Arizona schools chief said hotline would prompt investigations. What's actually happening?
Ten months after launching a hotline for parents to report instruction they believe runs afoul of academic standards, Arizona Department of Education officials said only “about two dozen” of the tens of thousands of reports it has received were “real complaints.” Even fewer related to the hotline’s intended purpose.
The department does not track outcomes from the hotline or have information on how many investigations concluded there was wrongful instruction, department spokesperson Rick Medina said.
When the Empower Hotline launched in March, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne billed it as a means to cut down on “inappropriate” topics like race and social and emotional learning that he said detract from academics, one of his key campaign promises. The department would dispatch an investigator to schools and request teachers cease troublesome lessons or else face potential discipline, Horne said.
But in a reversal, Medina last week said the Education Department is not responsible for investigating hotline complaints at involved schools despite funding a $70,000 to $80,000 hotline investigator position. The investigator functions to verify the credibility of people making reports, not to verify the facts being reported, Medina said. Districts are responsible for conducting their own investigations into hotline matters once the department contacts them about complaints it has deemed legitimate.
Spokespeople with districts that the Education Department identified as having legitimate hotline complaints against them said nobody from the department ever contacted them about investigations, however. The Arizona Education Association, the public school employees union, is not aware of any educators being investigated, either.
“Nearly a year later, the only results are a ton of headlines and 30,000 prank calls — and a deepening of the sense among Arizona's educators that this state is hostile to educators and our work,” said Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia. “The impact is real. Arizona loses thousands of educators every year to other states and other professions, and disrespectful political stunts like Horne's tattletale line are a part of the reason why."
What does the Empower Hotline investigator do?
By June, the hotline had received more than 30,000 prank calls from out-of-state robots, local critics and even a handful of radio DJs. Medina said calls have mostly trickled off in recent months, though reports do still come in.
Prank calls: Robocalls, out-of-state messages flood Arizona hotline to report 'inappropriate' curriculum
The investigator’s job is to sift through those reports and identify which, if any, are legitimate. The investigator might ask complainants to share accompanying documentation or answer further questions to clarify their report.
“We don’t want to be contacting the school district with every crank call that comes down the pike here,” Medina said, adding that corroboration steps might look different depending on the complaint. The process involves “preliminary screening of the complaints so that they can be vetted out and ensure that they are sincere complaints before they are sent to the local school officials.”
The investigator splits time between vetting complaints through the Empower Hotline and those attached to the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts voucher program, which provides families with state tax dollars to spend on private education or home-school expenses.
The position has been vacant since November after the first investigator stepped down.
A job posting lists the following duties:
Review and investigate inquiries, reports, complaints, findings.
Gather materials and conduct fact-finding interviews.
Work with external partners, including law enforcement.
Maintain investigation files and present recommendations to leadership.
Once a complaint is deemed legitimate, the department hands it off to the involved school district, which can choose how or if it wants to investigate the matter further, Medina said.
Districts say Education Department never reached out about complaints
Horne held a news conference in June to announce several examples of alleged wrongful instruction identified by the hotline. Whenever a problem is identified, he said the department calls district officials to talk about the complaint and asks that they no longer continue the concerning practice.
Under review: Tom Horne says he's investigating 3 school districts over complaints made to hotline
That was news to the three school districts Horne highlighted during his 50-minute news conference, district representatives said.
“We were surprised to hear there was an investigation at the press conference, and then nothing ever came of it afterward,” said Julie Farbarik, a spokesperson for Catalina Foothills Unified School District in Tucson.
In the seven months since, Farbarik and Chandler Unified School District spokesperson Stephanie Ingersoll said, the department still has not contacted their districts over hotline concerns. Farbarik did receive an apology email shortly after the news conference from an Education Department official, however.
"I apologize if no one from ADE has reached out to you or the District prior to this communication," Arizona Department of Education Director of School Safety Mike Kurtenbach wrote in the email. “I would welcome the opportunity to take just a few minutes of your time to discuss the matter if you’re willing to do so."
Farbarik declined the offer and has not heard from the department since, she said. Neither has anybody else in her district.
Catalina Foothills Unified and Chandler Unified have not acted on the information presented at the news conference because the issues were either resolved or nonexistent, the spokespeople said.
What wrongdoing has the hotline found?
The department has announced no new complaints since June, when Horne shared the hotline's three findings:
A Catalina Foothills Unified school distributed a spreadsheet with student names and pronouns used at school with an indicator of whether or not each student wanted that information shared with their parents.
A Chandler Unified Gay-Straight Alliance Club allegedly distributed emancipation paperwork to students.
A Mesa Public Schools training program, Horne said, focused on race by using terms such as “intersectionality” and “microaggression” and stating Americans live “under a system of white supremacy.”
In a December news release recapping Horne’s first year in office, the department again touted those three examples, but spokespeople for the districts said the hotline's findings were old news or unfounded.
Catalina Foothills Unified never withheld information from parents as the spreadsheet suggested, Farbarik said. Withholding information would be against district policy.
That spreadsheet was from 2021, and the matter had long been resolved, Farbarik said, but it resurfaced in early 2023 — several months before the news conference and just before the hotline launched — through reporting by Fox News and Arizona Daily Star.
“It’s not like any new information was uncovered,” Farbarik said. “I don’t know that there’s much value to that.”
In June, Mesa Public Schools Superintendent Andi Fourlis said the training materials were part of a one-time, optional training in 2020 and have not been used regularly.
Chandler Unified denied the allegation altogether.
“We have no evidence this occurred, nor is it our practice,” Ingersoll said.
Launched: State school superintendent starts hotline for public to report 'inappropriate' lessons
Medina chalked the districts' rebuttals up to the fact that the hotline investigator may not have all of the details, such as when something happened, when the Education Department shares information with a district or the public.
The department did not provide other examples of the two dozen complaints deemed legitimate. Some pertain to professional misconduct or child endangerment, Medina said. Those matters, though important, are not the intended purpose of the hotline, and the department is limited by privacy statutes on what details it can divulge about those investigations, he said.
Even so, Medina said there is a benefit to the hotline being available regardless of how much use it receives.
"Just because you get a small number of complaints, that doesn't mean the complaint hotline isn't worth having," Medina said. "Sometimes, if you're not getting many complaints at a company, that's a good sign. The complaint hotline helps to give you peace of mind that if people were upset, they could be complaining."
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Reach the reporter at nicholas.sullivan@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: What has 'inappropriate' lessons hotline for Arizona schools achieved?
