When Indiana’s Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita launched Eyes on Education — an official state website that he says seeks to expose “socialist indoctrination” of students and “trans-sanity” in schools — educators targeted by the site were caught completely off guard.
Paul White is the superintendent of New Prairie United Schools, outside of South Bend. “I found out when it became live,” he tells Rolling Stone. But when he saw why his district was among those highlighted for supposedly unacceptable policies, White was confused. “The document that they had on their website related to our school system was no longer in use. It had only been used for about 60 days. And it had been replaced for almost two years now.”
Rokita’s office has claimed that the “objectionable curricula, policies, or programs affecting children” that are posted to its site are fully reviewed and verified. But White insists that is hogwash: “There was zero due diligence,” he says. This lack of considered process may be a pattern.
The attorney general website pledges the office will use “our investigative tools, including public records requests” to probe materials it believes could violate Indiana law. But Rolling Stone sent records requests to the 14 districts and educational entities highlighted on Eyes on Education, asking what the attorney general’s office has demanded of them. None of the eight that responded had received any records requests from Rokita’s office.
In the case of New Prairie, the Eyes on Education site posted, for public opprobrium, the district’s old “Gender Support” policy, originally crafted in August 2022. That plan had directed that trans and gender-nonconforming students could choose whether the district would discuss their school accommodations (think: bathroom choice, pronoun changes) with the parents. Based on community feedback, that policy was soon revised to make disclosure mandatory. The new policy, adopted November 2022, is still in effect. And it complies with a controversial new state law, adopted in May 2023, to require such disclosure.
When launching Eyes on Education, however, Rokita’s team posted the district’s old, temporary policy without any context, as if it were still in effect. As White’s office was suddenly besieged by calls from local media outlets, he figured there had been a simple error, and thought the attorney general’s office would be eager to correct it. To reach Rokita’s office, White used the same Eyes on Education portal that allows citizen snitches to make a complaint.
White provided Rolling Stone with the correspondence he used to try to get the matter settled. “Whoever sent this to you did not share the correct plan with you,” he wrote. “My recommendation is that you … not take every citizen’s submission as gospel truth.” He pressed the attorney general’s office about its seeming lack of care: “Why did no one from your office reach out to me to ensure the accuracy of the posted document and verify its usage?”
White attached copies of the current plan, highlighting that “parents will be informed in all instances when a transgender student comes forward to request gender transition considerations.” He asked that the old policy be removed.
The response White received shocked him. Corrine Youngs,policy director and legislative counsel for Rokita, demanded White provide extensive “documentation that evidences the repeal of your former policy,” as well as documents “evidencing you formally adopted this new policy.” Having already posted the out-of-date policy without corroborating it was still in effect, the attorney general’s office was refusing to correct the record without putting White through the wringer.
White did not hold back in his reply to Youngs: “It is beyond concerning that the highest legal office in the state of Indiana … vetted nothing, gave me no chance prior to publication to respond, and now you have published your website and we have to ‘prove’ what I submitted to you is true. This is sad and I have no respect for it,” he wrote. White insisted that the submission process for Eyes on Education enables politically motivated attacks. He wrote of the person who sent Rokita’s office the outdated document: “They clearly have an agenda, or they would have been interested in the full truth.”
The updated policy was eventually added to the Eyes on Education website, but without any context or explication. The old policy is still there as well, now with a date appended: “Policy revised in November 2022.” White says he has gotten “no response” to his last communication with the attorney general’s office. A Rokita spokesperson defended posting outdated materials on the website in a statement to Rolling Stone: “Even if a lesson plan or policy has changed, it’s important for parents to see what the adults in their child’s school are capable of.”
White points out that gender accommodations weren’t something the district came up with on its own, but the result of litigation that required the district to develop a policy. White made this clear in his letter to Youngs: “Given you are in the Attorney General office, I am guessing you are also aware of federal court case precedent around this subject.” He referenced a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up, about an Indiana school that was required to make accommodations for a transgender student. White adds, “We have no choice from policy and federal case law precedent [but] to work with transgender students on facility and programming access.”
Youngs did not respond to detailed questions about her communications with White. Instead, Rolling Stone received an additional statement from the Rokita spokesperson. “A vast majority of the submissions on the portal currently were given to us by teachers or other school employees, and easily verified,” it says in part. “That’s why they went up without us notifying the schools.” The statement insists that “the portal’s goal is to provide transparency,” but adds, “We will not take down outdated content.” The statement asserts that the “portal will actually help teachers and school administrators because it will expose misinformation that can naturally exist amongst the public.”
White says he still doesn’t know what the aim of Eyes on Education is. But as a Cuban American, he’s particularly alarmed by other documents highlighted on the site — posted from a nearby school district — that simply alert students to the availability of minority scholarships at local colleges. “I went to a state university in this state on one of those types of minority scholarships — and so did my mother, as a first generation immigrant,” he says.
“That really concerned me,” he continues. “Is that local school system supposed to be in trouble for highlighting opportunities and options for minority students? It seems to infer that. I find that troubling on so many levels. I just don’t understand.”
