Patagonia High School volleyball coach Brenda Somoza was in Tucson on Sept. 26 when Nate Porter, athletic director for the school, called and asked her if she had put the tarps down on the gym floor.
It had started to rain, and the failing gym roof has at least ten leaks. “I shot back from Tucson as fast as I could, and put the tarps down,” Somoza said.
It was important to get the floor dried right away, as Homecoming ceremonies, as well as varsity and JV games against the Gregory School, were slated for later that afternoon. “It wasn’t that bad yet because it hadn’t rained much,” she said. “It was kind of just sprinkling, but then once the game started it really started coming down.
“All the towels we had were all soaking wet, so I called my mom who was on her way to the game and told her to turn around and go get beach towels either at my house or her house. We mopped up the water in between the sets.
“It was really nerve-wracking because that was a big game for us and at any time the ref could have been like, ‘We’re calling this, you guys forfeit.’ We were really scrambling and just praying that the rain would subside a little bit so we could get through the games. We had kids racing out onto the court to mop it up between the sets. We had a station right behind the referee stand where I had two girls mopping up with the help of a girl from the Gregory School and then I had two girls at another spot back behind the locker room that just stayed there both games mopping up.”
Michael Young, assistant principal and the school district’s Building Director, said there is no quick and easy fix for the gym’s roof.
“We’ve had assessors come down (to look at) the roof on the gym,” he said, adding that one contractor refused to allow his men on the roof because of rot. “Some of them said they wouldn’t even touch it, and some said that they would give me a warranty for as long as we can see their taillights leaving the parking lot.
“There are no blueprints that I can find. We’ve had engineers come out to look at it and they said they won’t touch it, there’s no specs on this building, and it’s rotten. There’s nothing we can do to help you.”
The bigger concern for district administrators and students goes well beyond forfeiting a volleyball match or the occasional leak. Significant repairs are needed throughout the Patagonia campus, which serves grades Kindergarten through 12, and funding for such repairs is unavailable due to politics and bureaucratic red tape.
“Every building needs a new roof,” Young said, noting that almost every classroom on the campus has a leak.
School facility repairs in Arizona are funded by the State Facilities Board (SFB). The SFB is limited in what it can fund, however, because its budget is set by the Arizona legislature, which has a long tradition of underfunding public schools in the state.
Funds are allocated to schools through a competitive grant process, a system set up to meet the needs of the more than 2000 public schools. For fiscal year 2026, the legislature appropriated $200 million to the Building Renewal Grant fund at SFB. According to the School Facilities Oversight Board’s August 2025 report, there were 738 grants awaiting funding, with an estimated cost of $338.3 million. This leaves a $138.3 million gap between the money allocated by the state and the requests for funding from schools.
The SFB was created in 1998 after the Arizona Supreme Court declared, in 1994, that the state’s system of funding public education was unconstitutional. Previously all funding for schools had been provided primarily by secondary property taxes, which meant that funding was dependent on the property values of the individual districts. The SFB was formed with the intention that it would provide more equitable and uniform funding for all schools. The legislature, however, has failed to fully fund the program.
In 2013, Arizona lawmakers implemented the competitive grant system so that districts had to compete for the limited pool of money. “The result was two-fold: not only was there less money available to schools, but there was no longer a clear benchmark for what adequate funding should be, limiting scrutiny of how much lawmakers were shortchanging schools,” wrote Jim Small in the Arizona Mirror on August 14, 2025.
In 2017, four school districts, the Arizona School Boards Association, the Arizona Education Association, and the Arizona School Administrators filed a lawsuit against the state legislature, arguing that the state’s method of funding of the schools was unconstitutional because it violated the state constitution’s requirement that there be a “general and uniform” school system. The plaintiffs argued that the present system led to underfunding, especially for schools in less affluent districts. Plaintiffs estimated that Arizona public schools have been underfunded by $6-7 billion dollars over the past 25 years.
It took eight years for the case to move forward, but in August 2025, Maricopa County Superior Judge Dewain Fox ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying that the state’s model for funding school facilities is inadequate, and that “local wealth largely determines school quality.” The Arizona legislature has already announced that they will be appealing the ruling.
Meanwhile, the Patagonia district resides squarely in the lower end of the “wealth” scale, and the district’s students pay the price.
Superintendent Kenny Hayes said in addition to the gym’s leaky roof, its electrical and plumbing systems, installed in the 1970s, need replacing.
“Our gym is at the ‘End of Useful Life,’“ he said, referencing a term used by the State Facilities Board. “No roofing company will even touch our gym roof because of how bad it is. There’s not a company that can provide us with the things we need to fix it, so we need a whole new facility.”
SFB conducted an assessment of the building, however, and does not agree that the gym should be replaced. The school has challenged this assessment, pointing out several factual errors in the assessment.
