Arizona schools chief accuses Scottsdale Unified board of adopting ‘woke’ curriculum

SCOTTSDALE, AZ (AZFamily) — Arizona State Superintendent Tom Horne says he plans to report the Scottsdale Unified School District to the federal government, saying the board violated a signed agreement not to teach diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Horne held a news conference Wednesday with Maricopa County Sheriff Jerry Sheridan. Together, they called out Scottsdale Unified’s curriculum, particularly a history book that Horne calls a “DEI-oriented textbook” that allegedly contains anti-police propaganda.

Horne called the majority of the school board “woke” for passing the curriculum.

“To label them woke without having ever read what was the 1,250 pages in the textbook is a problem from my perspective,” said Scottsdale Superintendent Scott Menzel.

He says content experts reviewed the book and made an informed recommendation regarding a balanced approach to history that complies with Arizona state standards. Horne points to a passage that says some Black Lives Matter activists believe some deaths that led to the movement were “the result of deeply embedded racism.”

“Well there are many people in this country who don’t think that racism is deeply embedded in this country,” Horne said. “They didn’t give a two sided presentation.”

“We would never adopt a curriculum that was anti-police,” said Menzel. “We do have historically situations where some people argue that we should defund the police. Here in Arizona we had people who removed school resource officers. That’s not something that we would ever contemplate, but from a historical perspective our students should be able to wrestle with why someone might have made that argument.”

The district also responded to the news conference with a statement saying, “Horne’s claims of indoctrination and a so-called ‘leftist curriculum being imposed’ on students are simply untrue and unsupported by fact.”

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