Hey parents, flood Horne’s hotline with positive calls

Arizona Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Horne has established what he calls an “Empower Hotline” for conspiracy-driven MAGA parents to leave hallucinatory complaints about teachers.

That’s not how Horne’s office describes the program, of course.

They say the hotline is meant for parents who feel a teacher might be offering lessons or presentations that “detract from teaching standards” or “focus on race or ethnicity rather than individuals and merit, promote gender ideology and social emotional learning.”

In other words, Horne is allowing parents who believe in a critical race theory boogeyman and other kooky education goblins to utilize state resources to report their paranoid fantasies.

And he’s doing so knowing that critical race theory is NOT taught in Arizona schools.

Still, after a complaint is filed the state education department will dispatch an “investigator” to the school. Who will do what, exactly?

Interrogate a teacher or a student? Rifle through an educator’s desk looking for damning evidence? Badger other teachers? Search file cabinets in the principal’s office?

Under what authority? The complaints aren’t criminal. There’s no legal license to do any of that.So what type of taxpayer-funded witch hunt are we talking about?

Horne is not an idiot. He’s a poltician. He’s simply pandering to the far right conspiracy crowd that helped get him elected.

Meantime, his so-called investigators will be out there intimidating teachers and threatening them with potential discipline.

Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia said that Horne “continues to politicize and disrespect educators and their profession and the relationships that they have with their families.”

It also sends a terrible message to potential education professionals at a

time when the state is already having a difficult time recruiting and maintaining teachers.

However, parents with children in Arizona schools can do something about this.

I am a parent whose children went through Arizona’s public school system. Along the way they had many, many wonderful teachers. I’d guess the same is true of parents today.

So, use Horne’s “Empower Hotline” to remind the superintendent of that. Flood his negative hotline with positive messages. Give Horne what he deserves, and in the process give Arizona’s many, many terrific teachers what they deserve: Respect.

I’d guess that Horne, a supposed believer in rigorous education standards, is a fan of math and science. One of the things a student learns in each of those disciplines is that a positive cancels out a negative.

So, do it.