Tom Horne's 'empower' hotline yields mostly jokes and ridicule

The “empower” hotline that GOP Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne started as a way for parents to report questionable teachings in public schools has yielded hundreds of submissions.

However, more than half appear to be jokes or complaints about the hotline itself.

The hotline started in March 2023. According to public records obtained by KJZZ, the first two and a half years did not necessarily bring on the issues the hotline is meant to root out.

The Arizona Department of Education’s website states the purpose of the hotline is to flag: “inappropriate public school lessons that detract from teaching academic standards. These include those that focus on race or ethnicity, rather than individuals and merit, promoting gender ideology, social emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content.”

It yielded about 675 complaints, but 370 of those don’t appear legitimate.

They include pleas to get rid of the hotline like these:

“Tom Horne has set up a racist, transphobic hotline to ‘report’ the teaching of history or kindness as if either were a crime,” one person wrote.

Several submissions were just insults directed at Horne himself calling him a “racist old fart” and a “dumb ho.”

Several people took to transcribing song lyrics like “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Others wrote fan fiction. Multiple people transcribed the script of “Bee Movie.”

One person even composed a sonnet about “critical race theory.”

The names of most people who wrote in were redacted by the Department of Education.

There were many other submissions where it wasn’t clear whether the person writing in was being serious.

One person wrote that they have three children enrolled in K-12 public schools, and voted for Horne for his position against critical race theory, but accused him of allowing students to be indoctrinated by teaching about the Holocaust.

“Much like other anti-white teachings, the Holocaust is just another way of making our children feel bad about themselves because of what white Europeans did to the Jews. Is he going to want to make our children feel bad about slavery next? Something my children had nothing to do with. Perhaps he should teach about the unlimited power some groups of people have over the world's banking system and the resentment that makes,” the person wrote.

A spokesperson for the departments said itis investigating some allegations and have passed a handful of others on to the U.S. Department of Education, but results are “pending.”

Horne said the hotline is working.

“I think it’s been successful a lot of times, because we’re a local-control state. I don’t have the power to stop what they’re doing, but if I publicize it, then they stop on their own,” Horne said.

About 20% of the complaints were about sexuality or gender being taught inappropriately to students, such as pronoun use and teachers displaying rainbows.

“Book in classroom about transgenders led my child to changing his name,” one submission said.

“They were talking about how rights for gay people are actually a good thing and not a sin against God,” another stated.

Roughly 11% of the submissions were complaints about racial lessons or critical race theory. They largely included reports that lessons unfairly promote white guilt.

“(REDACTED) was overheard by my child talking about the ways in which slavery affected blacks even after emancipation, and we feel that this encourages a victim mindset that is helpful to no one and excludes the white students in the class,” a complaint said of a teacher.

Horne said through this method, he stopped the Mesa Unified School District from using a visual in professional development training for teachers describing the United States as a “white supremacist country.”

It’s not clear where that information was publicized, but the department’s website refers to the incident.