Ryan Walters the poster boy for governing being the first priority (and fish rotting from the head)
Ryan Walters the poster boy for governing being the first priority (and fish rotting from the head)
There’s a larger point to be made about Ryan Walters, in the midst of running a state department into the ground unlike any state department’s ever been run into the ground, but it’s hard to make it because keeping up with the idiocy illustrating that larger point is a full-time job itself.
Nonetheless, presuming Walters doesn’t do anything bat-#$%@ crazy on Thursday, two recent stories should get you up to speed pronto on Walters’ latest shenanigans and the response to same.
One led The Oklahoman’s front page Wednesday morning, under the bylines of M. Scott Carter and Murray Evans, primarily explaining how speaker of the house Charles McCall shot down the request of 17 Republicans formally asking for an investigation into Walters, a figure later updated to reflect 22 Republican lawmakers signed on to the request, putting their name on a letter originated by house member Mark McBride.
For the record, McCall offered up some pablum about the sanctity of elections, which are apparently more important than laws, oaths of office and education in the state, saying he would need 51 Republican house members’ signatures to consider granting an investigation, an odd number given 42 would reflect a majority of Republicans.
Perhaps the most valuable portion of the story was its second half, in which its authors recounted a great deal of Walters’ like-clockwork malfeasance making McBride’s letter necessary.
The other story popped Tuesday night on KOKH Fox 25’s website, and can be both viewed, straight from the newscast, or read.
Both ways, it’s devastating, put together by KOKH reporter Payton May.
In it, Adam Pugh, chairman of the state senate’s education committee, explained, in addition to hearing from school districts that don’t know where large portions of their funding are coming from if they’re coming at all, he’s receiving anonymous calls from department of education workers trying to do their jobs, yet who are unable to work around the office politics to do them.
“It seems to be getting worse,” Pugh said, “even to the point where I’m having state [education] department employees call me anonymously and ask for me to help them navigate the inner agency challenges that they’re having.”
At the end of May’s written story, she offered a laundry list of school districts that have told Fox 25 about the expected funding for which they’ve yet to receive or been given any guidance toward what may be coming.
Here is that section of the story.
Here are responses from the districts that responded to FOX25:
• Yukon Public Schools said they have not received allocations for any federal programs including Title I, any funds for maternity leave and are not aware of inhaler funding. They also do not have allocations for most state dollars, with Flexible Benefit Allowing being the largest one.
• Stillwater Public Schools said they have not received Title I, II, III, IV, V and IX funding. They believe they have around $60,000 in rollover from last year's school security funds, but their account is showing as zero. They also believe they requested around $70,000 of maternity leave funding but have not received any money.
• Piedmont Public Schools said they have not received anything yet.
• Tulsa Public Schools said they have not received any allocation numbers for Title I or school security funding and the information of numbers they can work with often comes earlier than this.
• Bixby Public Schools said they have no information on how to base their budget, they haven't received any inhaler information or maternity leave information.
• Mustang Public Schools has not received maternity leave funds and does not know about the inhaler fund program, but has not had an issue with Title funds.
• Minco Public Schools has a pretty good idea on how much they'll be receiving in Title I, but doesn't know for sure and said it's late for them not to know. They have received off-formula dollars and don't know about inhaler funding.
• Mid-Del Public Schools said they have received initial allocations of Title I, but have not gotten information on maternity leave or inhaler funding.
And here, for me, is the most important quote from Pugh.
"As we enter the next legislative year we'll have to very seriously consider as we're funding a new program or giving some sort of statutory responsibility to an agency to implement an education program, what's the right agency to do this if the state department [of education] is not willing to be our partner and do this successfully.”
So there you go.
You’re up to speed.
The bigger point?
It’s governing, man.
It’s all governing.
It’s why we [should] vote people into positions. It’s why those folks we vote for [should] lead departments or branches that [should] include career pros who know how to govern and are free to do it — bureaucrats, they’re called, often like it’s a bad thing, but we’d be lost without them — who know how to make the levers of government work, because government, if you haven’t put it together, is mostly a service job and that’s a bad combination when you’ve got a governor and state superintendent, who, in the case of Kevin Stitt sees it primarily as a political job, and in the case of Ryan Walters sees it entirely as a political job, and in the case of speaker McCall lacks all political courage, despite being a lame duck, thereby continuing to allow Walters to do Walters things, which are perpetually destructive.
It’s a good lesson.
When policy is passed, it doesn’t magically spring into action. It must be put into action. It must be, word of the day, administrated.
Or, jut to make it a little more clear … ADMINISTRATED!!
When the legislature closes the book on school funding, a great deal of that funding is presumed to come from federal grants that in many cases has been part of funding education in Oklahoma for years and years and years and years.
Yet, the federal government doesn’t ship those funds directly to 509 Oklahoma school districts. Instead, they’re left to the state to divvy up district to district, and, to this point, to the state department of education to execute and administer.
Indeed, it’s the biggest reason the state department of education exists in the first place, to allocate resources.
But if the leader of that department has chased away employees by the dozens, has no interest in fulfilling the root of the department’s mission and fills his calendar with self-aggrandizing media appearances rather than actually running a department that could’t be more important to Oklahoma families from Boise City to Idabel, this is what happens.
We saw it in the attorney general’s office prior to Gentner Drummond’s arrival, in which the office of former AG John O’Connor was afraid of its own shadow, took marching orders from the governor and ran the department politically rather than as a means of law enforcement.
We see the opposite in the labor department, where labor commissioner Leslie Osborn, but for the occasional op-ed, doesn’t make waves precisely because the department is acting as the department should.
The bottom line is you get who you vote for. And just as important as who’s running the departments, the branches, the boards and commissions are those entrusted with oversight of them, the legislature.
Walters is only running rampant because he’s been allowed to run rampant. He should be voted out, of course, but he should also be stopped before that happens.
All of one party and a portion of the other wants that to happen, but the rest of the other party doesn’t.
If only there were a solution.