Like them, she’s part of a Latino family from East Tulsa and wanted to give back to the community she loved. She kept her word. The new charter middle school quickly performed among the best schools in Oklahoma with an A on the state report card. 

But on a recent sunny morning in May, she sat in a conference room in the former paper mill the school purchased and renovated and spoke words uttered by countless school leaders since 2020: “Then the pandemic happened.”

The school’s ranking fell. Chronic absenteeism spiked, and instead of being two or three grade levels behind academically, some students arrived as much as four years off track. Even as she worked to expand the network, Pollock that she would be able to fulfill her commitment to get kids in and through college. Students went to work to help their families during the crisis or cared for younger siblings.

“The mindset of school being a top priority had shifted,” she said.

But there are signs that recovery is now underway. All 74 seniors in last year’s graduating class were accepted to at least one four-year university, and the small network’s two middle schools for growth in reading and math from a national charter school organization. 

As the network prepares to take its next major step, opening an elementary school, Tulsa Honor Academy is “back on an upward trajectory,” Pollock said. “Our goal was to get back to a level of excellence, both in terms of academic growth and school culture.”

The new school will open as a Spanish-English dual language program. It’s something parents have wanted for a long time. Roughly half of the students Tulsa Honor Academy serves are not only first in their families to go to college, they’re also the first to graduate high school. 

That means some students’ “home language skills are not fully developed at home, and our kids also need to learn English,” she said. “By the time they get to middle school, they will be completely fluent in both languages.”

Teachers at the school already use strategies that build fluency and new vocabulary among English learners. On a morning in May, sixth grade science teacher Miguel Ramirez led a lesson on the nervous system. In their matching uniform sweatshirts and khaki pants, students read aloud definitions of terms like nucleus and dendrites and turned to a partner to repeat the material.

“Constantly hearing people say the words gets them to internalize it,” explained Justine McGovern, the school’s development director. 

The academy celebrates Latino culture by being the only one in Oklahoma, as far as Pollock knows, that offers full courses for elective credit in , cultural dances from Mexico. In authentic dresses that represent the regions of Mexico — white for Vera Cruz or vibrant colors for Chihuahua — the students perform all over Tulsa, and many compete nationally.

‘Unapologetically college prep’ 

Inspired by her mother, an engineer who moved from Mexico to Tulsa to pursue a career,  Pollock originally planned to become an immigration lawyer. At a time when there weren’t many Latinos in Tulsa, her mother advocated for a Spanish mass at a local church and started a free GED program.

But Pollock abandoned the idea of pursuing law to join Teach for America, and developed the drive to launch her own school while working in St. Louis and Chicago. 

From the beginning, Tulsa Honor Academy has been what she calls “unapologetically college prep.” College campus visits start as early as fifth grade. Juniors work on personal statements in class. They research different careers and share their insights with sophomores, and because navigating college life can be overwhelming, staff in the school’s college readiness office encourage alumni to return for one-on-one help.

“If we want more Black and brown, first-generation, low-income students to eventually become teachers, lawyers and doctors,” Pollock said, “then we need to make sure that they’re being educated to be able to go to and graduate from college.”

with hospitals, nonprofits and city agencies are another hallmark of the school’s model. After his semester interning with Reading Partners, a tutoring organization, Oscar Gutierrez was convinced that teaching wasn’t for him. 

“I don’t want to work in the education field whatsoever,” said Gutierrez, who graduated this year. 

The experience still gave him a glimpse of behind-the-scenes operations like scheduling and recruiting volunteers. It eased anxiety over finding his way around an unfamiliar place and interacting with people he hasn’t met.

“You had to talk to the kid,” said Gutierrez, who plans to study accounting at Tulsa Community College and then transfer to the University of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State University. “It teaches those communication skills and just being confident within yourself.”

Kimberly Perez, part of the first graduating class of 2023, landed an internship at Miller-Tippins, a leading construction firm in Tulsa. She learned how to prepare bids for projects and estimate the cost of materials. Now a rising senior on a full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma State University, she’s already received job offers from companies in Dallas. 

She still remembers when Pollock visited her home in 2016, sat on the couch and promised her mother that Tulsa Honor Academy was a better option than the district middle school. She was in fifth grade at the charter at the time, but only reading at a first grade level. 

“I would come crying to my mom, like ‘I don’t want to be in that school,’ ” Kim said. Her mother considered pulling her out. “But Elsie said, ‘She just needs extra time.’”

‼���������ٱ�Ի���’

Those were the years that Pollock was still leading just one school. In 2019, the high school opened, housed in a trailer on the same property. In early 2020, just as schools shut down because of COVID, Tulsa Honor Academy of a building for the high school, an accomplishment in a sector where schools often face challenges securing facilities.

Financing for the project, however, required enrollment to grow, so Pollock and her board fast-tracked the opening of a second middle school in the fall of 2021 — three years early. The expansion to three schools, in some ways, marked a temporary setback. The challenge, Pollock said, was managing a major renovation while also responding to families’ needs in a community by the virus.��

“During the critical years of growth that other schools get to methodically establish network systems and structures,” she said, “we had to pivot and start to focus on surviving the pandemic.”

Student behavior worsened, turnover rates among staff increased, and the principal hired for Flores Middle quit just after the new school opened. 

Brent Bushey, CEO of Fuel OKC, a nonprofit that provides financial support to charter schools, has watched Pollock’s journey from the beginning and recognized where the network stumbled.

“They overextended, and that came through in the academic results,” he said. 

Since 2021-22, the original middle school hasn’t earned higher than a C. Flores, the second middle school, has been stuck at a D since it opened. But those are 2025’s scores, and Pollock is hopeful about where Tulsa Honor Academy is headed. Last year, Flores Middle saw the highest fall-to-spring growth in reading and the third highest in math on NWEA’s MAP assessments among the 60 schools that submitted data to , a national nonprofit formerly known as Building Excellent Schools. Tulsa Honor Academy Middle was second in both reading and math.

Overall, the high school earned a C from the state, but was graded a B for postsecondary opportunities, better than the state average 

Overcoming the pandemic hasn’t been the only crisis Pollock has had to weather. In March, a former middle school teacher following accusations he texted a 12-year-old student and inappropriately touched the child. The school fired him in January and released a of the steps taken to report the situation to police. According to Tulsa police, the investigation into whether other students were affected is ongoing.

‘Tipping point’

As she focuses on Tulsa Honor Academy’s growth, which is expected to reach nearly 1,800 students with the new elementary school, Pollock also has a larger goal of inspiring and supporting more Latino educators to start charter schools. She helped to launch , Latino Educators Advancing Leadership, a word that also means loyal in Spanish. 

She was the first and remains the only Latino charter school leader in the state. It’s both a point of pride and what she calls a “gross disservice” when the majority of students attending brick-and-mortar charter schools are Latino. She’s encouraged that another Latino leader, Robert Ruiz, will open a in Oklahoma City in 2027.

The biggest barrier, she said, is the lack of educational attainment among Latinos in Tulsa. data shows that less than 20% of Latino adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Pollock sees that void in her own work. Two years ago, she knew of four Latino charter school assistant principals in Oklahoma, two of them in her own schools.

“The tipping point is going to be once our scholars graduate from college and we can start hiring them back,” she told The 74. “My biggest dream is for one of our scholars to eventually sit in my seat.”

I knew I wanted to be one of the engineers building this future. But at the end of middle school, the time I spent in class felt stale and unambitious, like just another obstacle separating me from my goals. I wanted to take my education more seriously.

So I transferred to the Academy of Seminole, a charter school in Seminole, Oklahoma that offers more opportunities to move forward faster. 

The new environment took some getting used to, but I thoroughly enjoyed the challenging classes, engaging teachers and new friends during my first two years of high school. The real turning point came at the end of sophomore year, when we all began finalizing our upperclassman plans.

TAOS challenges us to start our postsecondary education early through college or vocational dual enrollment or Vo-Tech. With the contrast of a traditional high school timeline fresh in my mind, I wanted to squeeze as much utility out of the next two years as possible.

I decided to take college courses at Seminole State College to graduate with an associate’s degree like many other students at TAOS. At the same time, I enrolled in Gordon Cooper Technology Center’s machining program. 

Machining is the most precise form of mechanical manufacturing, so the trade appealed to my love of mechanical systems. For me as an engineer, it offered a better understanding of how projects are made, giving me a unique perspective to design for manufacturability. 

I also wanted a way to pay for my education to avoid student loans, so developing a valuable technical skill alongside college coursework made perfect sense. Even better, TAOS covered the remaining tuition and fees not paid by the state, removing any financial worry.

The biggest challenge was simply fitting everything into the day. My physics class ran until 1:35 p.m., but my Vo-Tech work started at 1. My college classes stretched into the late afternoon. I missed more class time than I liked and weathered quite a few late nights to make it work. But with the support of all three schools and my family, I graduated high school already four years into my postsecondary education.

For a long time, my post-graduation plan was simple: attend a local university close to home and earn my engineering degree while using my machine training to keep me debt-free. Then, while filling out scholarships in senior year, I discovered the QuestBridge National College Match and applied on a whim. To my surprise, I became a finalist. For the first time, I realized I was a nationally competitive student who could attend an elite university.

While I didn’t match through QuestBridge, I still applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and after a few weeks of anxious waiting, I was admitted with financial aid that completely covers my cost of attendance. Without even realizing it, I had been studying under the exact educational philosophy laid out by the MIT motto: “Mens et Manus” or “Mind and Hand” by applying myself both academically and technically. 

Looking back, I’ve grown so much since I was that pessimistic eighth grader. I found an ocean of opportunity at my three schools. More importantly, I found a community of people who believed in me and helped me become capable of far more than I once imagined.

Now, I look forward to pursuing a bachelor’s degree, and hopefully a PhD, in nuclear engineering at MIT. I plan to use my education to help pioneer new methods of producing abundant, safe and clean energy. I’ve already come farther than I once imagined, but I’m nowhere close to done yet. I can’t wait to see what challenge my ambition drags me into next and to meet the great people who will help me overcome it.

She got her opportunity four years ago, when a K-8 art teacher position opened up at Dove School of Discovery, at the same time her daughter was preparing to enroll at a school in the network.

Lanning was thrilled that her new curriculum would combine art with STEM. Soon, she was helping students build cars, use a power drill and solder metal.

“I don’t allow the students second grade and under to use the dangerous stuff by themselves, but for third grade and up, once they’ve had safety lessons, they’re able to use those types of things — there is no limit to what they have access to,” Lanning said. “A lot of them are scared, but I walk them through it. I’ve literally held hands. Once they get that experience of trying it, they’re like, ‘Oh, I kind of like this.’ ”

STEM education is one of the of Dove Schools, a with nine campuses in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, plus a statewide virtual program. Educators there credit the presence of STEM in every grade — from computer science in kindergarten to high school career pathways — to the schools’ 100% graduation and college acceptance rates, and other measures of academic success.

“The [students] have grown up with the Dove Schools culture, and in elementary and middle school they already know what the meaning of college is and the importance of college,” said Ibrahim Eskikurt, Dove’s STEM coordinator. “From ninth grade until 12th grade, students already know they have to do something — go to college and graduate — and then they will have more opportunities.”

The first Dove School was founded in 2000 in Tulsa by Oklahoma State University graduates. Since then, the network has grown from roughly 200 students to more than 4,700. 

Last year, 157 Dove seniors each had an average of four college acceptances. Nearly 88% of them were the first in their family to attend college. The average scholarships each received topped $95,000.

Maureen Brown, Dove’s chief outreach and development officer, said she doesn’t know what the district’s “secret sauce” is, but a few main factors contribute to student success. Besides STEM programming and college preparation that begins in kindergarten, Dove Schools offers , a curriculum that teaches skills like critical thinking, kindness and morality. The district also arranges home visits to keep educators and families connected.

“Every teacher and school administrator, at the beginning of the year, wants families to see that the school is there to partner with them, so they make an appointment to go visit families at their homes,” Brown said. “The home visit is not to go check on their house and see their living circumstances — it’s providing information and resources they have at school. It’s really about building a relationship, and that’s been a really, really big deal for us.”

About 80% of Dove Schools students are low-income. Because the charter is tuition-free, a lottery system decides which students are accepted if there are more applications than open spots. 

“Anybody can apply as long as they live in city limits,” Brown said. “If they want to come to Dove Schools, and if there’s a spot available for them, they come in.”

Students who enter Dove Schools as kindergartners will be immersed in STEM through computer science activities on their Chromebooks. In the higher elementary grades, they learn how to code. Middle schoolers explore hands-on STEM projects in robotics or electronics. 

If students want to continue their STEM education in high school, they can enter a pathway to learn computer science, engineering or biomedical science. These also award college credits and offer specific career-focused courses.

After school, the network offers multiple STEM-based extracurricular clubs. The five-year-old drone program is particularly popular.

It began with one small team of students building and flying drones in local and national competitions. Now, Dove Schools has about 25 drone teams from fourth to 12th grade. Each group has roughly three students.

Eskikurt said students can’t earn drone aviation licenses from the Federal Aviation Administration through the program, but that’s something administrators are working to offer in the future. The district also plans to add a high school pathway in aerospace engineering next year, as it’s one of the in Oklahoma.

