Criticizing school curriculum could cost you your job if you’re a Mesa Public Schools (MPS) parent.
That’s the experience one mother shared recently after sending negative emails to outgoing MPS Superintendent Andi Fourlis. The MPS mother — who omitted her name — explained her interaction with Fourlis with the governing board during their meeting on Tuesday.
The mother recounted how she’d emailed Fourlis her opposition to proposed English curriculum, and in response Fourlis sent an email to her employers which read in part:
“I received lengthy, inaccurate, and inflammatory emails from one of your staff members using [your company’s] email address regarding school district matters. While I met with the employee as the parent of a student in our district, I’m wondering if the email messages are representative of your public relations firm, as they are coming from your firm’s email address?”
The mother petitioned the board for greater protections of parents, teachers, and staff from any other inappropriate pressures by Fourlis. She questioned whether Fourlis had other victims.
“My concern is, I’m just a parent. If Dr. Fourlis felt the need to look up my bosses and try to get me in trouble at work because I disagree with things and have spoken at a couple of board meetings, what type of unethical or intimidation tactics is she doing to your staff members and to your teachers? I encourage you as a board to look at the emails that Dr. Fourlis has been sending. And I’m concerned about the superintendent’s members that remain. Are they victims of the same intimidation tactics? Are they perpetuating the same unethical practices?”
Board member Rachel Walden publicly challenged Fourlis over her email. Walden promised she would work to establish policy to prevent MPS leadership from engaging in “cancel culture” behaviors against parents in the future.
“Superintendent Fourlis sent [an email] to her employer in what sounded like an attempt to make this woman face repercussions with her employer for her email to us. These were Superintendent Fourlis’ actions and not the board’s. I am vehemently opposed to cancel culture!” said Walden. “Please continue to email me questions or concerns and know that I would never contact your employer. Whatever email account you use is up to you, but note that communications to the board are still subject to public records requests. I will be asking the board President, who controls the agendas, that we address this as a board so that something like this never happens again.”
Tonight at the school board meeting in public comment we heard from a woman who had previously emailed the board and Superintendent using her work email address, which revealed her employer. She proceeded to then read an email that Superintendent Fourlis sent to her employer in…
— Rachel Walden (@waldenpatriot) May 14, 2025
Walden is involved in an ongoing lawsuit against Fourlis and the district for allegedly “encouraging and assisting students to identify as members of the opposite sex without notifying parents.” Per Walden’s legal team, MPS policy allows students’ gender transition plans to remain hidden from parents.
Administrators for at least one MPS school were discovered to have maintained a secretive spreadsheet documenting the students undergoing gender transitions whose parents were not to be told. Email evidence obtained by counsel also indicated staff were instructed to not disclose gender transitions to those not named on transgender support plans.
Just look at the superintendent’s tenure- per pupil funding lowered bc the amount of qualified teachers drastically dropped + thousands of students left the district. That’s her legacy
Fourlis should be fired.
This is not a new tactic but it has gotten worse over time. I never took political opinion to my work at Phoenix Union High School District but when I said something on Twitter it went viral including false information from cancel culture. HR came in to my office and told me they didn’t agree with my political beliefs. I said that was why I don’t bring my politics to work. The next year 2018 my contract was not renewed.
I have kept my employment as confidential ever since because I was elected again to a school board in 2020 and have been on a board since. As a conservative Republican I am constantly attacked by various groups linked to the superintendent and by his wife including one attempt to get people to contact my employer by a group Also the superintendent, his wife, and the current board president have all put slanderous defamatory statements that dox my potential employment because they don’t want accountability or transparency.
I think it is a methodology being used in public education because NOBODY stops them. The attorney general, county attorney, etc.. don’t take complaints of OML or other violations serious and everyone says your only option is to sue them. Well they brag about having an army of tax paid attorneys that will ensure they don’t lose in court. I even got an injunction of harassment to protect my family against the superintendents wife but that only means she can’t go to my home or church. Her online defamatory statements have increased. It is the industry of bullying and harassment. Some of us are trying to fix it but we are losing.
So, let me get this straight… she was sending something that her employer would punish her for saying – which we can easily infer from her interpreting this as a threat to her employment, then speaking at a board meeting to tell people about it, then going to a journalist about it… and saying she’s being threatened? The only person who made all of this public is herself. And no, she shouldn’t send controversial opinions using her work email, and if she does work for a PR firm, she should definitely know better.
Hurrah for the MPS mother (unnamed) who has the intestinal fortitude to challenge the leftist bureaucracy who attempted to silence her.
Administrators for at least one MPS school were discovered to have maintained a secretive spreadsheet documenting the students undergoing gender transitions whose parents were not to be told.
all should be terminated – with loss of license or ability to teach in any public school. It’s simply NOT THEIR PLACE.. contact with students should not be allowed – much as a sex offender is limited.
What can you say about “educators” like Fourlis? What disgusting human beings these people really are when they try to harm people that disagree with them and make their disagreements public. And then on top of that the board allows a list to be kept of kids that the “teachers” are allowing to transition (which is the code word for severe mental illness) without telling the parents who would be able to help their child with their sexual confusion brought on no doubt by the “teachers” themselves and their indoctrination of the kids in the classroom. What a total joke our public education system has become thanks to the idiot leaders of the teachers unions and the unstable people that are hired to be “teachers.” Our educational system is in the toilet and ready to be flushed.
Get your children out of public schools. The administrations and teachers hate you.