The intrigue is fun.
The good guys — such that there are any when appointed by the governor, our great state’s second worst politician who birthed the first, Ryan Walters — appear to be winning as the state superintendent appears the odd man out of a state school board he purports to lead.
Yay, us.
But if you can check out of the art-of-war and comeuppance components of the saga — historically unnecessary until Walters made them necessary — it becomes just another measure of the lasting damage Walters has wrought and how far we’ve retreated from the terrific things that board and the state education department could have been doing.
First, the intrigue.
Last Thursday, though a regular meeting of the state board was to occur as demanded by law, it was canceled that very day.
Here’s the way Murray Evans, reporting for The Oklahoman, explained the the cancelation.
A spokeswoman for the education agency, which Walters leads, said the meeting was canceled “due to the transitioning staff and legal team.”
“There are several big items facing Oklahoma education and we want to make sure that the board meetings are conducted properly and efficiently,” said the spokeswoman, Madison Cercy.
When asked whether Walters had made the call to cancel the meeting, neither Cercy nor a second agency spokesperson answered the question.
Oh, by the way, Cercy, according to her LinkedIn profiles, graduated from high school in 2021 and from Florida State, where she continues to be a graduate student, in 2024.
A month ago, she revealed “I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined the Oklahoma Department of Education as Press Secretary under the leadership of State Superintendent Ryan Walters.
“I’m honored to serve in this role and help communicate the important work being done to advance American First values in our schools.”
Which is sad.
Not only is Walters killing education, he’s corrupting at least one recent Florida State grad, who likely couldn’t believe her luck to grab such a high profile job so quickly, not realizing it may tarnish her credibility forever going forward.
But I digress.
The meeting was canceled by Walters because who else could it be and, in the very same story, Evans nailed down why:
Board member Ryan Deatherage, of Kingfisher, said Wednesday board members have “asked for a reason” for the meeting cancellation, "but none has been given.” Another board member, Chris Van Denhende, of Tulsa, told The Oklahoman he believes a dispute over who might be the board’s next attorney was behind the decision to cancel the meeting.
“We notified SDE who (we) wanted to represent the board and that person was approved by the AG and I understand had a conversation with Supt. Walters,” Van Denhende said in a text message. “I was told Walters was resigned to the choice and (it) was going to be addressed at tomorrow's meeting.”
Boom goes the dynamite.
Also, guess what, the four board members, all recent appointees of the governor, of which Detherage and Van Denhende are two, HAVE SINCE SCHEDULED THEIR OWN BOARD MEETING, due Wednesday morning inside the state senate’s primary meeting room at the capitol, likely because the chances of Walters opening his own office to it are nil.
One wonders if he’ll show Wednesday himself.
In a more recent story, Evans offered his best shot at how the quartet, also including Becky Carson and Mike Tinney, got the new meeting scheduled:
Board member Chris Van Denhende said board members aligned with him had found a way to post the special meeting notice through the Secretary of State’s office, which is legally required for meetings of public bodies in Oklahoma. According to the Secretary of State's website, the state's education secretary, Nellie Tayloe Sanders, posted the meeting notice and agenda. Sanders was appointed to her role by Gov. Kevin Stitt.
Talk about a kick in the nuts.
The person who made the special meeting official has Walters’ old job.
The implications are staggering.
Not that Walters hasn’t spent much of his time in office ruling by edict rather than votes of the board he’s supposed to lead, but if Deatherage, Van Denhende, Carson and Tinney stick together, it will be them, not Walters, winning every vote of the seven-member board.
All those things Walters has and hopes to still implement by by decree could be struck down just as quickly by a board in which he’s become the minority.
We’ll see how far they wish to go, but if just to make a statement they chose to suspend Walters’ teaching license for having ultimate responsibility over what’s played on his television during board meetings, they could do that, too.
Not to mention, though they’d need help from the legislature, invalidating the state’s new social studies standards before the 2025-26 academic year. Or simply passing a measure proclaiming teaching to the previous standards will not be punished by the board.
A clear resetting of numerous boundaries Walters previously bulldozed could be on future agendas.
We’ll see.
Now that I think about it, the intrigue is not just fun, watching Walters lose power over a board once his rubber stamp, but very meaningful, too.
It should be celebrated.
And still, if not for Walters in the first place, if not for an utterly partisan, headline-seeking, con-man-worshipping bullshit artist who’s raced for influence, power and cash as our education ranking has slipped to 50th, we could have had Jena Nelson in the chair instead, perhaps battling extreme Republican forces, sure, but still running an enterprise looking out for students, supporting teachers, doing the hard and necessary work on behalf of public education.
We’d have had no exodus of the department’s professionals. No slandering of teachers, support staff, superintendents or fellow state board members.
The state department might have been a bulwark against perpetually smaller education budgets and, worse, pouring hundreds of millions into private education, much of it directly into wealthy parents’ pockets.
There would have been no PragerU contaminating our classrooms, no mandatory Bibles in them either, no national PR firms hired and no attempted teaching of the Tulsa Race Massacre without mentioning race.
No need for comeuppance.
Just a state agency doing its job, lifting people up.
Good government.
Instead, we got what we got.
Thankfully, finally, something’s being done about it.
Oklahoma legislators might as well hand out shovels, because the state just keeps digging itself into a hole!
My schadenfreude runneth over!!