While the drone club teaches students to build machines that fly the sky, another program is focused on those that operate underwater. Lanning is one of several teachers who manages the Dove Schools club, part of an international program in which students build aquatic robots that can be entered in competitions against other schools. 

“We give them the materials, they do all the work, and we just guide them along as they do the engineering design and the science concepts,” Lanning said. “They have to go through an obstacle course, a mission course and an interview stage.”

Lanning’s program for third through fifth graders used to run for just a semester, but this year she extended the afterschool club to last the entire year. Roughly five students meet for 40 minutes once a week to build their robots. She said her goal for next year is to get 10 students involved at her school. 

The favorite part of Lanning’s day, she said, is watching her elementary students discover STEM for the first time. 

“They see what they can do, because I give them an idea, and the goal is to let them take that idea in any direction they want to,” she said. “Once you give them the materials and guidelines, they take off with it and they have no limits to their imagination.”

I grew up hearing that line. However bad things were in Oklahoma — from teacher pay to life expectancy — our nation’s poorest state, Mississippi, was presumed to have it worse. It was a cruel quip, but also a comforting one. At least somebody was behind us.

In education, however, that old prayer of gratitude has become obsolete. Mississippi, for one, has posted impressive gains in student learning, especially in the early grades. Oklahoma has been moving in the opposite direction. According to I conducted of National Assessment of Educational Progress data, the Sooner State now ranks 48th in the nation when fourth and eighth grade math and reading results are combined. Among the dozen states in the region, Oklahoma ranks dead last.

That is bad news for Oklahoma, but it is also a warning to every state that assumes lasting decline can’t happen there. 

In the 1990s, Oklahoma was not a superstar, but neither was it an educational basketcase. The state generally hovered around the national average and occasionally beat the average. And for years, Oklahoma outperformed Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee on the Nation’s Report Card. What I found when examining the NAEP scores over time is not just that Oklahoma ranks near the bottom today, but that Oklahoma experienced a generational erosion of performance that unfolded over decades and accelerated after 2015. 

Oklahoma’s math scores were on the rise until around 2015, when math scores plateaued before steep declines during the COVID-19 era. Because most states’ math in the era following the passage of No Child Left Behind, Oklahoma’s score increases did not translate into rankings increases, and the state fell from 30th to 40th in the nation in math scores from 2000 to 2015. Since then, Oklahoma’s math scores have dropped sharply, with declines larger than many other states, even as the entire .

In reading, the story is simpler: Oklahoma has experienced both relative and absolute decline over the last decade. In 2024, Oklahoma posted its worst reading scores on record in both fourth grade and eighth grade. In the years since 2015, the state’s reading rank fell from 34th to 48th.��

These shifts are sobering, but they are also confounding. Oklahoma has not experienced a unique economic shock or demographic shift that obviously accounts for the scale of its educational decline. Indeed, all but one major student group in Oklahoma performs poorly relative to comparable students in other states. 

White students, Hispanic students, Black students, wealthier students and poorer students all significantly underperform the national average. Only Native American students stand out positively, ranking first nationally among the 14 states with sufficient data to report scores. It is common to explain away weak test scores with demographics. But when a state’s relatively advantaged students also post dismal results compared with their peers elsewhere, demographics are probably not the main story.

The regional picture looks even worse. Oklahoma now ranks last among the 12 states in the region in combined math and reading achievement. Oklahoma’s current regional ranking is attributable not only to Oklahoma’s decline, but also to experiencing noteworthy change. Tennessee was the first state in the region to pull ahead of Oklahoma, overtaking it in 2013. Mississippi surpassed Oklahoma in 2019, followed by Louisiana, which passed Oklahoma in 2022. 

It’s a depressing state of affairs for Oklahoma, but Oklahomans are unlikely to accept this story as final. Public frustration with the state’s education system is rising, according to . The state’s schools are , and policymakers are increasingly looking to for ideas. 

The larger lesson is not just for Oklahoma. Educational decline can happen slowly, almost invisibly, until it becomes impossible to ignore. Other states should take note before they find themselves becoming someone else’s punchline.

The routine offered a helpful reminder of why she’s stayed in the field for 26 years. 

“I look at where these babies have started. Some of them might have known two or three alphabet letters,” said Jarvis, who teaches in the Chickasha district, southwest of Oklahoma City. “Now, looking at their test scores, I’m sending six to first grade on a third grade reading level.”

But when she looks at her paycheck, she doesn’t get the same satisfaction.

Her take-home pay has increased about 17% since 2018, about half the rate of inflation. Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill last month raising teacher salaries by $2,000, but when Jarvis calculated the amount after taxes, it translates into less than $6 a day.

“I definitely don’t do it for the money,” she said, “but that was an eye-opener.” 

Eight years ago, she was part of a massive, nine-day teacher walkout that saw more than 30,000 educators descend on the state capitol to demand increases in education funding. Then-Gov. Mary Fallin had already signed a $6,100 raise, but teachers wanted $10,000 and increases in the education budget. They also saw raises in and .

But since that historic “Red for Ed” movement, teachers like Jarvis say the incremental progress is barely noticeable. Starting teacher pay in the state still hovers near the bottom in the country, while neighboring states have climbed in the rankings. Some districts say they’ll have to come up with to extend the $2,000 increase to non-teaching staff, and teachers are likely to return next year asking for more.

“We have to have substantial increases annually to catch up,” said Shawn Hime, executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association and a former assistant state superintendent. He applauds lawmakers for increasing teacher pay 37% since 2018, but high numbers of teachers still either leave the field or for better pay. “We’re all in the same race, and we started a lap behind.”

Districts can pay higher salaries above the state scale, but there are limits. That’s because to avoid large gaps in funding between poor and wealthier communities, the state caps how much they can raise .

“If you’re an equity warrior, in theory, this is like the perfect funding formula,” said Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a nonprofit focusing on school finance. But in a state that’s reluctant to increase taxes, she said, districts are often “forced to decide between hiring more people and giving pay raises.” 

To deliver the 2018 salary increase, the legislature overcame a 75% supermajority threshold to increase taxes. But now, in an election year, some lawmakers who voted for it are “getting hammered” by their opponents as they seek higher office, said Hime, with the school board’s association. 

One of them is Charles McCall, the former House speaker and now a Republican candidate for governor. , Chip Keating, a challenger in the June August GOP primary, accuses McCall of passing “the largest tax increase in Oklahoma history. “That’s why taxes are too high.”

The state needs a long-term plan for funding education, Hime said, but lawmakers’ hands are tied because they can’t obligate money for future years. One former legislator has been arguing that point for years. 

“We have this year-to-year budgeting and that’s got to stop,” said Mark McBride, a Republican who chaired an education appropriations committee in the House. He recalled voting against a previous $2,000 pay raise prior to the walkout because he preferred to support a substantial hike over several years. Educators, he said, “got really irritated with me.”

‘Disrespect crept in’

Pay is not the only reason teachers in Oklahoma leave the classroom. Some advocates say mandates like making struggling readers repeat third grade will force more out.

“This is going to exacerbate our teacher shortage,” said Erika Wright, a community organizer for the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice and the founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition. “Who the hell wants to teach third grade now?” 

When former state Superintendent Joy Hofmeister was in office, she commissioned a of thousands of teachers who were currently certified but not teaching. While pay was a factor, nearly a quarter said their views rested on “the inability to make decisions related to instruction” and “burdensome standards and curriculum requirements.” 

Rhetoric that teachers found demeaning hasn’t helped either. Former state Superintendent Janet Barresi, Hofmeister’s predecessor, once said she wouldn’t let the “education establishment lose another generation of Oklahoma’s children.” 

She was the first to remove an educators hall of fame display from the state Department of Education building, former Superintendent Ryan Walters repeated when he took office in 2023. He sought to from educators, publicly criticised them in videos from his car and instituted a to weed out applicants from states he deemed too liberal.

“Disrespect crept in,” said Bryan Duke, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma. “Job creep,” was another factor, he said, as teaching became more complex and behavior problems escalated. “It’s like screaming into the wind. I think many teachers felt that their voices weren’t heard.”  

Lawmakers introduced this year to lower class sizes in the elementary grades, a frequent request from teachers, but it died in committee.

Some years, Jarvis, the Chickasha teacher, has had as many as 28 students in her class. This year, she had 21, but doesn’t have a classroom aide. With about eight more years until retirement, she feels more fortunate than some of her colleagues who work a second job at a nearby steakhouse because the tips are so good.

But she often puts off vacations and big-ticket purchases now that she’s paying health and car insurance for her two sons. Eight years ago, they demonstrated with her at the state capitol.��

“I remember sitting them down and explaining why we were going,” she said. Her youngest made a poster with the names of his teachers. “It was very meaningful to see the kids there.”

“Blah blah blah.” That’s all I heard during story time, sitting on a colorful checkered carpet in kindergarten, feeling like a stain that didn’t belong, yet somehow stood out. English was not my first language, and mastering it took time. Years later, I became the one other students would ask, “What clicked?” or “How’d you do it?” 

The answer I always heard from upperclassmen was simple: “Just do the work.” But as a first-generation student in East Tulsa, I learned that doing the work was not enough. Balancing school, homework, extracurriculars, home responsibilities and applications all before turning 18 is tough. 

Like most of my classmates, fitting in was a priority. Many were Hispanic like me, but they often had siblings or parents who spoke English. I didn’t have that privilege. As the oldest, I became the bridge between home and my community: the translator, the example, the one who had to “walk” so my siblings could run. My mom was just as lost as I was, a non-English speaker herself, navigating a school system nothing like the one she grew up in. Nevertheless, she found a way to support me. 

She enrolled me at ReadSmart Learning, a tutoring program in Tulsa. I still remember the big cartoony bluebird at drop-off and the pins I earned for completing lessons. Slowly, my grades rose and I spoke English with more confidence. My mom noticed, rewarding me with packs of Shopkins figurines and saying, “Ya vez? No hay mal que por bien no venga mija, siguele echando ganas.” 

Every cloud has a silver lining, sweetie. Keep working hard.

Her faith in me made me believe that effort could change everything. For first-generation students like me, programs like ReadSmart aren’t extras. They’re essentials. 

Middle school brought a new challenge, an all-English environment. Although it was intimidating at first, it also brought math. Numbers became a language I could master, and that love followed me into high school. Tulsa Honor Academy’s College Readiness team was a constant presence, always helping me navigate hands-on opportunities that I wouldn’t have found on my own, including Tulsa Technology Center’s dual enrollment program. Tulsa Tech offers a two-year program that allows students to take classes and get a real view on what engineering or pre-med tracks might look like. It was here that I found that electrical engineering was the career path I wanted. 

I’ll never forget the project in which my team and I used programming sensors to detect a chocolate chip cookie. Our clay “chips” had a mind of their own and tumbled off the conveyor belt, scattering everywhere. Hours of troubleshooting, reshaping and laughing with my team taught me more about perseverance. I learned that pushing through the struggle is what makes the result feel rewarding and worth it. 

That same perseverance carried me through applying for programs and scholarships such as , and Imposter syndrome creeps in sometimes, but I always keep going. 

Perseverance has helped me become a and earned me a full ride to Washington University in St. Louis.

Now, when students come to me and ask “What clicked?” or “How’d you do it?” I don’t tell them to just do the work. I tell them to look for scholarships, apply to summer programs, build their extracurriculars, keep their grades up, and most importantly, take every opportunity in their path. I give them the guidance I had to piece together for myself, because nobody handed it to me. 

My story isn’t about being exceptional. It’s about dreaming big for your future and creating a plan. It’s about dedication to your goals and being relentless, no matter what obstacles stand in your way. It’s about the power of having someone who believes in you and is willing to walk alongside you, even if they don’t have all the answers. 

The truth is, your circumstances do not define your future. With perseverance, hard work and the courage to keep going, kids like me don’t just get by. We succeed academically. We become professionals. We go back and tell the next kid on that carpet: “You belong here, too.”

“Resting up from my vacay.”

“Netflix binge last night.”

Those were among the “lame excuses” for missing school that Oklahoma’s Union Public Schools featured during the 2024-25 school year, part of a humorous campaign intended to reduce chronic absenteeism.

Behind the comical posters, however, leaders were troubled by the data. During the 2022-23 school year, 29% of students missed at least 10% of the school year. At Union High School, the rate soared to 43%.

“I think there have been huge changes in behavior since COVID,” said Chris Payne, spokesman for the Tulsa-area district. He echoed what policy experts and school leaders nationwide have been saying since rates skyrocketed after schools fully reopened. “I think people reprioritized and decided, ‘You know, I’ve got things I need to take care of.’ ”

In addition to the attendance campaign, staff met with parents and visited students’ homes to find out why they were missing school. But starting in 2027, Oklahoma schools will no longer be judged on whether those chronic absenteeism rates go up or down. The legislature voted last year to remove the indicator from the state’s education accountability system as a factor that contributes to a school’s overall grade and can determine whether a school is labeled in need of improvement. 

Among , teachers and administrators, there’s a sense of relief.

