Tulsa Education: December 2021 Archives

This is a reworking of a post from two years ago, but it has been updated with current information about open seats and candidates, and there is some new information below.

END OF FILING UPDATE, 2021/12/08: 5 of the 17 seats in Tulsa County had only one candidate (Berryhill, Collinsville, Glenpool, Liberty, Sperry), and one seat (Keystone) had no candidates file. The two Tulsa Public Schools seats drew two and four candidates, respectively. Former District Attorney Tim Harris and three other candidates will run for the open Office No. 7 seat being vacated by Suzanne Schreiber, and E'Lena Ashley will challenge incumbent Shawna Keller for Office No. 4.

In city races, two council seats and the mayor's office in Collinsville each drew only one candidate; likewise a single Owasso council seat drew a single candidate. Sand Springs Office No. 1 drew 3 candidates, and Office No. 2 drew 2.

We are in the midst of the annual filing period for public school board positions in Oklahoma, which ends Wednesday, December 8, 2021, at 5 p.m. Most K-12 school districts will have a single seat, Office No. 2, up for election to a five-year term. Dependent districts (Keystone is the only one in Tulsa County) have three seats that rotate through three-year terms. Skiatook, in far-north Tulsa County, also has Office No. 5 on the ballot. Tulsa Tech has Office No. 3 up for election, and the incumbent has drawn a challenger.

After two days of filing in Tulsa County, out of 17 seats up for election, 11 seats have drawn one candidate, only 5 have drawn two or more candidates. No one has filed in Keystone school district.

Filing is also open for a number of municipalities; candidates have filed for city office in Collinsville, Owasso, and Sand Springs.

(Here is the current list of candidates for Tulsa County school board seats. And here's where you'll find maps showing school district and election district boundaries.)

School board filing always comes at a busy and distracted time of year. As I've written before, it's almost as if school board elections were deliberately scheduled to escape the notice of potential candidates and voters.

The school board primary election will be held on February 8, 2022, for those seats where there are three or more candidates. If no one wins a majority of the vote in the February election, a runoff will be held on April 5, 2022. If a seat draws only two candidates, the election will be held on April 5, 2022.

The Tulsa district, largest in the state, has two out of seven seats up for election to a four-year term, Offices No. 4 and 7.

Tulsa Election District 4 is the east portion of the Tulsa school district, roughly south of Admiral and east of 89th East Ave. The current member for District 4 is Shawna Keller, a Democrat. She has filed for re-election and has not yet drawn an opponent.

Tulsa Election District 7 is the southern edge of the Tulsa school district, east of the river and south of 51st Street, plus the Patrick Henry neighborhood between 41st, Harvard, Yale, and I-44. Suzanne Schreiber, an employee of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is the incumbent and is registered as a Democrat, but she has not yet filed for re-election. Susan Bryant Lamkin, an independent, has filed for the seat.

If you're a conservative, you should give serious thought to running for school board, even if you have no school-aged children, even if you have children that are homeschooled or in private school, even if you've never had a child in the public schools. The public school system exists to serve all citizens by educating the children of the community, so every citizen has an interest in the curriculum being used, the way discipline is handled, the condition of the school buildings, and the credentials, skills, and philosophical presuppositions of the teachers, principals, and administrators. Property owners support the school system through ad valorem taxes, and so they have a reasonable interest in the proper and efficient expenditure of those funds. So do all citizens who pay state income and sales taxes, which provide funds to supplement local property taxes.

If you are, like me, a homeschool or private school parent, you will have experience and valuable insights with successful, classical alternatives to the faddish and failing teaching methods, priorities, and content currently in use in the public schools.

The pandemic period has been an apocalypse -- an unveiling -- with remote learning and work-from-home giving parents a clear picture of how little their children are being taught, and how corrosive to society and civilization are the ideas that are being taught in our public schools. Parents began to ask pointed questions at school board meetings across the country, most notably in Loudoun County, Virginia, where parents launched a recall effort against board members. The National School Boards Association wrote Democrat U. S. Attorney General Merrick Garland a letter comparing protesting parents to "domestic terrorists" and asking for the Justice Department to invoke the Patriot Act, and Garland echoed the NSBA's language in a memo directing the FBI to investigate protesting parents, triggering a nationwide outcry and leading 17 state school board associations to cancel their membership in the NSBA.

Here in Oklahoma, Reclaim Oklahoma Parental Empowerment and Parent Voice Oklahoma, with local chapters like Parent Voice Tulsa, are among the groups supporting parents and taxpayers as they seek to reassert civilian control over our taxpayer-funded schools. Although school board ballots don't list party affiliations, the Tulsa County Republican Party is ready to help school board candidates who are registered Republican and who seek to bring conservative principles to public education.