PUHS’s Michael Young said that two years ago, the plumbing had to be shut down when some of the cast iron pipes collapsed. The school was told that it would cost over $100,000 just to replace the plumbing in the building. “I figured why should we pour more money into something that is rotting around us?” Young said. “We’d just be putting lipstick on a pig here.”
Patagonia art teacher Cassina Farley has been dealing with a leak in her art room for several years. When it rains, the water runs down through a light socket in the ceiling. “I get a bucket, I put it under the drip and then I get angry about the fact that our kids deserve better,” she said.
“These kids in this small school get it from every angle. They got it on the county level with the money stolen from them by the former treasurer, they get it from the state level from the legislators, in this case through the State Facilities Board, and they get it on the federal level with all the programs being cut.”
Mold is another big concern for both Hayes and Young. The cafeteria is particularly worrisome to Young. “In the cafeteria the water is penetrating into the block and the block is degrading,” he said. “It’s coming right through, and you can see staining all throughout the building.”
In 2018, the school received a building renewal grant from SFB to replace old swamp coolers with new HVAC units, and ever since then the roof has leaked.
“SFB is the one that signed off on the project, but the company never did it per plan,” Young said. “[SFB] sued the company, but the company went out of business, and we’re left with the leaks. It needs to be completely redone. We need to pick the AC units up, redo all the flashing that they put up under the AC units, but then the roof itself is also failing because it’s just old and it’s a flat roof.”
Several of the tiles in the cafeteria ceiling were removed because of fear that they might fall when the roof leaks, but, according to Young, a representative from the State Fire Marshal’s office said the tiles, which are a fire retardant, needed to be put back in place. “When they get wet, I don’t want to put the health and safety of the children at risk of those falling, so we haven’t put them back up,” Young said.
Dan Erickson, superintendent of the Sonoita School District, testified at the recent hearing regarding the state’s funding model for school repairs, citing his experience as superintendent of Bowie Schools, where they had documented 17 leaks. “Every time it rained, you could go in the auditorium and watch the rain traveling down the side of a wall inside a building,” he told the PRT.
The Elgin School is in better shape, Erickson said. “We’re in a better spot than some schools because we have a newer facility and we do a good job keeping it up as much as we can.”
Erickson recognizes that the SFB program is underfunded. “They’re never going to have enough money to do what every school needs,” he said.
Arizona State Representative Lupe Diaz (R-Benson), who represents District 19, which includes Patagonia, Sonoita and Elgin, believes that the Patagonia School District should consider a bond election and not depend solely on the state for repairs. (The PRT also reached out to District 19 Representative Gail Griffin and State Senator David Gowan for this article, but neither legislator responded to our inquiries.)
“It’s worth noting that neither school district [Patagonia High School and Patagonia Elementary School] has gone out for a bond in recent years, and they should look at that,” Diaz said in a phone interview. “And neither have they gone for a voter approved override … which means there’s some things that they can do as well.”
Both these options would have to be approved by voters in the school district. Bonds, which are used mainly to fund capital expenses, are debts that are paid back to the investors by the taxpayers of the district. A tax override would allow the district to increase taxes beyond the limits set by the state.
In response to Diaz’s comments, Patagonia High School Board President Ron Pitt said the state constitution places the responsibility for maintenance of school facilities on the State Legislature, and that responsibility has not been met, resulting in school facilities all over the state are in various states of disrepair.
“I believe that bonding should be used by local districts to construct new facilities and not for repairs,” Pitt said. “Overrides should be used when state and local funding is inadequate to fund annual operational budgets. Current operational budgets for both districts are adequate.”
Pitt also pointed out that it would be illegal to use elementary district funds on buildings owned by the high school district.
Superintendent Hayes said it would be irresponsible to ask local taxpayers to approve a bond initiative for facility repairs.
“For a community as small as Patagonia is, it would have to be such a large amount of money to fix all the problems that need fixing at the school that it would be an undue burden on the taxpayers of our district,” he said.
“It’s sad that representatives for the state of Arizona can’t change from campaigning to actually governing once they are in office. Ideologies such as this are the reason that Arizona ranks the lowest in all of the 50 states for educational funding.”
Erickson believes that one solution to school funding shortages would be to limit the state Empowerment Scholarship program, which diverts funding from public schools to pay for voucher programs. “If you would take even half of that money, $500 million, out of the voucher system and put it into schools, we would have enough money to fix up schools all around the state,” he said.
Meanwhile, Young has no idea when there will be funds available to fix all the leaks at the Patagonia campus. For now, tarps and buckets seem to be their only recourse.
His biggest worry is that one of the roofs on campus may cave in. “We go to [SFB] facilities meetings and they’re always after us. They keep drilling through us that you have to do roof inspections, you have to go through and ensure that they’re safe. Well, we are, but when there’s no backing, what do you do?
“They showed us [pictures of] roofs that had completely collapsed in the Valley area and that’s my biggest fear. Are we next on that list for that whole roof to cave in and just pray that there aren’t children in there at the time? It’s hard to sleep at night.”