“I’m not sure that it’s fair to evaluate schools based on something that we cannot control,” said Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City. Originally in favor of making chronic absenteeism a factor in schools’ A-F grades, he no longer thinks it’s a good way to assess schools.

Oklahoma’s most , for 2024-25, gives the state a D for the percentage of students with good attendance. Its chronic absenteeism rate of 19% is far from the worst in the nation, but it’s still 5 percentage points above the state’s pre-pandemic level of 14%. Data from shows the rate stands at about 21%. 

“It’s not just an Oklahoma thing,” Simpson said. “I’ve got colleagues and friends all over the country, and they’re fighting some of the same challenges.”

Oklahoma isn’t the first state to remove chronic absenteeism from its accountability system. Arkansas took it out in 2024 as part of . Illinois officials have recommended replacing chronic absenteeism with , and now reports broader attendance data rather than just chronic absenteeism.

‘States already had the data’

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires state accountability systems, and the report cards available to the public include indicators of academic performance, graduation rates, progress in learning English and an additional measure of student success. For that last metric, 38 states chose chronic absenteeism.

The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that it’s currently considering the state’s request to replace chronic absenteeism with a new measure, but so far, state officials haven’t said what that’s going to be. The challenge will be landing on a K-12 data point that is comparable across Oklahoma’s more than 500 districts, said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the Data Quality Campaign. The nonprofit has published reviews of state report cards since 2016.

Chronic absenteeism “was an inexpensive indicator to implement because states already had the data,” she said. Adopting a new measure, she said, could require districts to pay for changes to their student information systems and spend time training staff to collect and input the data. In addition, she said, it takes two years to ensure data is reliable enough to use in decisions about school ratings.

But the connections between chronic absenteeism and student achievement are backed by years of research. , for example, showed that a 1% increase in attendance was linked to a 1.5% jump in third graders passing the state reading test. showed that students who were chronically absent in middle school had lower math scores and were less likely to graduate on time than those who didn’t miss as much school. 

Kowalski said there’s plenty schools can do to improve attendance. Reducing bullying, increasing teacher retention and challenges, she said, can address some of the reasons students miss school.

Transportation surfaced as a barrier when the Union district surveyed parents, teachers and students on the issue. But teachers were far less likely than parents to say that reliable transportation would improve attendance — 25% compared to 47%. There were also stark differences between parents and students. Twenty-three percent of students said mental health reasons kept them home, while 12% of parents said that was a common explanation. 

Tulsa makes progress

Some communities in Oklahoma have adopted a tough posture toward parents whose children are frequently absent. Erik Johnson, a Republican district attorney in the southeastern part of the state, has prosecuted and jailed parents to force compliance with the law. 

Prior to the pandemic, Guthrie allowing police to fine parents for their kids’ truancy, but Simpson, the superintendent, said those measures didn’t “move the needle.”

In Tulsa, the state’s largest district, Board Member Stacey Woolley said she’s glad chronic absenteeism is no longer part of the grading formula because the indicator lowered schools’ scores. 

“At the same time, we have to continue to make it a priority,” she said. When leaders examine student data, they find that students who struggle are chronically absent, regardless of their socioeconomic status. 

The district’s work shows that reductions are possible. The rate has declined over the past two years from 44% to 37%, and have seen drops of at least 10% compared to last school year. 

Such efforts won’t go completely unrewarded. Under the to the Education Department, schools that lower chronic absenteeism could still score “bonus points” toward their grade but the indicator won’t be used in determining which schools are identified as needing improvement. 

By the end of the Union district’s campaign, chronic absenteeism had dropped by about 1.4%, well below the goal of 7%. Still, Payne said, the progress equated to 200 fewer chronically absent students. 

Leaders also realized something else: Students in the district’s career-tech programs, like aerospace and construction, had lower absenteeism rates than those in the general student population. Now, in response to local workforce shortages, the district has launched a healthcare career pathway as well. 

“I had students that didn’t really have a direction,” said Jason McMullen, who teaches aviation courses at the district’s Innovation Lab. “Then they see a helicopter land and that lightbulb goes off.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, some students at the lab learned how to secure safety wire to the nuts and bolts that hold planes together, while others patched holes in sheetrock. 

The change to the state’s accountability system, “doesn’t mean we’re going to quit working on it,” said Payne, the district’s spokesman. “The reality remains that if students are not present, they’re not going to perform and have success in school and life.”

What can the state do? One step might be to continue expanding its charter school sector, especially the brick-and-mortar schools serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students.

Oklahoma’s declining NAEP scores represent a sample of students across both traditional and charter schools, but Oklahoma has been fortunate to have a relatively successful charter sector. For example, using data through 2019, a Harvard found that Oklahoma had the sixth-highest-performing charter sector in the country.

A from the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board allows for a deeper, more up-to-date analysis. The biggest takeaways focus on size, performance and cost.

Both brick-and-mortar and virtual charters have grown in Oklahoma, collectively increasing from about 51,000 students in the 2022-23 school year to 55,000 last year. In the 2024-25 school year, 35,831 students attended a virtual charter and 19,190 were enrolled in brick-and-mortar charter schools. All told, charters serve about 8% of all public school students in the state.

A of student performance found 31 of 49 brick-and-mortar charter schools outperformed their neighboring traditional schools last year. For example, students at Stanley Hupfield Academy and John W. Rex Charter Elementary School outperformed the Oklahoma City average by 21 and 20 percentage points, respectively. The Dove and Santa Fe charter networks each had several standout schools, including Dove Science Academy, where students outscored nearby traditional schools by 34 points and which we named a Bright Spot for its third grade reading proficiency.��The largest outperformance was notched by a standalone charter called Deborah Brown elementary school in Tulsa, where students scored 59 points higher than peers in the neighboring district.��

As for virtual charters, the analysis found that only one — the Oklahoma Connection Academy High School — outperformed the statewide average, while 15 did not.

Note: Brick-and-mortar charter schools are compared to the traditional public schools in their physical districts. Virtual charters are compared to all traditional schools in the state.

A new from Adam Tyner at the University of Oklahoma made similar comparisons for high schools. At that level, students attending brick-and-mortar charters had slightly lower ACT scores than peers attending traditional public schools, but they had higher graduation rates — especially the low-income students. Meanwhile, the virtual charters had significantly worse outcomes. 

Notably, Oklahoma’s charters are getting these results with significantly less money. According to the state charter board, traditional public schools received $10,643 per student in state and local funding last year, compared with $9,684 for brick-and-mortar charters. This disparity of almost $1,000 per student has widened over time and is largely due to the fact that charters do not have the same access to money for facilities and do not receive the same share of local revenues that traditional district schools do.

Closing this funding disparity would likely boost outcomes for charter students even further.

While it is impossible to know for sure whether Oklahoma’s charter schools are getting their results by cherry-picking the best students, or even whether the rise of charters may have contributed to stagnation on the part of traditional public schools, suggests that’s not the case. If anything, traditional schools tend to get higher scores when they face increased competition in the form of charter schools.

For instance, Tulane University researchers Feng Chen and Doug Harris found that the effects from this type of competition tend to materialize when charter schools a 10% market share in a given district. The new charter found that Oklahoma now has six communities where charters have surpassed this threshold, led by Oklahoma City at 23%.

When I spoke with Rebecca Wilkinson and Shelly Hickman from the Oklahoma Charter Schools Board, they said they wanted to create an annual report that was comparative and meaningful, and to dispel myths about what charters are and are not. They are optimistic about increasing market share in more communities, and they hope that success can generate even more momentum across the state. 

But by the time the class leaves the following spring, the majority are ready for fourth-grade reading. It’s a transformation made possible by Frederick Elementary’s third-grade teaching team, whose strategies include daily interventions that break down literacy into 15 distinct skills.��

Frederick Elementary has roughly 360 students in a district of 737, located about 45 miles from Lawton, the nearest mid-sized city. About 87% of elementary students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch during the 2023-24 school year, which would predict a third-grade reading proficiency rate of only 40%, according to federal data that are the basis of The 74’s Bright Spots literacy project. Instead, 71% of the school’s third graders were proficient in reading.

The academic scores of all schools in Oklahoma rose that year, after the education department, led by then-State Superintendent Ryan Walters, lowered testing standards. After the state last year, Frederick’s proficiency rate came in at 66%. 

Oklahoma requires students in early grades to receive reading intervention if they score below the 40th percentile on a screening test that’s given multiple times a year. Depending on a student’s level, state statute mandates specialized instruction in small groups at least twice a week.

At Frederick Elementary, reading intervention occurs daily.

The school’s program, called , can be difficult to implement, said reading specialist Danna Akin. 

“There’s been other schools that have wanted to get started in it, and they bought into the program, but it’s hard to get started,” she said. “The scheduling gets pretty complicated.”

Students who score below the 40th percentile then take an exam with 95 Percent and are grouped together by the specific reading skills they are missing, such as understanding silent “e.” A teacher — sometimes the librarian or special education instructor — works on a particular skill during a period called flex time, a 45-minute block that occurs each morning.

“The students above the 40th percentile obviously don’t need 95 Percent, so we put them in larger reading comprehension groups,” Akin said. “But for the 95 groups, we try to keep it to seven or less [students] so they can get that one-on-one intervention time.”

The instruction starts with plastic envelopes, each containing lessons and activities that teach a specific phonics skill. Students will move small chips over a board that has letter sounds and review them with their teacher. They’ll practice vocabulary, spelling and reading short passages that include words they’re struggling with. 

Each of the 15 skills in the 95 Percent program takes students roughly a week to 10 days to go through. After students graduate from a skill, they are tested again to see if they can advance to the next envelope taught by another teacher during flex time.

“If you’re only doing [reading intervention] twice a week, they’re not going to get the reinforcement that they need. But if you’re doing it five times a week and for 45 minutes, they’ll get what they need,” Akin said. “By the time you’ve done that much reinforcement with them and you’ve spent that much time on a skill, they’ve got it.”

Akin and Frederick’s three third-grade teachers review student progress at least once a week to see what each child still needs to become more proficient. A data wall in Principal Laura Yeager’s office tracks where each student in the intervention program is at.

“Sometimes it takes a little while, but eventually they all get out of the 95 Percent program, and then they’re working on those grade-level skills,” Yeager said. “This year, we’ve been really fortunate. We’ve been very, very successful getting kids out of it.”

Frederick Elementary has only third, fourth and fifth grades. Younger students attend the Prather Brown Center from pre-K through second grade.

“It’s really challenging, because when the second graders come to us, we usually have a large amount that fall under that 40th percentile,” Akin said. 

That’s a trend seen nationwide: A found that by the middle of the 2024-25 school year, only 58% of second graders were on track for core reading instruction and were likely to meet grade-level standards by spring.

Frederick’s third grade teaching team starts each school year with the mindset that they can’t begin with third grade standards, because they have to review second grade skills first. 

“We’re having to fill these phonics holes, which I think is happening probably everywhere — I don’t feel like that’s just a Frederick Elementary thing,” said Halle Pineda, one of the third grade teachers. “But I don’t feel like we really get their best third-grade self until about January. And by then, we only have four months until it’s time to start wrapping up. It’s a game of catch-up.”

Last fall, Frederick Elementary received $10,000 from the state to bolster the 95 Percent program. Yeager said the money was part of Oklahoma’s new , which has an initiative solely for rural schools. Frederick Elementary used the money for high-dosage tutoring in reading. Early data showed some students jumped from the 30th to the 60th percentile in literacy. Others, on average, improved 12 percentage points in their performance.

Oklahoma has been trying to improve its reading proficiency scores for . Legislation implemented in 2013 required third graders to be held back a grade if they scored poorly on the state’s reading test. After years of back and forth and added exemptions to the retention law, it was .��

Now, literacy is back on the table, and it’s center stage. Lawmakers want to reverse Oklahoma’s , which show that 27% of students scored at or above grade level in English language arts and 36% scored below basic during the 2024-25 school year. 

A law has a robust set of guidelines for struggling readers and reinstates third-grade retention. It’s part of a by the state’s chamber of commerce to boost local economies and make Oklahoma more competitive against other states for employees and business.

Beginning next school year, the mandates that first and second graders who don’t read at grade level at the end of the year either be held back or receive reading interventions when they return to school. 

Parents will be notified of their child’s reading deficiency within 30 days of its discovery. Third graders not at grade level by the end of the school year will be retained unless they qualify for an exemption. Some exemptions are geared toward English learners, students with disabilities or children who were already held back in earlier grades.

Chad Warmington, CEO of the , said there have been “lessons learned” from the 2013 legislation that required third grade retention. This year’s law uses the practice as a last resort, he said. 

“You can’t put in place a retention policy at the expense of all the other things that are going to improve outcomes — that’s just not how it works,” he said. “Last time, there was far more emphasis placed on the retention part, and not enough on what we are going to do to make sure teachers coming out of teaching schools are trained on the science of reading. Or that the teachers in the classroom are retrained and given opportunities to improve their skills in the science of reading.”

Some educators want legislators to focus on other challenges in the classroom than reading proficiency, said Erika Wright, founder and former leader of the .

