Arizona’s schools are once again staring down a funding cliff and the culprit isn’t just political gridlock — it’s a decades-old formula called the aggregate expenditure limit .

Passed by voters in 1980, the spending limit was intended as a budgetary guardrail. It caps how much Arizona’s public school districts can spend each year, even if the Legislature has already approved those funds, such as those from Proposition 123, which increases the distribution from state trust land funds for education, or other sources.

The cap is based on student enrollment and inflation, but with a fixed baseline from 1980 — a time when overhead projectors and chalkboards dominated classrooms and school safety wasn't part of the general fund and long before Arizona school districts experienced huge a

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