Recent polls show a sense of belonging influences how children view their education, and across the country, some states — such as Illinois, and — have begun to mandate school climate surveys, measuring how kids feel at school.

A recent study has taken the conversation further with a focus on “mattering.”

“Mattering really has two dimensions, … both feeling valued and adding value,” said Anna Johnson, co-author of the report and professor at Georgetown University. “It certainly includes other things like belonging, purpose, meaning, but mattering goes deeper than those things. A student can belong to a school environment and they can report that they belong in their school, … but they can still not necessarily feel known or valued by the people there.”

In a survey of nearly 600 sixth graders in Tulsa, Okla., a majority of whom are students of color and from low-income families, Johnson’s study found correlations between a higher sense of mattering and better mental health and academic outcomes. ����Ӱ�� spoke with Johnson about her findings and how schools can better develop a sense of mattering in students. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

To kick off our conversation, where did the idea of mattering come from? What did you research?

Mattering is something that journalist Jennifer Wallace has been thinking about for a long time. Most of what she had was based on some early psychological research from the 1980s, and a lot of the literature has been based on adults in the workplace.

She and I connected probably a year ago around wanting to know whether there’s kind of empirical data to support this notion of mattering. [Wallace] talked a lot about mattering among youth, and so we started thinking about what mattering means for young people of color. We wanted to explore what is mattering, what predicts it and what does it predict in a community of pre-adolescents who are just forming their identities.

We used data that I’ve collected in the largest school district in Oklahoma, with a very diverse, low-income population of public school students. At the time of these interviews, they were in fifth and sixth grade. We looked at whether different kinds of cultural factors, family factors and demographic variables predicted a higher or lower feeling of purpose and a feeling that your life is worthwhile. We also explored whether the students who said they had high levels of mattering and purpose had better outcomes with academic performance and mental health.

Can you go deeper into the weeds of your findings? How did students respond in the survey and how did it differ among student groups?

We asked questions about whether students feel their life has a sense of purpose, feels worthwhile, has a larger reason or purpose, and if it’s going somewhere. 

A majority of the respondents reported that they had “some” to “a lot” of mattering.

Two-third of the sample was higher on mattering, feeling like they had a strong sense of worth and purpose. More than half of our sample of Black students reported “a lot” of mattering, which was the highest degree they could answer. For the Hispanic or Latino sample, about 60% reported high levels of mattering — answering “some” or “a lot.”

I think that’s really important because oftentimes we make assumptions about populations, particularly young people, that aren’t necessarily accurate like because there are high degrees of discrimination, maybe certain subgroups have given up. We found the opposite — that families who had conversations about preparing for bias, navigating their race and ethnic identity in the world and how they could prepare them for that, actually produced a higher sense of mattering, particularly in these low-income Black and Hispanic adolescents, which then went on to produce higher reports of mental health and in some cases slightly better test scores. 

We saw lower loneliness, greater reports of school liking, lower anxiety and depression and stronger academic performance. We also saw borderline better school attendance. Test scores were 1.4 points higher in reading and 1.2 points higher for math for students with a higher sense of mattering.

I’d love for you to talk about the different aspects of mattering and the different environments it can show up for students. 

I did an interview with a sixth grade public school teacher, and asked some of these questions about how they saw mattering show up in their classroom. The example that I got from the conversation with the teacher was there can be opportunities in the curriculum. 

For instance, let’s say social studies, where you’re studying countries and cultures, you can invite students to bring in something that is meaningful to them. Maybe it’s a recipe. Maybe it’s a sports jersey. Something that feels culturally meaningful. Inviting students to share those cultural assets, those features of their cultural background, brings them not just a sense of belonging, which is part of mattering, but also allows them to then share with the class why that’s important. 

You’re adding purpose to your classroom community. You’re teaching your peers about a new way to make rice. You’re teaching your peers about a new sports team. Maybe you’re even using some new words that your peers and teacher haven’t heard. That’s a way for the student to both give value and also receive value. 

