(Image source from: AZcentral.com)

The Arizona public education system will be on the general election ballot with the subject of two ballot measures and will affect infinite races up and down the ballot, from the governor to school board.

Electors will face two specific questions accompanying the public education system.

The first, a referendum on a private school scholarship program, was placed on the ballot after a group of political novices, aided by both their passion for the cause and naivete at the challenge, gathered enough signatures in 2017 to refer the program to voters. A no vote would mean the law, which would take a targeted scholarship program and apply it to all public school students, would not go into effect.

The second question is a measure to raise the income tax on the state's highest earners. The Invest In Education Act turned in nearly double the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. Teachers who were part of Arizona Educators United, the group that started the #RedForEd movement, helped gather some of those signatures at parks, zoos, and Arizona Diamondbacks games during the late spring and early summer.

Noah Karvelis, one of the leaders of Arizona Educators United, said that effort came from teachers realizing that the Legislature adjourned without meeting the demands laid out ahead of the April walkout. Lawmakers passed a pay-raise plan — an average 20 percent phased in over the next three years — but did not restore funding to pre-recession levels.

"We're just trying to get back to where we were," Karvelis said. "We're just trying to get back to our 2008 funding levels."

Karvelis said the number of signatures gathered showed the sustained movement of the teachers, though it was in a less-concentrated and lower-profile manner than the protests at the Capitol and at schools.

"It's been continued, sustained support," Karvelis said. "Not for a week, not for a month, but it been months and months of sustained activity."

"Teachers are engaged in the political system of Arizona and there's no return from that and I think that will be the lasting legacy of this," Karvelis said. "It will be beyond the walkout, beyond the ballot, beyond the red shirts. It will be that teachers became engaged in the political process of Arizona."

By Sowmya Sangam