Buz Mills
Republican candidate for governor Buz Mills retreated on Sunday from his bizarre claim that Arizona’s public schools have as many administrators as they do teachers.
The wealthy gun range owner made the claim to Heat City two weeks ago in an exchange on Twitter. At the time, he was asked what he would like to see cut from the state budget to pay for his plan to beef up immigration enforcement.
“Education,” Mills tweeted. “1:1 ratio of administrators to teachers. Cut admin to appropriate level – improve education while freeing budget $$$”
But this weekend, Mills appeared on Sunday Square-Off, a weekly political news program that airs on the NBC-affiliated KPNX (Channel 12) in Phoenix. Host Brahm Resnik brought up the Twitter exchange and asked Mills exactly how many school administrators he thought Arizona employs.
“About 55,000,” Mills said.
“Are you sure of that?” Resnik asked.
“That’s the numbers that I get, yes,” said Mills.
The candidate paused for a moment, perhaps sensing something was coming, then added: “I don’t sign the paychecks, so I don’t know how many precisely it is, but the numbers that I get show that there’s 55,000 teachers and 55,000 administrators and bureaucrats and scorekeepers and so forth.”
Resnik pulled out several sheets of paper from the Arizona Department of Education and told Mills that, in fact, the state’s schools employ about 3,400 administrators.
“Now, I don’t know how you categorize —” Mills stopped himself. “The numbers can’t be that far off.”
“They are that far off,” Resnik told him.
The host said there are about 120,000 total employees in Arizona schools. A little less than half of them (55,000) are teachers, while about 4 percent are administrators. Resnik also said there are twice as many janitors as administrators.
Mills quickly began to backpedal from his claim.
“Did I say administrators, or did I say support personnel?” Mills said. “My recollection is that we had one-for-one. One backup person for every person on the front line.”
Mills said he was never talking about administrators only, but instead about all the public school employees other than teachers, including, apparently, janitors.
Mills conceded, however, that he hadn’t seen the employee breakdowns: “I haven’t been through your list,” he told Resnik.
Mills is running for the Republican nomination for governor. The primary will be held in August.
Watch the interview entire over at the 12 News website.
(h/t PHXated.com)