Tom Horne wants to stop Arizona's 'woke' teachers. But first he has to find one

In March, Arizona’s intrepid state superintendent launched a hotline to root out all those public school teachers who apparently lay awake at night, plotting ever new devious ways to indoctrinate our children in all manner of insidious political thought.

“I promised to establish this hotline so that anyone could report the teaching of inappropriate lessons that rob students of precious minutes of instruction time in core academic subjects such as reading, math, science, history and the arts,” Superintendent Tom Horne announced. “That promise is being kept.”

In June, Horne announced that complaints were flooding in to his Empower Hotline, revealing the many nefarious ways our teachers are pushing critical race theory and gender ideology and inappropriate sexual content.

“Despite those in ideological groups and some in the media that propagate the urban myth that CRT (critical race theory) is not a part of the school system, we have evidence from the empower hotline, that there is enough CRT in our schools to constitute a problem, though it is obviously not universal,” he said, as he detailed complaints against three school districts.

“We also have evidence that schools have put systems in place to hide or attempt to hide critical personal information from parents about their child. This is in direct violation of Arizona law.”

Horne's hotline turned up nothing

Now, 10 months later, The Arizona Republic’s Nick Sullivan provides an update on the flood of supposedly outrageous activity inside Arizona’s public school classrooms.

Turns out there was no flood, no trickle — not even a drop here and there.

It seems Horne’s Empower Hotline and his $70,000- to $80,000-a-year investigator have not rooted out so much as a single instance of a school conspiring to keep secrets about a child’s pronoun preferences or a teacher making white kids feel guilty about their race or a librarian sneaking porn to our children.

And those three complaints he cited during his 50-minute June press conference (and repeated in an end-of-the-year report on his first year in office)?

Turns out none of them amounted to much, if anything.

In fact, the schools were never even contacted by Horne or his investigator before the “findings” were announced.  The school districts learned about the allegations the same way as the rest of us — from Horne’s press conference.

Accused schools debunk hotline claims

Meanwhile, here in the real world, a spokeswoman for the Catalina Foothills Unified School District told The Republic the school never withheld information from a parent about a student’s pronoun preferences and that, in fact, withholding such information would be against district policy.

Mesa Unified School District’s superintendent said the training material that Horne said inappropriately focused on race was a one-off, optional class offered in 2020 and is not part of the district’s regular professional development program.

Numbers don't lie: GOP is wrong about school vouchers

And a spokeswoman for Chandler schools said the district could find no instance of a school handing out emancipation paperwork to gay students, as Horne claimed.

“We have no evidence this occurred, nor is it our practice,” she said.

As for the other cases of “woke” teachers instructing kids to hate one another, hide their gender preferences and debauch our babies? Here’s what The Republic’s Sullivan learned:

“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.”

Where is all that 'woke' indoctrination?

Put another way, we’re paying for a hotline — and an investigator who doesn’t actually investigate — so that Horne can crow about indoctrination that apparently doesn’t exist.

Swell.

Meanwhile, I’m guessing that Horne’s school voucher marketing campaign — the $10 million we are spending to convince kids to take tax money and flee public schools — isn’t going so well.

Gov. Katie Hobbs recently reported that nearly 50,000 of the 73,000 children who are getting Empowerment Scholarship Accounts were never even in public school before grabbing the money to leave public schools.

One wonders how much better the public schools — the ones the vast majority of Arizona’s children attend — might be if, instead of trying to tear them down, our leaders spent some time trying to build them up.

Instead, we have a state Legislature that is focused on boosting private schools and a state superintendent who is obsessed with chasing phantom conspiracies … and we pay for it.

More importantly, our kids do.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

Support local journalism: Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tom Horne wants to stop 'woke' teachers ... if he can find one