An Open Letter to Tom Horne, Superintendent of Arizona Schools

Published: April 3, 2025

Hey Tom, I heard you want to start cutting police loose on parents because their kids miss too many days of school. Let me stop you right there, boss— That ain’t leadership. That’s lazy blame-shifting. You wanna know why kids aren’t showing up? Because schools don’t feel like places of hope anymore. They feel like holding cells with bad food and broken promises. Here’s a thought: Before you start tossing cuffs on tired parents just trying to survive, maybe ask yourself what you’ve done to make school worth showing up for. Let’s start with the basics: Why do administrators make five times what teachers do? Why is the damn copy machine always broken unless there's a budget scandal breathing down somebody’s neck? Why are we drowning kids in standardized bullshit while they walk through metal detectors to eat food that looks like it lost a fight with a microwave? You wanna fix chronic absences, Tom? Try this: Pay the damn teachers, not the bean counters. Scrap Common Core and teach kids something relevant—like how to write a resume, fix a car, pay taxes, or hell, think for themselves. Stop force-feeding them ideological noise. Being a kid is confusing enough without adults making it worse. Make schools safe—and I don’t mean more cops. I mean community, respect, and teachers who actually have the support to do their jobs. Serve school lunches that don’t taste like regret and cardboard. And how about this crazy idea: Year-round school, optional night schedules for juniors and seniors, and drop the eight-subject madness. You ever juggle eight jobs in one day, Tom? Neither have most adults. So why do we force it on kids? Schools should be portals of opportunity, not minimum-security prisons with mascots. Tom, this isn’t about politics. It’s about priorities. Get some backbone, quit posturing, and start listening to the boots-on-the-ground folks who actually care about these kids—the teachers, the parents, and yeah, the students themselves. You want to fix chronic absences? Then make schools worth attending. Signed, A Fed-Up Citizen Who Still Believes School Should Mean Something

– Common Joe