School Use Guidelines: School District or Charter School Resources

The Arizona Legislature, during the First Regular Session (2003), mandated that the Arizona Attorney General publish guidelines relating to the prohibition on the use of school district or charter school resources or personnel to influence the outcomes of elections. A.R.S. § 15-511(E) provides as follows:

By January 1, 2004, the Attorney General shall publish and distribute to school districts and charter schools a detailed guideline regarding activities prohibited under this section [A.R.S. § 15-511]. The Attorney General may distribute these guidelines through a website or electronically.

The following Guidelines are intended to address possible ambiguous situations (rather than the obvious applications of the plain statutory language). It is virtually impossible for these Guidelines to anticipate all of the factual scenarios that may arise in the course of an election. These Guidelines may, however, give some guidance about how pertinent questions should be analyzed.

Individual school board policies may be stricter than these Guidelines. School board policies are not supplanted by these Guidelines.

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