“Our teachers have been screaming about class sizes and behavior, and pay is always on the burner. When this whole literacy [initiative] came out, we pulled together a group with the State Chamber to sit in a room so that they could listen,” she said. “I sat in that room for four hours listening to the teachers saying, ‘This is awesome, but you’re not listening to us. This will not work because I have 29 kids in the kindergarten class and 14 of them have Individualized Education Programs and eight of them don’t speak English. I don’t have an assistant. I am spending all of my day managing behavior.’ ”

Warmington said he’s heard from teachers who are dealing with similar issues, but a “vast majority were absolutely for this deal.”

Yeager said very few Frederick Elementary third graders were held back when a retention law was in place a few years ago, so the new legislation won’t have much of an impact in that area. But that Oklahoma held back more students than all other states, except Mississippi, when the old retention law was still active.

A small number of third graders will go through the 95 Percent program again once they enter fourth grade to build back skills they lost over the summer, Yeager said.

“We have a unique culture and a great team that works together with these 95 Percent groups. We also do these groups in fourth grade to make sure we’re not missing skills,” she said. “It doesn’t just stop with third grade, but it gives you that idea that, ‘This is just not my class, and I’m responsible for my class’ scores.’ They’re all our kids, and that’s something my teachers say that makes the difference.”

The $37 million effort is the brainchild of Chris Brewster, founder of the popular Santa Fe South Schools, a charter school network that has already opened classrooms in former big box retail stores that anchor the mall. 

The 74’s James Fields visited Crossroads this spring to see the work firsthand and to film the progress being made towards raising funds to scale available seats for families across the city. 

Last year, WalletHub, , ranked the state 50th — just above New Mexico — on a mix of criteria including test scores, graduation and teacher certification rates. More recently, a University of Oklahoma researcher zoomed in on the , where the state places 48th overall in math and reading.

The unwelcome attention typically prompts a wave of finger-pointing from politicians and . 

Sometimes, teachers like Sarah Clifford.

A single mom of two who relocated from New York, she’s among the thousands in the state who entered the classroom without completing a teacher training program. In 2023, as a new teacher in the Edmond Public Schools outside Oklahoma City, she struggled to write lesson plans and hated teaching math, a subject she disliked as a child. Districts statewide have increasingly depended on emergency certified educators like her to fill vacancies. In 2023-24, the number topped 5,000, state data shows. Since 2022, the state has also allowed schools to hire , who may have no more than a high school diploma.

“We don’t want to demonize any person who is stepping up to be a teacher, regardless of the pathway,” said Bryan Duke, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma. “But the difference in preparation launches people successfully or unsuccessfully into careers.”

Duke’s program has been part of the solution. In 2024, the university received nearly $2.5 million in from the state for scholarships to help teachers like Clifford complete their certification programs and earn a master’s degree. She graduated with last December after spending nine months instruction so she could “help students feel confident and start to love something that’s hard.” Most of her third graders students who were “on watch” in math ended up on grade level by the end of the year.

“Our state doesn’t look like we’re doing well,” she said. “But if you go inside a classroom with people who have the passion and want to be there, those kids are thriving.”

The data on the state’s decline is undeniable. In the mid-’90s, the state ranked 17th in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. With the 2024 scores, the state had fallen to 48th.

In a , University of Oklahoma researcher Adam Tyner described how Oklahoma missed the “southern surge” that brought academic turnarounds to states like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Those states saw improvement after pouring millions of dollars into teacher training, strong curriculum and coaching.

Oklahoma’s results have also affected public opinion. Less than a third of Oklahomans graded their local schools an A or B in from the university’s Oklahoma Center for Education Policy. Two years ago, 41% gave their schools high marks.

At about $12,500, the state’s per-pupil spending is . One reason is because it takes a in the legislature to approve a tax increase. District budgets could take another hit if voters this fall approve on property taxes. 

“If it’s really hard to increase revenues, you have to take away things from other areas,” said Deven Carlson, a public policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s going to be hard to improve outcomes, if you think that money matters.”

One possible off-ramp for parents is school choice. Many charter schools their local district schools, data shows, leading to push for expanding the charter sector.

This year, lawmakers took a dual approach to tackling the state’s education challenges. They gave teachers a $2,000 raise — but the is still well below neighboring Texas and Arkansas. Gov. Kevin Stitt also signed a increasing the minimum number of days in the school calendar from 166 to 173. That will make it harder for some districts with four-day weeks to maintain that schedule.

“We’ve lost a lot of instructional days,” said Education Secretary Dan Hamlin. “It’s not the only thing that matters; you need other things, too. But it is a component that’s meaningful.”

‘Art of teaching’

State data shows that 184 districts are in session for 166 days or less, which they can achieve through four-day weeks with longer days. 

shows four-day weeks don’t necessarily improve retention, but districts that don’t adopt them can to nearby ones that do. The model is generally popular with teachers, who trade off longer hours for three-day weekends.

Superintendent Rick Cobb’s experience in the Mid-Del School District, outside Oklahoma City, illustrates the problem. When he became superintendent in 2015, he was “alarmed” that the district had 20 emergency certified teachers, he said. Now 114 either have emergency certifications or are adjunct teachers, according to .

His district, which serves a blue collar community near an Air Force base, never shifted to a four-day week. But others around Mid-Del did, luring away his teachers.

Knowledge of the subject matter generally isn’t a weak spot for emergency certified teachers, he said. But they often lack the skills to manage classrooms and modify lessons for students working at higher and lower levels.

“That’s the art of teaching,” he said.

Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City, has faced the same challenge. His district, where nearly 60% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, has lost teachers to districts with four-day weeks. But he never went that route because parents in his district depend on schools not just for education, but also for school meals. 

“If the parents go to work, who’s taking care of those kids? Who’s feeding them?” he asked. “I take that very seriously.”

The small, rural Jennings Public Schools, west of Tulsa, is among those that run four days. It received a waiver from the state to operate a 156-day calendar.

Superintendent Derrick Meador doesn’t struggle to find certified teachers. He had three job openings recently and about 10 applicants for each one. It was the first time in three years he’s had to hire a teacher. Families, he said, support the four-day week and don’t want to lose it. Fewer than 2% of students are chronically absent, and the district performs well academically.

“If we weren’t getting the results that we were, I would have ended it a long time ago,” Meador said. He doesn’t appreciate districts with four-day weeks getting for dragging the state down. “I don’t like being lumped in with other districts. We stand alone on our merits and should be judged accordingly.” 

He hopes the state will continue to allow waivers from the new 173-day requirement, but without it, Jennings will likely have to give up its four-day week.

‘Life experience’

It’s difficult to tie student outcomes to any one education policy, whether that’s the academic calendar or teacher certification. But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, said if performance is falling, teacher quality “is one of the very first things that I would look toward.”

Oklahoma is certainly not alone in lowering the bar to teach, especially since the pandemic. Goldhaber examined post-COVID outcomes for students in Massachusetts and found that those whose teachers had emergency licenses in math and science than their peers. 

In Texas, a third of teachers were unlicensed in 2023-24. aims to reverse that trend by gradually reducing the share of unlicensed teachers that districts can hire to 5% by 2029.

Oklahoma took a small step in that direction this year when it tightened restrictions on adjunct teachers, who are only required to have “distinguished qualifications in their field,” but not a college degree. Stitt signed that stops schools from hiring adjuncts to teach core content areas in K-5.

that educators with temporary or emergency certifications are more likely than those who are fully certified to leave the profession. But they often take positions that would otherwise be nearly impossible to fill. 

In the Union Public Schools, which serves southeast Tulsa and part of Broken Arrow, several teach at the district’s Innovation Lab, a hub for career and technical education courses. They include Jeremy Weber, a who teaches students the basics of aircraft maintenance. On a recent morning, he showed students how to use safety wire to secure nuts and bolts to parts of a plane.

“That life experience is pretty valuable,” said Kenneth Moore, the district’s executive director of secondary education.

Earlier this month, newly certified teachers with years of life and career experience gathered at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond to celebrate their graduation from the two-year alternative certification program. 

Grabbing refreshments at a pre-graduation reception and posing for pictures with their families and fellow graduates, they talked about wanting to reverse the stigma attached to teachers who take a nontraditional route to the classroom.

They included Cherice McDonald, a teacher in Oklahoma City schools who previously worked in the oil and gas industry, and is now being recruited to work as an assistant principal. 

Melanie Whitekiller Lawrence, a member of the Cherokee Nation, stayed home to raise her four kids before taking a job as a long-term substitute. When she took charge of a fourth grade class in Edmond, she said she “had no idea” there were academic standards in math and reading she was required to teach under state law. She’s come a long way since the days when a colleague in the classroom next door would supply her with ready-made lessons for the week.

Last fall, her colleagues at Chisholm Elementary chose her to represent their school as . 

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m more knowledgeable about current and best practices than my colleagues who have been teaching for a very long time,” she said at the reception. “We’re not just warm bodies.”

OKLAHOMA CITY — After hours of witness testimony and pages of evidence, a struggling Oklahoma City charter school still has not convinced a state board that it should be allowed to stay open for another year.

The Statewide Charter School Board on Monday made the rare vote to terminate the founding charter contract for Proud To Partner Leadership Academy. The board first voted 9-1 to declare there is “clear and convincing evidence” the school violated that contract before agreeing unanimously to proceed toward canceling it.

Board members made their decision after a lengthy and uncommon termination hearing that began April 29 and continued on Monday. A few more procedural steps remain before the school’s charter contract could be canceled officially, after which point its state funding would be cut off.

If the southwest Oklahoma City high school closes, its 100 students will have to return to their home districts or find another educational option for the next academic year.

The only way to avoid a shutdown is if the school makes “significant changes structurally” in the coming days, said Brian Shellem, who leads the statewide board. He said the board would “extend a hand” to the school and its attorneys to explore options.

Proud To Partner’s superintendent, Dawn Bowles, said the school’s leaders will wait to hear from the state board about what alternatives are available. In the meantime, students are “in limbo of knowing where they will actually be next year,” she said.

“We are still devoted and committed to doing what’s best on behalf of the families that we serve,” Bowles said after the vote.

Throughout the termination hearing, state officials described Proud to Partner, known as PTPLA, as a school in financial and operational disarray since it opened in July 2024.

Attorneys representing PTPLA said the school was unfairly targeted in a “rush to judgment” and wasn’t given proper due process to address concerns.

“The evidence here will show there’s been a sort of fearmongering, a sort of hysteria, a flame of emotions that were overblown and overindulged,” the school’s attorney, Kwame Mumina, said during the first day of the hearing.

Members of the statewide board’s staff testified that they came away with grave concerns about the school’s academic quality after visiting it.

Statewide Charter School Board executive director Rebecca Wilkinson, who visited PTPLA at least 15 times, said she saw signs of poor engagement of students. She reported seeing students sleeping or sitting in front of computers while not logged into classwork.

“I was concerned that too often students were not able to even tell me the course that they were working in, much less what they were doing,” she said.

Wilkinson said she had further concerns over whether the school’s special education and child nutrition services complied with law and the charter contract.

PTPLA finances also raised red flags when the school finished its first year with a $250,000 deficit. This school year, three teachers were laid off from the small teaching staff because of a lack of funds.

“This school is spending money it doesn’t have, and that is an issue,” said Thomas Schneider, the board’s attorney and deputy general counsel at the Attorney General’s Office.

Wilkinson initially reported seeing only during a site visit this fall. PTPLA leaders said the report was false and the three laid-off teachers continued working as volunteers. Those teachers have since been rehired on part-time pay.

Multiple members of the board’s staff and Oklahoma State Department of Education officials testified to having difficulty getting PTPLA administrators to respond to issues and to file financial reports on time.

School officials acknowledged they struggled with financial and operational difficulties, but they said it never compromised student learning. They said they were caught off-guard when the statewide board placed PTPLA on a November meeting agenda to discuss deficiencies at the school.

The statewide board in that November meeting ultimately .

Sharri Coleman, PTPLA’s school board president, said the state was too quick to punish rather than offer support.

“If we’re all for students, then you as a board, as my authorizer, would help my board to make sure that we are getting the supports that we need so that we can help those students,” Coleman said on the witness stand.

After being placed on probation, PTPLA’s board from the state and contended there was “nothing to fix.”

Statewide board members over the following months, contending school leaders refused to cooperate fully with state oversight. They finally ran out of patience in January, when they .

Bowles, PTPLA’s superintendent, warned that closing the school would harm the underprivileged students it was designed to serve.

“Most importantly, it will take away an opportunity to provide an education that is aligned to the needs of our Black and brown families in Oklahoma City,” she said during the hearing.

For the charter contract to be canceled, the statewide board must vote again to approve findings of fact from the termination hearing. That vote could take place as soon as next week, Shellem said.

PTPLA then would have 10 days to file an appeal with the board and, if rejected, to take the matter to district court.

Bowles didn’t confirm or reject the idea of challenging the state board in court.

“Right now, we’ll wait to hear from them as to what those next steps are,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

OKLAHOMA CITY — A $2,000 teacher salary increase advancing through the Legislature has raised concerns among school district leaders of whether state funding will support its total cost.

