Roughly 1,700 children in Navajo County are being educated on state Empowerment Scholarship Accounts this year and more than half of them live in two places: Show Low, with 551 and Snowflake, with 360. That is what the Arizona Department of Education’s own numbers show. The department’s third-quarter report for fiscal 2026, filed with legislative leadership in June, lists every ESA student in the state by home ZIP code.
The numbers are uneven. Show Low’s 85901 has 551 ESA students, the most in the county. Snowflake has 360, Lakeside, 170; Taylor, 159; Whiteriver, 104; Winslow, 75; Pinetop, 68; Joseph City, 47; Holbrook, 41; and Overgaard, 38. Clay Springs has 16; Heber, 15; Fort Apache and Pinedale, 11 apiece; Woodruff, five; Sun Valley, two; and Cibecue, one.
North of Holbrook the numbers drop sharply. Across the northern end of the county, the Navajo Nation chapters and all of the Hopi Reservation, the state lists 17 ESA students: six in Kayenta, five in the Pinon area, three in Kykotsmovi, two in Indian Wells and one in Second Mesa. Keams Canyon, Polacca, Hotevilla and Shonto do not appear in the report at all.
Statewide, 102,891 students held ESAs in the third quarter, with annual awards totaling $1.115 billion, an average of roughly $10,800 per student, a figure inflated by larger special-education awards. At that average, Navajo County’s roughly 1,700 accounts represent something like $18 million a year in state education spending that flows to families rather than school districts.
A second table in the report answers a different question: where those students came from. The department also reports which public school district each ESA student attended immediately before enrolling, a table that, by its own footnote, only captures students who attended an Arizona public school from fiscal 2017 onward. For Navajo County’s districts, the counts are Snowflake Unified, with 196 students; Show Low Unified, 158; Blue Ridge Unified, 70; Whiteriver Unified, 46; Winslow Unified, 32; Joseph City Unified, 32; Heber-Overgaard Unified, 21; Holbrook Unified, 12; Kayenta Unified, two; Pinon Unified, two; and Cedar Unified, two. Sequoia Village School, a charter in Show Low, sent 57. That is 630 in all.
Set 630 against the roughly 1,700 ESA students who live here and more than three in five local ESA students did not come from a county public school, at least not since 2017. For that larger group, the state money is new spending rather than money redirected from district budgets, since districts are funded by enrollment and never enrolled those students. The report does not say where those students were educated before.
That mirrors the state as a whole, where 42% of all ESA students came to the program directly from an Arizona public school. Meaning most of the students using the funds are students, the state was previously not funding at all. Among this year’s new enrollees, the share is higher: 58.6% of universal-eligibility students in grades first through 12 who signed up this fiscal year came straight from a public school, the department says.
No district in the county has sent more students to the program than Snowflake Unified. Its 196 is more than Show Low’s 158 and more than every district around and north of the I-40 combined.
Why only 17 accounts across the entire northern end of the county? Eligibility is not the reason. Students living on a reservation have qualified for ESAs since 2013, nearly a decade before the program opened to everyone. Part of the answer is that many children on the Navajo Nation and Hopi Reservation attend schools run or funded by the federal Bureau of Indian Education rather than Arizona districts, and those schools sit outside the state system the ESA was built to draw from. The larger part appears to be supply. An ESA pays for private schools, microschools, tutors and curriculum and there is little of that to buy north of Holbrook.
The same report suggests what happens when there is. Just across the county line in Apache County, the reservation community of St. Michaels, home to a Catholic school that has operated on the Navajo Nation since 1902, has 102 ESA students. Fort Defiance has 79 and Window Rock 63. In Navajo County, Whiteriver has 104. Where a school already exists to spend the money at, families use it; where one does not, the program barely registers.
The department’s next report, covering the full fiscal year, is due later this year with use of this program showing very little signs of slowing down.