Tulsa Public Schools daily attendance is plummeting. In the 2015-2016 school year, Tulsa ADA was 36,415.56. In 2020-2021, it was 26735.36. Even before COVID, TPS was losing students: ADA was 33,043.90 in 2018-2019, a 10% drop in three years. By comparison, Jenks ADA was 10,787.50 in 2015-2016. 11,768.39 in 2018-2019, and 11495.86 in 2020-2021. (Average Daily Attendance and Average Daily Membership data by district can be downloaded at the State Department of Education website.)

It seems that a substantial number of families move from the Tulsa district to the suburbs when their children reach kindergarten, or, if they stay, many opt for homeschooling or private schools. Those numbers make a strong case for new leaders in the Tulsa district. And if the school board is going to be strictly representative, at least two of the seven members should have children in homeschool or private school, and a majority should be conservative.

Filing is simple: A notarized declaration of candidacy, and a signed copy of the statutory requirements for school board candidates. For this office there is no filing fee. You can view the Oklahoma school board filing packet online. And although school board elections are officially non-partisan, the local and state Republican Party organizations will provide assistance to registered Republicans who are candidates for non-partisan office. (I suspect the same is true of the Democrats.)

There was a time when it was generally agreed that schools existed to transmit knowledge and the values of the community to the rising generation, working alongside parents. At some point, as part of the Gramscian long march through the institutions, the public schools were infiltrated by Leftists who saw them as a venue for missionary work, converting children away from the values of their parents, away from the ideals that made America a prosperous and peaceful nation. The Left has influence over schools of education, textbook publishers, teachers' unions, and continuing education for teachers, administrators, and board members.

If you live in a suburban or small-town district, you might suppose your district is safe from Leftist influence. Think again. Through their college training, their teachers' union newsletter, continuing education courses, peer relationships, and curriculum, your districts' teachers and administrators work in an atmosphere of Leftist presuppositions about the world. It takes strength, conviction, and vigilance for a conservative educator to be conscious of that atmosphere and to resist its influence.

There are, it must be said, many good conservatives, many devout Christians serving in Oklahoma's public schools. But they need support in the form of school board members who will set policy and curriculum and ensure that the paid staff adhere to it. Conservative school board members should not give undue deference to "professionals" who have been trained to see education through a Leftist lens. The subject matter taught, the methods used, and the values undergirding it all should be firmly under the control of our elected representatives on the school board.

Education is necessarily ideological, because it rests on presuppositions about knowledge, truth, goodness, and beauty. The ideology of the public schools should reflect the ideology of the community.

If I were running, here are some of the planks that would be in my platform:

• Introduce the classical trivium as the philosophy and method of instruction in schools that are currently failing. That includes a heavy emphasis on memorizing facts in the elementary years, which gives children a sense of mastery and accomplishment and provides a solid foundation for subsequent learning.
• Instill pride in our city, state, and country. America has its flaws, but it is a beacon of liberty and opportunity that inspires hope in hundreds of millions of people around the world who wish they could live and work here. Our children should understand the aspects of our culture and history that have made our country prosperous and peaceful. The "black armband" view of history should have no place in our schools. We would uphold the state's ban, passed this year as HB 1775, on teaching the racist ideas that collectively come under the heading of critical race theory and praxis.
• Keep the Land Run re-enactments in our elementary schools. It's a fun and memorable way to introduce students to our state's unique history. There is an activist in Oklahoma City who managed to convince historically ignorant principals and school board members there that the '89 Land Run was an act of genocide. Oklahoma City, founded by the '89 Land Run, no longer has reenactments of that event, because of a zealot who pushed her slanderous revision of history on ignoramuses in charge of the schools.
• Return music to the elementary grades. An early introduction to classical music and learning to make music by singing have tremendous developmental and behavioral benefits.
• Review all federal grants and determine whether the cost of compliance and the loss of independence is worth the money.
• Young people who foolishly believe that swapping sexes will solve their deep unhappiness deserve pity and guidance. It is utter cruelty to humor their misplaced hope that "changing gender identity" will cure their misery. Leadership at each school should craft a way to accommodate these deluded young people with compassion and dignity, while protecting the dignity of everyone else, and while affirming the biologically undeniable reality of the two sexes.

Our public schools need principled, intelligent conservative leadership. Will you step forward to serve?

FROM THE ARCHIVES: My 2015 post on school board filing included links to two important articles about the leftist direction of your local public school board, particularly on sexual morality and gender identity.

Stella Morabito wrote, "Ask Not Who's Running For President, Ask Who's Running For School Board," citing the recent battle in Fairfax County, Virginia, over transgender policy as one among many reasons.

Walt Heyer, a man who underwent sex-change surgery and then, realizing that the change failed to give him the happiness he had hoped for, changed back, wrote about the Obama Administration using its perverted interpretation of Title IX to force public schools to trample their students in the transgender war against science and reason.

My 2019 post included several then-current examples of leftist ideology on sexuality and race running amok in public schools.