The Oklahoma House approved the teacher pay raise, outlined in , by a vote of 92-1 on Tuesday, more than a month after . The legislation, which returns to the Senate for final review, would add $2,000 to the state-mandated minimum salaries for Oklahoma teachers and certified school employees.

Although lawmakers budgeted $100 million for the pay raise, some district leaders said their schools likely will have to pay out of pocket to cover the full expense, especially if they already pay above the minimum salary schedule for teachers.

The $100 million allocation is part of a budgeted for public education.

House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said the extra money should be sufficient for districts to raise their teachers’ salaries, regardless of whether they pay at or above state minimums.

“If districts are on the formula and pay above the minimum now with existing funding, they can pay them $2,000 more with nearly a quarter billion in new public education funding, $100 million of which is specifically dedicated for teacher pay,” Hilbert said in a statement.

Districts already paying above the state minimum wouldn’t be legally obligated to provide a full $2,000 increase. But, teachers in those districts still should push for a $2,000 raise, Hilbert and other legislative leaders have said.

The extra state funding coming to Midwest City-Del City Public Schools would cover just under 80%, or $232,000 short, of the cost to increase the district’s teacher salaries by $2,000, Superintendent Rick Cobb said.

Raising a teacher’s salary by $2,000 comes at a true cost of $2,500 when factoring in added teacher retirement expenses and higher payroll taxes, he said.

Although the district already pays well above the state minimum, Cobb said “I don’t think our teachers are going to accept us not giving them a $2,000 raise when we go into negotiations.”

“I know one of your questions is going to be about whether (lawmakers are) fully funding the raise, and in our case, they’re not,” he said. “So, I think that needs to be part of the conversation, too, is that our teachers are going to expect a $2,000 raise. Our teachers are making less than the cost of living increase that inflation is bringing into their lives. So, without an infusion into the salary schedule, their buying power is less and less every year.”

As district leaders put together a budget for the next fiscal year, Cobb said Mid-Del schools still are going to try to make a $2,000 raise work.

“I’m not sure exactly how right now, but we’re going to try,” he said.

The small northeastern Oklahoma district of Peggs pays at the state minimum but completely covers teachers’ retirement contributions, saving each educator $3,000 to $4,000, Superintendent John Cox said. Teachers in the rural district also “wear many hats” and are compensated for fulfilling multiple roles.

Cox, also a Republican candidate running for state superintendent, said he expects Peggs would have to pay a small amount out of pocket to cover the total cost of the $2,000 raise when considering retirement and fringe benefits.

The bigger challenge, he said, is affording the rising payroll while operational expenses, like bus diesel and maintenance, also increase year over year.

The state budget doesn’t raise funding for schools’ operational costs, even though lawmakers are in 2027-28.

“There’s a definite balancing act,” Cox said. “We’re required to pay the teacher pay raise. Then what do you do with operational costs and what do you forgo to be able to pay those teacher pay raises? What in the maintenance area and in the operational costs do you cut to be able to make those pay raises?”

State lawmakers touted the pay increase as the latest of multiple steps in improving Oklahoma teacher salary levels. The Legislature last approved teacher raises in 2018, 2019 and 2023.

Oklahoma’s current average teacher salary is fourth among all bordering states and second in the region when factoring in cost of living, . The average starting salary for teachers in the state is still ranked toward the bottom of the region, even when considering cost of living, the agency reported.

The state’s largest teacher union, the Oklahoma Education Association, said it is “grateful to lawmakers for making another investment into competitive teacher pay.”

“Even if districts already pay above the minimum, we hope that they will use the funding that will be provided by the state to give all teachers the full $2,000 raise,” the organization said in a statement Wednesday. “They deserve it.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Major changes to early childhood reading policies, including a return to strict third-grade retention, are now law in Oklahoma after .

Gov. Kevin Stitt signed while surrounded by state leaders and students at John W. Rex Charter Elementary on Tuesday morning. Multiple children at the downtown Oklahoma City school asked for the governor’s pens as a souvenir.

The legislation implements stricter requirements, starting in the 2026-27 academic year, for public schools to intervene when students fall behind grade-level expectations in reading. Third graders who score below a basic level on state reading tests and fail a second state-approved literacy assessment would be held back from advancing to fourth grade, unless they meet limited criteria for an exemption.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

“This is about early support, strong instruction and giving parents the information that they need to stay involved in their child’s progress,” Stitt said. “And it ensures that when a student is struggling, we act quickly before that gap becomes a lifelong challenge.”

About 27% of Oklahoma students scored at or above their grade level in English language arts last school year while 36% scored below basic, . Below basic is the lowest category and indicates a student is not on track to be college or career ready by the end of high school.

Legislative leaders said they hope to , a former bottom-dweller in education rankings before it dramatically raised student reading scores after years of investment and stricter policies. Mississippi similarly requires low-scoring students to repeat third grade, has an expanded network of reading coaches and specialists, and spends $15 million a year on literacy initiatives.

“We can do better because Mississippi has done it, which shows that other states can as well,” House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said during the ceremony while accompanied by two of his young daughters.

It could take five years for Oklahoma to rise in national rankings, Hilbert said, though he suggested the state could see “improvement pretty quickly.”

SB 1778 passed with .

It establishes three tiers of reading instruction and support starting in kindergarten.

Tier 1 represents the core reading lessons all students receive. Children who score below their grade level qualify for Tier 2 and 3 interventions, such as small-group lessons, extra tutoring, summer programs and transitional classrooms, which would involve separate reading classes for students who have fallen behind.

Families also could choose to have their children repeat first or second grade.

Schools will be required to notify parents or guardians within 30 days of a student showing a reading deficiency and must give monthly updates on the child’s progress through an improvement plan.

“The idea here is that third-grade retention is not the actual tool for learning,” Stitt’s education secretary, Dan Hamlin, said. “It’s a last resort after many other efforts have unfolded.”

The state, for the first time, will administer the annual third-grade reading exam to second graders to give students an early opportunity to pass and avoid retention the following year.

The new law lays out good-cause exemptions for students to continue to fourth grade despite poor reading results.

Students whose individualized education plan “indicates that participation in the statewide student assessment system is not appropriate” would qualify. Exemptions also would apply to children who have spent fewer than two years learning English as their non-native language.

Children who have been retained twice between kindergarten and third grade would be eligible for a good-cause exemption, as would students with disabilities who have repeated a grade once.

The state budget, , adds more than $26 million to a fund that supports literacy instruction in public schools. The total $43.75 million Strong Readers Act Fund will dedicate 40% of its money to Tier 1 instruction across the state, 30% for students needing Tier 2 and 3 support, and 30% to reward districts that improve their reading scores.

The budget also adds $100 million to raise all teachers’ minimum salaries by $2,000.

Lawmakers dedicated $5 million to expand a team of literacy coaches at the Oklahoma State Department of Education. The team will grow from five to 20 literacy coaches, who assist educators in improving reading instruction and will prioritize low-performing schools.

State Superintendent Lindel Fields, who leads the Education Department, said the agency will begin hiring for the team immediately. His administration also will start preparing a new early literacy micro-credential program, called “teacher academies,” with Oklahoma colleges and universities.

SB 1778 requires all districts to employ a reading specialist, reading interventionist or staff member who has completed the micro-credential program, which will focus on the science of reading and best instructional practices. Any certified school employee who completes the micro-credential would receive a $3,000 stipend from the Education Department.

“The bill gets signed today, but the real work starts tomorrow morning,” Fields said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Legal efforts to found the nation’s first religious charter school in Oklahoma have reignited, with a and a former U.S. congressman filing a lawsuit against the state Tuesday.

The founding group of Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School and former Florida U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch, who applied to open the school, sued the state’s attorney general and the Statewide Charter School Board in Oklahoma City federal court.

The statewide board, which governs charter schools, voted earlier this month to deny the school’s application to open. The Oklahoma Supreme Court forbade the board from permitting state-funded religious schools in .

Deutsch and Ben Gamla’s founders allege religious groups are wrongfully excluded from opening charter schools with faith-based instruction — a similar argument Oklahoma Catholic leaders made when trying to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. 

They contend the Jewish school’s rejection amounts to religious discrimination, violating the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They asked a federal judge to block the state from enforcing Oklahoma laws that require charter schools to be non-sectarian.

“We’re asking the court to end that blatant religious targeting and allow families to choose schools that are best for them,” Deutsch said in a statement Tuesday.

A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, Shauna Peters, said it is reviewing the lawsuit and will respond in due time.

A law firm representing the Statewide Charter School Board didn’t immediately return a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

Attorney General Genter Drummond led the legal fight against the Catholic school, contending the concept of a publicly funded religious school would violate church-state separation enshrined in both the U.S. and Oklahoma constitutions. The state Supreme Court sided with him.

Members of the Statewide Charter School Board said they rejected Ben Gamla’s application solely to comply with the Supreme Court ruling and . They hired a conservative Christian legal group, the First Liberty Institute, to represent them.

After the Catholic school was rejected at the state level, the in April of last year. The nation’s highest Court , with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused. That allowed the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling to stand.

One of the Catholic school’s founding board members, Brett Farley, now holds a similar board position with the Jewish school as a representative of prospective parents.

All charter school boards in the state must have a parent member. Drummond called into question whether Farley, who is Catholic, would genuinely enroll a child in the school. Farley told Oklahoma Voice he “would definitely” consider the school for his daughter, if it opens.

For this reason and others, Drummond contended Ben Gamla’s board and application had multiple deficiencies beyond the religious component that should have contributed to its rejection. He against the statewide board, alleging it deliberately weakened its own legal position to benefit the school’s federal case.

Drummond asked that an Oklahoma County district judge order the board to issue a new and complete rejection letter to the school.

Meanwhile, multiple Oklahoma synagogues and Jewish organizations . In a January joint statement, they said Ben Gamla’s founding group failed to meaningfully consult the local Jewish community.

Deutsch told the statewide board he spoke with about 10 Jewish parents and 20 people total in Oklahoma before applying to open Ben Gamla. He founded six secular charter schools in Florida that have a similar name.

The Oklahoma school would offer an online-based education to students K-12 that is “intellectually rigorous and deeply rooted in Jewish knowledge, values and lived tradition,” according to its application.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

Pensions are sort of like New Year’s resolutions. Policymakers always promise, to themselves and to their constituents, that this will be the year they’ll finally get their financial house in order and bolster their pensions. But inevitably, something shiny comes along and distracts them.  

Oklahoma is grappling with this dilemma right now. After years of dutifully funneling millions of extra dollars into its beleaguered teacher pension plan, state policymakers are now considering scaling back. Instead, they would like to use that money to fund : pay raises for active teachers, more money for its school choice tax credit program, plus new investments in reading and math.

It’s likely to be a popular list. But it threatens to derail the state’s progress on pension funding. 

Oklahoma has actually done better on the pension front than most other states. Thanks to a combination of benefit cuts, plus a surge of new contributions, it has dramatically improved the health of its teacher pension plan. 

For example, the system’s unfunded liability, essentially the difference between how much it had promised and how much it had saved toward those promises, from $10.4 billion in 2010 down to $6.1 billion last year. Its funded ratio — a comparison between its assets and its liabilities — has improved from in 2010 all the way 80% as of last June. 

Oklahoma’s teacher plan is still not quite as well-funded as the median state and local plan — which was funded last year — but the state’s policymakers deserve kudos for making progress. Current and retired Oklahoma teachers should be thankful that their retirement plan is in much better shape than it was 16 years ago.

So how did they do it? First, legislators raised the retirement age from 62 to 65 and extended the amount of time that a teacher would need to work to qualify for a benefit from five to seven years. (This is called the vesting period, and these tend to be longer for teachers than for workers in the private sector. For example, according to a survey of Vanguard 401(k) plans, of employees are immediately vested in their employer’s retirement contributions.) These policy changes meant that any Oklahoma teacher who started after Oct. 31, 2011, had to wait just a bit longer to qualify for retirement benefits than those who came before them.  

A rising stock market certainly helped the pension plan as well, but the biggest change was on the funding side. From 2001 to 2011, Oklahoma was contributing less each year than what its actuaries said it needed to. Instead of paying off their metaphorical credit card in full, they made only minimum payments, which led to a large financial hole.

But every year since 2012, Oklahoma has put in more than what its actuaries said it needed to. As of , individuals were required to contribute 7% of their salaries. Employers like school districts paid 9.5% of each employee’s salary. And the state contributed a percentage of its revenues from sales taxes, cigarette taxes, corporate income taxes, individual income taxes and lottery proceeds. This extra state contribution came out to $456 million last year, and this is the portion that state legislators now want to cut back.

Oklahoma’s teacher pension plan is in much better shape today than it was. But it’s instructive to compare it with the plan Oklahoma offers to other state employees, which is in even better shape than the teacher plan.

That largely comes down to how far legislators went in designing reforms for each plan. In the case of the teachers, Oklahoma’s legislators were more hands-off. Teachers continue to be placed in the same defined benefit pension plan, for example. On average, their benefits are worth 10.67% of their salary, according to the plan’s latest . But remember that teachers themselves are paying about two-thirds of that cost, which means that most of the contributions made by the state and its school districts are paying for the plan’s unfunded liabilities, not for benefits for today’s workers. Moreover, the benefit structure is so heavily that someone would have to teach in Oklahoma for decades just to earn more than what they personally contributed.

