Kari Lake celebrated Labor Day weekend by announcing she’s laying off more than 500 workers at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the government-funded media organization she oversees, the Republic’s Ronald J. Hansen reports. The day before Lake’s announcement, a federal judge ruled she can’t unilaterally fire the Voice of America director.

Since today’s top was essentially a roundup of the biggest news we missed while on vacation, we thought we’d use this space to tell you a little about what we did on our break.

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Extra! Extra!

We broke from our vacation to break a little news about the broken news industry. Specifically, the buyouts at the Republic that claimed the entire editorial board and beloved politics reporter Mary Jo Pitzl.

Even Attorney General Kris Mayes, a former Republic reporter herself, put out a statement denouncing the move as “bad news for democracy.”

And we harassed the corporate overlord at the Republic’s parent company, Gannett.

More than 500 of you helped by drafting emails to CEO Mike Reed, urging him to reconsider the company’s wild decision to fire columnist Abe Kwok — while Kwok was on medical leave recovering from a stroke — without even telling him.

Thanks for stepping up!

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It’s an addiction, not a job

As journalism junkies and workaholics, we are literally unable to stop ourselves from sending at least one weekly email.

So we invited an elite 100 of you to sign up for a more personal Sunday Agenda, where we solicited feedback on a host of weird ideas, half-baked thoughts and ill-advised schemes we’re cooking up for 2026.

Thanks so much to those of you who took the time to read and write back! It was really cool to chat with you all.

Now, we’d like to hear from the entire class: Would you find value in a best-of roundup-style Sunday edition, or nah?

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Nazis are for punching, not promoting

During our three-week hiatus, everyone spent at least one week working on the project of their choice.

But perhaps the biggest project in the works is moving away from Substack as our email platform.

We explained why in one of our Sunday Agendas:

We appreciate Substack for believing in the Agenda when we first pitched it as part of a worldwide competition to launch a dozen local news publications.

But last week, Substack sent out a push alert asking people to sign up for a literal Nazi newsletter.

And really, the alert was just the latest predictable result of the direction Substack has been heading for years — once billed as an algorithm-free home for creatives, Substack is increasingly trying to compete against the hellscapes we’re all avoiding by becoming them. We suggest Casey Newton’s explainer if you wanna go deeper into that.

But the point is, Substack no longer feels like the right home for us.

Moving is a painful, multi-month process.

But the exciting part is that, as we build our own home, we can finally do something useful with all these emails you read and then delete.

Curt spent most of his break figuring out what that could look like as we build out our new website — and settled on a system of grouping our archives into primers for you to peruse. It’s quite impressive, although it’s still a work in progress.

After we reported that Gannett had abruptly ended the careers of some of the best journalists at the Republic, the Arizona Democratic Party came up with a novel solution for our local news crisis.

Donate to them!

Now, we’re clearly not above using the collapse of our industry to try to gin up support.

We can do that — we’re a news organization.

But the Arizona Democratic Party pretending that donating to them will help fill the gaps in the decimated local press corps is some of the most crass bullshit we’ve ever seen.

Democrats’ talking points are not a substitute for real journalism.

So we’re urging the party to donate every penny it made from that pitch to local news organizations, or to spend the proceeds on subscriptions.

Seriously, though. It’s the least they could do.

Wanna help put pressure on them? Forward today’s email to info@azdem.org

1. Those layoffs included Communications Director JP Martin, who has always been super helpful when we pester him with requests, so we’re sad to see him go. Meanwhile, Amy Chan, the office's longtime general counsel, and Murphy Hebert, the deputy assistant secretary of state, quit to pursue other opportunities.