Student: Huppenthal video was edited, taken out of context

A video circulated by Democrats that purported to show a Republican candidate for state schools chief walking out on an interview with a high school journalist earlier this year did not reflect what actually happened.

Keith Wagner, the student who conducted the interview as part of a class project, told Arizona Capitol Times he was not happy that Democratic activists and bloggers edited the six-minute report he did on education funding to show Sen. John Huppenthal struggling to answer the high-schooler’s questions and leaving the room.

“I am a little upset that the focus of that has been changed to ‘a high-schooler interviewing a state senator and kind of catching him off guard,’” said Wagner, who just graduated from Corona del Sol High School in Tempe.

The video, which was edited and posted on You Tube by Democrat activist David Morales, was circulated by other Democratic boosters and eventually landed on the Democratic Diva blog. The edited version of the video ends with Huppental excusing himself from the interview, followed by a black screen and the words “Keith Wagner is still waiting for Huppenthal to return.”

But Wagner said the senator did return, and only left to look for more information on the education programs the student was asking about.

“He did come back and he was very polite,” Wagner said.

Critics of Huppenthal, who is running for superintendent of public instruction, have also latched on to erroneous elements of Wagner’s video report. In the interview, the student journalist asked Huppenthal to explain how he could tout the importance of vocational education programs, given that the senator voted in May 2009 to cut $550 million from public education, including cutting funding for the vocational classes to about $57,000 from $11 million the year before.

Huppenthal struggled to answer the question and left the room a few moments later to retrieve more information on the vote.

But the bill Wagner was asking about, H2028 (Laws 2009, Chapter 5), didn’t do what Wagner said it did. The legislation was part of a two-bill package that closed a $650 million deficit in late in the 2008-09 fiscal year. It did three things: delay $100 million in university funding to the next fiscal year; delay $300 million in K-12 funding to the following fiscal year; and cut $250 million from K-12, but backfill the cuts with an equal amount of federal stimulus money.

Additionally, budget documents from the Joint Legislative Budget Committee show the vocational education funding levels remained unchanged in fiscal 2010 at about $11.5 million. Earlier this year, Gov. Jan Brewer had advocated cutting funding for vocational education programs to about $57,000, but the proposal was never considered by lawmakers.