Meanwhile, state employees have been enrolled in a portable defined contribution 401(k)-style plan since 2015. Members are required to contribute 4.5% of their salary, their employer contributes 6% and employees qualify for a growing share of those contributions over five years. A in the state legislature would raise those contribution rates and drop the vesting requirement altogether. Oklahoma’s higher education employees get an deal.

Putting the benefit situation aside, Oklahoma deserves credit for making substantial progress funding its teacher pension plan. According to the latest financial projections, the state’s actuaries expect that the plan could be fully funded by 2034. However, that assumption depends on its investments earning a 7% return every year. They also cautioned that one risk to its projection is that “actual contributions from the state may not be made in accordance with the current arrangement.” 

If Oklahoma legislators go forward with their plans to divert some of the money toward new expenses, they’d be putting all their hard-earned funding progress at risk.  

OKLAHOMA CITY — Everywhere House Speaker Kyle Hilbert goes, the topic of childhood literacy follows.

Hilbert, R-Bristow, said improving Oklahoma’s elementary reading scores is “top of the agenda for me,” and he’s been telling everyone who will listen.

“Every single event that I’m asked to go to or every single question that I’m asked where it’s economic development, tourist-related, you name it, I talk about reading because it applies to everything,” he told news reporters last month.

Early literacy has risen to the top of state lawmakers’ priorities for their 2026 legislative session, generating discussions and disagreement across the state about what policy changes and resources are necessary to improve children’s reading levels.

Only 27% of Oklahoma public school students scored at their grade level or higher on state reading tests last school year. A ranking of drew widespread public attention to Oklahoma’s ongoing struggles.

Legislators have discussed in literacy programs, but the single most dramatic change — and the most concrete reading policy idea that has emerged at the state Capitol — would be retaining struggling readers in third grade.

Republican leaders have pointed to third-grade retention as a clear solution for Oklahoma’s , but educators and parents said they’re less convinced.

Hilbert’s legislation would require students who score below a basic level in reading to repeat third grade. It also would promote earlier interventions, like summer tutoring, small-group lessons and optional retention in younger grades.

“We know if we pass this bill we will have better education outcomes,” Hilbert told a House education subcommittee in February. “That is a fact. It’s backed by science. It’s backed by data. It’s backed by research. It’s backed by evidence of what other states have done. We know what will happen if we pass this. We just have to have courage to do that.”

Research indicates retaining a student in elementary school leads to a , but retained students face a and .

Parents voice concerns over retention policy

Republican lawmakers and have pointed to Mississippi, with its strict retention requirement and improved reading scores, as a success story to emulate.

Mississippi has surpassed the national average in fourth-grade reading proficiency after on literacy initiatives and reading coaches, along with retaining its lowest-performing third-grade readers.

Oklahoma implemented similar third-grade requirements in the 2013-14 school year and by 2015-16 among early elementary grades.

School districts at the time said the retentions were necessary to prepare students for the high-stakes third-grade reading test.

The policy became unpopular among parents and educators, who complained the state placed far too much consequence on the results of one annual reading test. Lawmakers progressively for children to avoid being held back. They altogether in 2024.

Parents don’t want to return to high-stakes testing, said Wendy Hardwick, president of the Oklahoma Parent Teacher Association.

Hardwick’s twin daughters were in third grade when Oklahoma last had strict retention laws. They had already repeated first grade, and two years later, their reading skills were strong, she said. That didn’t stop them from feeling “scared to death” that a poor testing performance would hold them back again in third grade, she said.

Hardwick, who worked in public schools as a long-term substitute and later in special education, recalled the school environment was “stressful and palpable” during state testing time.

“What (students) understand is that they’re going to take this test, and if they don’t pass it, they’re going to have to take third grade again,” she said. “It’s hard to see kids of that age being put under that type of pressure.”

Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, had similar worries for her son, who was in pre-K when the retention law first passed.

Like Hardwick’s children, Kirt’s son repeated first grade. It worked out well, she said, but she feared a poor standardized test result would hold him back a second, more damaging time.

“I was pretty nervous about it, and knowing my educators didn’t have much say in it concerned me,” she said. “Our classroom educator the year my son was in third grade said, ‘I know he can read. I’ve talked to him about it. I watch him read. He tells me he knows. We have no idea if he will show that on a standardized test.’”

Broken Arrow parent Kristine Chambers said her daughter in second grade already reads above her grade level and tests well. An extra reading curriculum her daughter received in pre-K through Broken Arrow Public Schools set her up for success today, Chambers said.

Boosting early literacy instruction should be lawmakers’ focus, she said, rather than having students repeat a grade.

“I think that instead of focusing so hard on this retention, maybe put that focus into funding for new programs, new ideas for early childhood literacy, so that we have that good base,” Chambers said. “Obviously, there’s going to be students that learn at different speeds, but I think that if we have a really good, strong reading support and intervention early, we can not have the retention possibility at third grade.”

The state’s poor reading scores demonstrate not enough schools are intervening sufficiently when young readers are struggling, Hilbert said.

That’s why his would require schools to offer summer tutoring, small-group instruction and other services. Mandatory retention “forces that accountability” for schools to take action and communicate with parents earlier, he said.

Teaching quality comes to forefront

Public school teachers have voiced disagreements, not with the concept of retention, but with doing so in third grade.

Students learn the foundations of reading in earlier grades, so the sooner a student is retained, the better, if it’s absolutely necessary, said Cari Elledge, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union.

“If you wait until third grade, it might be too late,” said Elledge, a former elementary teacher. “That’s really what we’re hearing from our educators across the state, is we do support this, but if there was any way that we could shift it back a little bit to pre-K, kindergarten, first grade, that would be more beneficial.”

Republican legislators and business leaders have framed backing off of tough retention laws as the start of Oklahoma’s downturn in education rankings. But, other key factors have impacted public schools since that time.

Oklahoma experienced some of the and an . Public schools in Oklahoma now employ and over 800 uncertified adjunct instructors, both of which used to be a rarity in the state.

“When we talk about watering down things, we’ve also watered down certification and licensure, and that has been a dramatic change to public education in the state of Oklahoma,” Elledge said.

The state Legislature has steadily increased public school funding since then, though Oklahoma in per-pupil spending.

Sen. Adam Pugh, who leads the Senate Education Committee, said as lawmakers invest more dollars in public schools, they’re aware Oklahoma’s teacher workforce is now younger, less experienced and more reliant on emergency certified educators.

That’s why measures to recruit and retain more teachers, including raising teacher salaries by $2,500, doubling college scholarship funds for aspiring educators, growing a statewide team of reading coaches and adding millions of dollars to support literacy instruction in public schools.

“I also think when it comes down to it, it’s not about the curriculum,” said Pugh, R-Edmond. “It’s about the individual that’s in front of the classroom every day, and so preparing that individual to go teach kids to learn how to read, I think, is really important.”

Oklahoma City schools show improvement in early readers

Test scores were already on the decline when disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic . Scores then from 2022 to 2024.

As districts seek to claw their way back up, Oklahoma City Public Schools has found a reason for optimism this school year. Winter benchmark testing showed nearly a quarter of the district’s first graders had more than a full academic year of growth in a semester of learning.

If more first graders show accelerated growth now, more will be on track to read proficiently by fourth grade, Oklahoma City Superintendent Jamie Polk said.

A major factor in that growth has been the addition of an extra reading curriculum on top of the district’s core literacy instruction, district leaders said in a March school board meeting. The extra curriculum more explicitly covers phonics and phonemic awareness, two concepts that are essential to sounding out words.

Classrooms that showed the most growth had another key element, Polk told Oklahoma Voice. They had teachers who were trained through content-specific professional development.

“What we have found that works more than anything is … teacher clarity — teachers understanding exactly this is what the students need to know and be able to do, but also when our students can articulate what they need to know and be able to do,” Polk said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Despite rejecting a Jewish charter school a second time, an Oklahoma state board is preparing to argue in the school’s favor in court.

The Statewide Charter School Board on Monday voted to deny a resubmitted application to open Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School. Board members said they had no choice but to comply with a that prohibited the concept of taxpayer-funded religious schools.

Chairperson Brian Shellem said most of the board members disagree with the state Supreme Court’s decision, and they plan to fight against it. They unanimously chose a conservative Christian legal group, the First Liberty Institute, to represent them once the Jewish school’s founders file an expected lawsuit.

The board supported a prior attempt to open a Catholic charter school in the state. The Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected the Catholic school, deciding a publicly funded religious school would violate the church-state separation required under the Oklahoma Constitution. A upheld the state-level ruling.

Shellem said the board’s position is the same as before — that a charter school concept shouldn’t be denied simply because it would include religious instruction.

“We’re not showing favoritism towards a religious component, but we also don’t think we should be discriminating against it,” he said after the board meeting.

Attorney General Gentner Drummond led the legal fight against the Catholic charter school. His office is now tasked with reviewing the Statewide Charter School Board’s request to hire the First Liberty Institute for legal representation.

A spokesperson for Drummond said the Attorney General’s Office will review the request. His office did not answer whether Drummond would fight the Jewish charter school in court.

Ben Gamla would provide an online-based education that “integrates general academic excellence with Jewish religious learning,” according to its resubmitted application. Its founding governing board, originally led by Florida charter school founder Peter Deutsch, aims to enroll 400 students K-12 statewide in year one.

However, leaders of five Oklahoma synagogues and Jewish organizations said the school’s founders failed to meaningfully consult the local Jewish community before seeking to open Ben Gamla.

“Had such consultation occurred, the applicant would have been made aware that Oklahoma is already home to many Jewish educational opportunities,” they wrote in a in January.

Deutsch told the statewide board he had spoken with about 10 Jewish parents in Oklahoma before applying to open the school. He established six secular charter schools in Florida with a similar Ben Gamla name, but he said the Oklahoma school would be a completely separate entity.

Initially, the Oklahoma school’s founding board included only one Oklahoma resident, Brett Farley, who held a similar role with the defunct Catholic charter school. When , the statewide board noted Oklahoma law requires all charter school board members to live in the state.

Deutsch then submitted an updated application for state approval. The resubmitted application adds new board members and states that all are Oklahoma residents.

Among the new members are local charter founder and school choice advocate Robert Ruiz and Kandice Jeske, a .

Farley said the Ben Gamla board will file a federal lawsuit soon to challenge the school’s rejection.

“We remain confident that our charter is something that needs to be approved,” he said Monday. “The (U.S.) Supreme Court’s already said three times that states have to respect the rights of religious institutions to participate in these (state-funded) programs, and unfortunately, the state Supreme Court disagreed. And so, we’re going to seek remedy in the federal courts.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma Senate plan to has drawn mixed reactions in the week since Republican leaders unveiled it.

Groups representing active and retired educators, along with legislative Democrats, have opposed Senate Republicans’ idea to redirect $254 million that otherwise would supplement the Teachers’ Retirement System. GOP leaders said the pension system is in a strong position now that it’s 80% funded, and those extra funds could benefit urgent needs in public schools.

The plan wouldn’t take any money out of the Teachers’ Retirement System, and no retirees’ benefits would be reduced. It would place a $200 million limit on a yearly pension subsidy, called an apportionment, that has helped build up the retirement system over the past 23 years on top of regular state and employee contributions.

Doing so would free up $254 million — in a tight budget year — for a $2,500 teacher pay raise, extra school funding, expanded private school tax credits and more, Senate leaders said.

The thought of repurposing retirement funds, though, has drawn scrutiny from the state’s largest teacher union and a group representing retired educators.

Oklahoma Education Association President Cari Elledge equated the plan to mortgaging a teacher’s future for a salary increase today.

“We shouldn’t be having to be the ones who are funding our own raises,” she said.

Using money intended to benefit public school teachers to instead bolster private school tax credits also would be “very troubling,” she said. The Senate plan would put $25 million of the pension apportionment funds into the state budget for the Parental Choice Tax Credit, which helps families pay for private schooling.

Retirement funds shouldn’t be used to finance other budget priorities, especially when retirees haven’t had a cost-of-living increase to their benefits in six years, the .

“An 80% funded ratio is meaningful progress — but it is not full funding,” the organization wrote in a public statement. “Redirecting retirement dollars now risks reversing years of hard-earned stability.”

Senate leaders didn’t rule out the possibility of a cost-of-living increase if their plan succeeds. They would need support from the House for the proposal to meaningfully advance.

House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, stopped short of endorsing or rejecting the Senate idea. He said lawmakers, though, will have to someday decide what to do with the pension subsidy as the Teachers’ Retirement System inches closer to being 100% funded.

“At some point the subsidization of the pension systems, the TRS system, will need to go away,” Hilbert told reporters Thursday. “It’s just a question of is that (happening in) 2026, is that 2030, is that 2034? I think that’s the question we have to wrap our heads around as we make determinations on what is fully funded and when does that subsidy need to go away. It was never intended to be there forever.”

Much of the criticism for the funding plan stems from a misunderstanding, said Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle. He said constituents who contacted Senate Republicans believed lawmakers planned to deduct from their pension paychecks.

“My wife is a retired teacher. I don’t get to go home at night if I’m trying to draw from her pension system. That’s not what we’re doing,” Paxton said.

Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, said she heard similar fears from constituents. Her office has been “flooded with calls” since the Republicans’ announcement.

Feedback on the proposal has been full of frustration, said House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson, D-Oklahoma City.

“Pitting retired teachers against active teachers is really not a good plan,” Munson said. “It’s not a popular idea.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board voted unanimously against an application Monday for a virtual Jewish charter school, citing the state supreme court’s 2024 ruling that public funding for a religious school would violate state law.��As expected, some board members voiced support for Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation.

“I think our hands are tied,” said Board Member Damon Gardenhire, who said he didn’t see much difference between Ben Gamla’s application and a now-closed Native American charter school that featured a “spiritual component.” 

In a statement responding to the vote, Brett Farley, a member of the proposed school’s board, said organizers plan to challenge the decision in federal court. “Oklahoma families should have the freedom to choose schools that best meet their children’s needs — without losing strong options simply because they are faith-based,” he said.

The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board is expected to deny an application for a Jewish charter school Monday, but will likely welcome organizers of the school to take them to court.

Peter Deutsch, founder of the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, and a former Democratic congressman, made his pitch for the school in January, saying that he aims to bring “a rigorous, values-driven education” to Jewish parents in Oklahoma.

“I anticipate that our board would like to grant them the application,” Brian Shellem, the board chair, told The 74. “But we can’t snub our nose at the court either.”

He means the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which ruled against the nation’s first Catholic charter school in 2024. That decision still stands after the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked over that case last year. The charter board’s likely denial of Ben Gamla’s application is expected to spark another lawsuit, pitting against those who say it would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on establishing a religion. With a case over a proposed Christian charter in Tennessee already in federal court and another religious school in Colorado founded to test the same legal question, there’s little doubt that the nation’s highest court will eventually settle the debate.

“It is hard for me to imagine the court doesn’t take the issue again when it comes to it,” said Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. But after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself in the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, resulting in the 4-4 tie, the justices likely in favor of religious charters, he said, “would want a case that was very strong.”

‘Pray and hear Scripture’

So far, the only case to watch is in Tennessee. Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville, a nonprofit that wants to open a K-8 Christian charter school, sued the Knox County school board because the district wouldn’t accept its letter of intent to apply. State law prohibits charter schools from being religious. 

“Students will begin to develop biblical literacy in kindergarten and begin taking catechism lessons by third grade,” according to Wilberforce Academy’s request for a quick ruling in the case. “And they will pray and hear Scripture together in a school assembly every morning.”

As St. Isidore did before them, Wilberforce argues that the nonprofit is a “private actor” and that approving its charter application would not turn it into a government entity.

The Knox County board told the court that it will “most likely” not take a position on the legality of Wilberforce’s argument. On Thursday, the board rejected asking state education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds to consider granting Wilberforce Academy a waiver so they can open the Christian school.

The Knox board, however, also said the issue of religious charter schools “deserves a thorough examination by the federal courts.” 

Judge Charles Atchley Jr, for the Eastern District of Tennessee, thinks so, too. Last week, he allowed a group of Knox County parents and religious leaders, who oppose Wilberforce’s application, . 

The case, he wrote, has the “potential to reshape First Amendment jurisprudence in the educational context” and it wouldn’t serve the court or parties involved to not have “vigorous advocacy on both sides.”

Amanda Collins, a retired Knox County school psychologist, is among those who have signed up to fight against Wilberforce Academy. She has two children still in the district and one who graduated in 2024. She grew concerned about Wilberforce Academy when she learned the organization didn’t have a history of operating charter schools in the state and feels its attorneys are using the district to “merely force an issue up the ladder to the Supreme Court.”

“In Tennessee, we have plenty of things that are underfunded,” she said. “We don’t need to be wasting our local Knox County taxpayer money on somebody’s agenda that is not intended to promote the education safety and wellness of our public school students.” 

‘The clear constitutional boundary’

Another school that could spark a lawsuit over public funds for religious schools is Colorado’s , which advertises that it offers students a “Christian foundation.” 

The school operates “pretty much just like a charter school” said Ken Witt, executive director of Education reEnvisioned, the board of cooperative educational services, or BOCES, that contracted with the school. 

As , emails between the attorney for the Pueblo County district, which allowed the school to open within its boundaries, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm, suggest the school was intentionally founded to test the legal argument over whether public schools can practice religion. 

After threatening to withhold state funds because of the school’s religious mission, the Colorado Department of Education funded Riverstone’s 31 students. But the state is also conducting a , which could take another year, before deciding whether it can legally provide money to the school. In the meantime, Riverstone had to close its building last week because of health and safety violations. It’s unclear whether students are learning remotely or in another facility in the meantime.

For now, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat running for governor, hasn’t issued an opinion on Riverstone, but his views on St. Isidore, the Oklahoma school, were clear. Last year, he in opposing state funding for the school.

In , he urged the Supreme Court “to preserve the clear constitutional boundary that protects both religious liberty and the integrity of our public education system.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican who is also running for governor, made a similar argument about St. Isidore before both the Oklahoma and U.S. supreme courts. 

But that’s where both he and Weiser split with the Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. In his , Skrmetti states that categorically excluding faith-based schools from public charter programs violates parents’ rights to freely exercise their religion.

To Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute, it’s a matter of equity. Higher-income families can move into wealthier neighborhoods or pay private school tuition, he wrote in a on the Wilberforce case. The state, he added, already funds religious schools through education savings accounts. 

“But families who rely on charter schools are told that their options must be secular,” he wrote. 

Black, with the University of South Carolina, said the issue comes down to who authorized the school to begin with. In both Oklahoma and Tennessee, either local or state boards approve charter applications.

“That explicit state involvement, to me, makes it clear that state action is involved,” he said, “and thus the Establishment Clause applies.”

OKLAHOMA CITY — After unsuccessfully , an Oklahoma board will “more than likely” have to deny a proposal to found another publicly funded religious charter school in the state.

The Statewide Charter School Board is expected to vote next month on a Jewish charter school’s application for approval.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Chairperson Brian Shellem said the state board is legally bound to obey an that rejected opening a religious charter school with taxpayer funds. A deadlocked U.S. Supreme Court .

That means, “we will more than likely have to deny their application,” Shellem said, though he suggested the school could do an “outstanding job” academically.

If rejected, the school founders would have an opportunity to reapply a second and final time.

Shellem said he expects the founders also might file a lawsuit if denied.

“I would not be shocked or surprised if this ignites another legal battle,” Shellem said. “So regardless of whatever happens, I really do believe our board would be sued no matter what.”

Ben Gamla would provide an education that is “intellectually rigorous and deeply rooted in Jewish knowledge, values and lived tradition,” according to its application.

Each employee, though allowed to have different religious beliefs, would be considered a “servant of the Jewish faith” and would be expected to “uphold the standards of the Jewish tradition in their day-to-day work and personal lives,” the application states.

A Florida charter school founder and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch said he is committed to making Ben Gamla a success in Oklahoma.

“This is something that’s been in my head for at least 10 years, if not longer, and I think the opportunity is probably the best in Oklahoma of any state in the United States of America today,” Deutsch said when presenting to the state board on Monday.

Brett Farley, who sat on the board of the now-defunct Catholic charter school, is also listed among the founding board members for the Jewish school.

The application promises a K-12 online-based education with rigorous academics. Ben Gamla, named for a high priest in Israel 2,000 years ago, also would provide instruction in Jewish religion, culture, values, rituals, texts, holidays and practices.

Like Deutsch’s secular Ben Gamla charter schools in Florida, the Oklahoma school would teach Hebrew classes. Deutsch said the Oklahoma school, though bearing a similar name, is an entirely separate organization from his Florida charter school network.

While presenting to the statewide board, Deutsch said the online school would be open to students of any background. He said he first visited Oklahoma a few years ago to explore the possibility of founding a school and visited with about 20 people, including 10 Jewish parents.

“My sense of talking to parents was there are a lot of parents that are looking for a sort of a faith-based, rigorous academic program, but there was nothing there,” Deutsch said.

State law and recent court precedent don’t allow charter schools, or any public school, in Oklahoma to adopt a particular religion. No existing charter schools in the state emphasize the Hebrew language or Judaic studies as Ben Gamla would, though multiple synagogues and Jewish community centers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City do.

An estimated , or .22% of the state’s total population.

The Ben Gamla application proposes opening later this year with a goal year-one enrollment of 400 students K-12. Its goal enrollment is 1,150 students in five years.

During Deutsch’s presentation, Shellem brought up the “elephant in the room” — why apply for approval after the board’s experience with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School? Deutsch gave a succinct response.

“We have presented an application for you that we believe meets and exceeds all of your criteria,” Deutsch said. “And so, we expect and hope that you’re going to approve that application.”

The statewide board isn’t interested in “paying for Sunday school,” Shellem said after the meeting Monday. Rather, the board is hunting for charters that would produce strong academic results.

“I believe the Ben Gamla school could deliver that,” he said. “I think St. Isidore could have delivered that. And we are going to be bound by the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling no matter what, and we will comply with those orders. But, I think it’s unfortunate that we have to potentially deny schools that are highly qualified that could do an outstanding job for students in the areas of mathematics, science, reading (and) literature because of their desire to teach a religious component.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

OKLAHOMA CITY — A state board governing charter schools has decided it’s seen enough from Proud To Partner Leadership Academy and voted Monday to “pull the plug” on the school.

The Statewide Charter School Board made the rare decision to issue a notice of termination to the charter high school in southwest Oklahoma City. Seven board members voted in favor and two abstained.

The decision sets in motion the process of closing the school once the current academic year ends and voiding its charter contract. The 100 students attending the school, known as PTPLA, then would have to return to their neighborhood school districts or find another educational option.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The board placed PTPLA over financial, operational and academic quality concerns. Members of the state board from the school’s leadership.

“That’s what we always ask for is a spirit of cooperation and desire to work together to improve the outcomes at the school,” board Chairperson Brian Shellem said after Monday’s meeting. “As it continued to progress, it seemed like it got harder and harder.”

State officials said they still had more questions than answers after three months of probation and multiple meetings with PTPLA.

The board’s staff made three visits to the school this fall and reported seeing only one teacher giving instruction. .

Rebecca Wilkinson, executive director of the state board, said she observed students with a computer open but not logged in, others not completing any work, seven who were sleeping or had their heads down, and some who were unable to say what course or topic they were studying, all of which raised concerns about the school’s educational quality.

PTPLA, which opened in 2024, faced scrutiny over weak finances, as well. It laid off four teachers in October and finished the previous school year in a budget deficit.

State officials also complained of missed deadlines and other unfulfilled obligations by the school’s administration.

“My opinion is it’s time to pull the plug,” statewide board member William Pearson said before the vote. “It’s time to move to termination.”

Despite the school’s struggles, PTPLA leaders told the state

School founder and Superintendent Dawn Bowles said her students now face the prospect of returning to “schools that were not serving them in the first place.”

“Our next feat will be, what is our next move to make sure that we don’t drop the ball on the ones that we’ve committed to serving,” Bowles said. “We will continue to serve them. We will continue to educate them. We will continue to provide opportunities outside of education, and we will continue to be their village as we move forward because this is what we consider to be the greater way.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

WARNER —  The banners stretch along the top of Warner Public Schools’ Event Center wall, each with the letter A as the centerpiece.

Every banner celebrates the 16 overall A grades that schools in the rural eastern Oklahoma district have received since 2013 on . A fresh one printed in 2025 signifies Warner’s high school and K-8 school were again among the top 5% highest-performing public schools in the state.

The A grades, though a heavy focus in the 800-student district, aren’t the point, Warner Superintendent David Vinson said. They’re a byproduct of students’ and teachers’ hard work. And if Warner can do it, he said, any district can.

“You have to make sure your students understand the why,” Vinson said. “It’s about their education. It’s about bettering their lives. It’s not about getting an A on the report card or about getting high marks as a school district. That’s a result or a fallout of them being high achievers individually.”

Public schools across Oklahoma are now implementing strategies Warner has been employing for years — a throughout the school day, frequent benchmark testing and . The district changed its culture and policies more than a decade ago after receiving disappointing results on state report cards.

The town of Warner, home to 1,500 residents and Connors State College, doesn’t have a wealth of industry to keep its school district flush with local tax revenue, Vinson said. State funding and community support for bond issues fill in the gap.

About 60% of Warner students come from households at or near the federal poverty line, . Many district students — 42% of whom are Native American, 31% white and 20% two or more races — have parents who work in farming and ranching in the area or drive 20 minutes north to Muskogee for industry jobs, Vinson said.

Not that he particularly pays attention to demographics. Those details, Vinson said, “tend to be used as excuses.”

High academic expectations and strict discipline are core to the district’s success, he said. Principals are quick to handle behavioral issues, leaving teachers free to teach and students better able to learn without disruptions.

The principal’s office is not a “revolving door,” he said. Any student sent in must leave with a consequence.

“I think education in general across the board has lost sight of that mentality, has lost sight of that philosophy,” Vinson said. “And that’s why you have schools that are in chaos, and you have entire schools scoring 0% proficient on assessments because the school has become so chaotic that teachers can’t teach and kids can’t learn. And there are just as smart of kids in those schools as there are in my school. They’re just not being afforded that opportunity to learn like our kids are.”

Small behavioral problems are addressed consistently, and big incidents are punished “severely,” he said. 

In Warner, that includes the rare use of corporal punishment, a method of discipline that . Simply having it on the table as an option, Vinson said, usually is enough to discourage most students from bad behavior.

While administrators handle discipline, teachers are expected to maximize every minute of their class time, a concept known in Warner as “bell-to-bell teaching.” That means no movies and no downtime, said Charla Jackson, the district’s curriculum director and elementary counselor.

Middle and high school students are discouraged from mingling in the hallways during passing periods. Instead they’re expected to hustle to their lockers and then to their next class, where a bellringer assignment is usually waiting. They’re expected to read a book if they finish their classwork early.

Literacy is a major emphasis in Warner, Jackson said. Several Warner Elementary teachers have completed in-depth training on the science of reading, and the school provides reading interventionists and tutoring for students who need extra help.

“They are the experts,” Jackson said of Warner’s teachers. “They are the ones making the difference. We just try to support them and allow them to do their job. So, that’s first and foremost.”

High morale keeps teacher turnover low, Jackson said. Class sizes, though increasing with Warner’s enrollment growth, max out at about 24 students per classroom.

But, Warner isn’t immune from the teacher shortage impacting public schools across Oklahoma.

About half of the teachers at Warner High School entered the classroom through non-traditional means, like adjunct teaching and alternative or emergency certification, Vinson said. The district tries to support those educators with training, pre-written curriculum plans and co-teaching hours with a veteran teacher.

Having fewer classroom disruptions, too, “just makes everybody a better teacher,” he said.

Several district teachers told Oklahoma Voice that behavioral issues are rarely a problem in their classrooms, but when they do occur, school administrators readily step in.

When asked what sets Warner apart, kindergarten teacher Lisa Lee pointed to elementary Principal Alan Gordon’s desk. 

“This man right here, he’s great,” Lee said. “The administration here, it just makes you feel good. You know what I mean? Like they’re backing us. They believe in us. They push us, and that makes a huge difference.”

Fourth-grade math teacher Pam White said she was ready to quit teaching before she came to Warner Elementary five years ago. White, 65, is eligible to retire but has chosen not to “because I love this school so much.”

She said the supportive administration has been “huge.”

“They’re in our classrooms,” she said. “They’ll take care of problems immediately.”

During a visit to White’s classroom, students in her afternoon math class were equally enthusiastic about their school, complimenting the quality of their teachers, school staff and principal.

But, Warner didn’t always have this culture of success. The turning point was 2012. That year, the district scored straight C’s on state report cards.

Vinson, then in his first year as superintendent, sent an email to Warner families to inform them “we are not pleased with the overall grade on these report cards for our schools.” The district’s administrators and teachers were already implementing changes, he wrote in the email. He still keeps a copy.

That’s when Warner adopted a more structured and disciplined culture, banned cellphones, started adhering to bell-to-bell teaching and aimed to have 90% of students make a proficient score on state tests. 

The following year, the district met or exceeded the statewide average on nearly every state exam.

That trajectory continued over the following decade, despite state test scoring becoming more rigorous in 2017 and COVID-19 interrupting schooling in 2020. In 2025, Warner students scored above the state average in every tested grade level, .

Families in the area have taken notice. While the town of Warner has experienced little population change, its school district has grown from 600 students at the start of the turnaround to more than 800 today. Student transfers are a major source of the spike.  

“I think a big thing is we established a culture here where kids want to succeed,” middle and high school counselor Misty Durrett said. “It’s something they take pride in.

“They know our ranking. They know where we stand. They want to maintain that.”

It’s not all structure and discipline, Vinson said. School still needs to be fun.

That’s why Warner has expanded extracurricular activities, electives and class options available to students. It’s added a competition choir, an art program, boys and girls wrestling, and a high school construction class, where students are building a house that should be ready to sell this spring. 

Students on the high school racing team design and build a dirt-track racing car that Vinson drives in competitions on the team’s behalf.

School spirit events, like Homecoming, consume entire school days. With the winter holidays approaching, the interior of every Warner school is decorated for Christmas with lights, trees and door decals.

“You have to create those opportunities for kids to enjoy school,” Vinson said. “It can’t be structure, discipline, learning, structure, discipline, learning 170 days a year.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

But the state’s request before the U.S. Department of Education has raised concerns by advocates who worry needy students could “lose both dedicated attention and resources” in Indiana and other states.   

Indiana joined Iowa this fall in asking the U.S. Department of Education for permission to merge their federal “Title” education grants – such as Title I to combat poverty and Title III to help English Language Learners — into one block grant for states and schools.

A similar attempt by Oklahoma is on hold after state Superintendent Ryan Walters resigned in September, while several state school leaders have asked U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to work with Congress to ease restrictions.

“Our goals…include less red tape for our people,” state Education Secretary Katie Jenner told the state school board. “We’re shifting towards…the flexibility to put the resources where they’re needed the most.”

At the same time, advocacy groups are shouting warnings that removing guardrails on the $30 billion in Title grants, created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” could lead to the country’s most needy students being left out.

In Indiana, officials have asked the U.S. Department of Education to pool the more than $350 million it receives in Title grants in the name of efficiency — to save time and millions of dollars now spent documenting how each dollar is used for specific groups of students.

Instead, the state wants the freedom to use the money for its main statewide education priorities — literacy, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) proficiency and reshaping high school education.

It’s also seeking freedom to spend federal School Improvement Grants — money now targeted at improving failing schools — to go instead toward state school choice goals.

Indiana would create an “innovation fund” with that money to help other schools nearby that students could choose instead. Such a fund would “better support a growing ecosystem of effective, innovative school models,” according to Indiana’s application.

“Students and families cannot wait — sometimes for years — for a chronically underperforming school to improve in order to receive access to high-quality instruction,” the application adds..

Both Iowa and Indiana’s request to the Education Department — with rulings expected early next year — “are expected to set a precedent for the scope of future waivers granted to other states,” the American School Superintendents Association

Indiana’s request, however, is raising concerns from several education advocacy groups — including The Education Trust, All4Ed, UnidosUS and the National Parents Union — that removing restrictions on the money will mean that students that most need extra help won’t get it.

“This approach fundamentally misunderstands — and threatens to undermine — the purpose of these targeted federal programs, which were created to address specific, documented gaps in support for vulnerable student populations,” the groups said in a . “When Indiana lists numerous state priorities without any specific commitments to individual student groups, it signals that these populations would lose both dedicated attention and resources under the proposed consolidation.”

Indiana’s request to the U.S. Department of Education to waive restrictions on the money goes beyond Iowa’s, said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, Assistant Director of P12 Policy at The Education Trust. Indiana is seeking leeway from restrictions both for the state and for individual schools and districts, while Iowa is asking for an exemption just for the state, he said.

“In its current form, Indiana’s is much more dramatic and wide-ranging in its scope and potential impact,” Munyan-Penney said.

Within Indiana, the Indiana State Teachers Association is also raising concerns.

“ISTA believes flexibility can be beneficial when paired with transparency, collaboration and a clear focus on student success,” the association . “However, we remain concerned about provisions in the waiver that could reduce input from educators and parents and divert critical resources from schools working to close opportunity gaps.”

The union also has concerns about shifting the School Improvement Grant money.

“The proposed waiver could redirect these funds to schools or programs that are not identified as low-performing, potentially diluting the impact on historically underserved students,” the union said.

And residents of Gary, a high-poverty city, also worry that the neediest students will be left out if guardrails are removed.

“When I hear…this waiver is about ‘cutting red tape,’ I don’t buy it,” Natalie Ammons, grandmother of three students in the Gary school district, testified last week in a webcast to Congressional staff. “It may be cutting something, but it’s not red tape — it’s cutting away the few protections families like mine have left.”

Asked for school officials who are seeking the waivers, the Indiana Department of Education did not suggest any. The 74 also requested a copy of feedback the department sought from residents and officials on the waiver, but the department did not provide it.

The goal of combining Title grants, which total about $30 billion a year nationally, have been a growing priority of Republican officials after a version of it was proposed in Project 25. Oklahoma and Iowa proposed merging them this spring, but concerns arose about what the U.S. Department of Education could legally allow.

Trump also put a hold on disbursing several Title grants to states this year before backing down.

In July, McMahon encouraging them “to seek creative and effective waivers for improving student academic achievement and maximizing the impact of Federal funds” and spelling out a waiver process.

Title I, which accounts for more than half of that money, is awarded to states and schools according to poverty levels and enrollment. All4Ed, estimates that more than two thirds of school districts receive some Title I money, though sometimes in low amounts if poverty is low.

Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, are scheduled to receive $15.7 million in Title I money next school year, while several smaller districts receive well under $100,000.

Texas has launched a partnership with Turning Point USA to create chapters of the right-wing organization on every high school campus in the state.

Gov. , Lt. Gov. and Turning Point USA Senior Director Josh Thifault revealed the initiative during a news conference at the Governor’s Mansion on Monday. They did not outline any plans that would require schools to initiate the clubs, but Abbott said that he expects “meaningful disciplinary action” to take place against “any stoppage of TPUSA in the great state of Texas.”

“Let me be clear: Any school that stands in the way of a Club America program in their school should be reported immediately to the Texas Education Agency,” the governor said, referring to the name of the high school clubs.

The announcement comes after Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath, who stood behind Abbott at Monday’s gathering, privately met with Thifault in early November to discuss expanding the organization’s presence in the state’s schools, which was by The Texas Tribune. Four days after that meeting, Patrick said he would $1 million in campaign funds to help bring the project to fruition.

Turning Point USA was founded by Charlie Kirk, the late right-wing activist who was often praised by conservatives as a champion of free speech and criticized for comments that many other Americans found hateful toward LGBTQ+ communities, non-Christians, people of color and women. Kirk was killed in early September while speaking on a college campus in Utah.

Following Kirk’s death, Abbott and Morath accused some teachers of posting social media remarks promoting violence and mocking the conservative activist. The state has since begun investigating submitted to the education agency about educators’ alleged comments — a move that considering teachers’ First Amendment protections. The agency has typically conducted such investigations for violations like threats or abuse.

Kirk’s organization has traditionally operated on college campuses, promoting itself as a hub for young people committed to conservative values. The group is also known for having created a so-called professor watchlist, which allows users to search for educators perceived as supporting and promoting liberal viewpoints in the classroom. Turning Point’s work has at times caused tension, particularly among who have because of the negative spotlight placed on them by the organization.

The group’s “Club America” chapters, meanwhile, operate in high schools. The clubs aim to “build strong networks, spearhead impactful initiatives, help students register to vote, and inspire meaningful conversations about the foundations of a free society,” according to .

Turning Point organizers say they have received about starting local chapters since Kirk’s death, while claiming that some students wanting to launch chapters have faced pushback from their schools’ administrators.

Republican officials in Oklahoma and Florida have also announced partnerships with Turning Point to expand the organization’s presence. Those partnerships rely on interested students to initiate the clubs, while Turning Point provides them with organizational support.

Oklahoma’s former right-wing superintendent, Ryan Walters, had to go after the accreditation of schools that refused to welcome the conservative group.

Petitions calling for of the school chapters have also emerged, with some students and parents the national organization for what they describe as “racist, homophobic, and sexist hate speech on college campuses across America.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that tracks extremism, Turning Point as an organization with a strategy of sowing fear “that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community and civil rights activists.”

Texas’ partnership with Turning Point marks the latest attempt by Republican officials to push education further to the right, after years of them accusing public schools of indoctrinating students with left-leaning beliefs about race and gender. The state, for example, has passed laws schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms — an effort currently facing — and on how educators teach America’s history of slavery and racism.

Abbott on Monday sought to distance Turning Point from any particular political party, comparing it to organizations like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes currently present in many public schools.

“This is about values,” Abbott said. “This is about constitutional principles. This is about a restoration of who we are as a country.”

The governor acknowledged that it is highly unlikely he would endorse a similar initiative for more progressive, left-leaning causes, but added that “it would not be illegal” for them to exist in public schools. Abbott signed earlier this year, a sweeping state law that with an LGBTQ+ focus.

Existing partnerships between Turning Point and other states have already about the constitutionality of state governments using their resources to promote political causes in public schools, with legal experts saying it’s unclear whether the initiatives cross any lines but that they do warrant further observation.

Abbott and Patrick said Monday that Texas already has more than 500 high schools with Club America chapters. Thifault said Turning Point’s goal is to have 20,000 chapters in high schools across the nation.

The president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, Zeph Capo, recently told the Tribune that groups with a divisive political presence like Turning Point may have a place on college campuses. But he does not think that they belong in high schools, where students are more impressionable.

Disclosure: Southern Poverty Law Center has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This first appeared on .