Why are these kinds of conversations particularly important around transitional periods like sixth grade?

I’m a developmental psychologist and I think a lot about unique ages in which there are very specific things going on for kids in development and how the environment around them can support kids at these different stages. Just like parenting, what you do with a 1-year-old is very different than what you do with a 4-year-old.

I think schools need to recognize that kids at different ages need different kinds of support, particularly kids on the brink of adolescence are just really struggling with their identity, “Who am I? Who am I relative to my peers? Who am I in my school environment? Who am I in my family’s ecology?”

Identity creation and identity formation is really happening strongly in these pre-adolescent years, and bringing in that a sense of ‘I feel valued. I add value,’ adds a protective layer.

In our study, we found kids had less loneliness, less anxiety and less symptoms of depression when they reported higher levels of mattering. It really does seem to be like a protective thing. 

We know the transition to adolescence is exactly when negative social and emotional outcomes tend to spike. For a long time, we believed it to be connected to puberty, and certainly there’s evidence that is absolutely part of it, but another part of what’s happening is this search for identity, this search for meaning.

In education, we often hear families have to be partners. How can school leaders and families work better together to provide wraparound services and build a student’s sense of mattering?

What we might call “collective mattering” are like a family’s own cultural identities. 

The families in our study are low-income and majority non-white — so feeling a little bit socially excluded structurally.

I think having opportunities to invite families in to talk about their cultural origins, having students to identify with their unique cultural backgrounds, inviting families to have these conversations on their own [is beneficial]. Then families and schools can partner by bringing those conversations to the school setting. 

It could be at back to school night where there’s a table to share your cultural perspective. Maybe its parent ambassadors, who volunteer to talk about their culture and how they fit into the school and the ways that they matter in the school environment, and that’s set up by administrators, but done by parents for other parents. I think having people who are liaisons with the school administration, the building leaders, and the administration, but then who also are the outreach to other parents is a really nice way to bridge a divide between school professionals and parents.

Are there any challenges with building up mattering as youth face challenges with social isolation and technology dependence?

I actually feel very hopeful, and I think mattering is a really actionable, low lift, low hanging fruit. It’s an easy thing to do by embedding it in classrooms or family conversations, calling out people when they’re doing it and building it up. 

I think it actually is probably impervious to things like increased social media use and AI. Those are two of the biggest threats we feel that youth are facing right now in both their academic and their social world. 

I think mattering is this special space where you can communicate it in a simple conversation with a key caregiver in your life, whether it’s a teacher, a school leader or a parent. It can be communicated easily, and then it kind of once it’s planted, it will grow. It develops this sense of worth and purpose that you’re contributing to your community, then you get it back and it reinforces. 

Mattering is in a space where it’s a little bit protected from these digital distractions and interference sources that we’re so worried about in other ways. 

Two of the things I’ve taken from our conversation is how important it is for a young person to feel seen and acknowledged. Are there any other key ingredients in building mattering?

Mattering can come from conversations that prompt some degree of introspection and identity, like parents saying ‘I see grandma in you when you do that, and you know how much I admire grandma.’

It’s prompts that I think help students and young people introspect a little bit and pull out from themselves. It’s not just telling kids ‘We love you. You’re good. You belong.’ It’s instead ‘Let me help you connect with something inside of yourself so that you can both give and get.’

I think connecting both to family origins, but also out to the community [builds mattering]. 

Disclosure: Author Jennifer Wallace has been a grantee of the Wallace Family Foundation, which also provides funding to ����Ӱ��.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Amid the largest single-year decline in decades for Oklahoma public school enrollment, the state’s largest district announced the potential closure of 17 schools as it grapples with a long-term trend of decreases.

Tulsa Public Schools last week became the latest district to reveal a closure plan that leaders say is necessary to ensure financial stability. and other have taken similar measures as a result of decreasing enrollment.

But, these losses aren’t unique to big-city schools. An Oklahoma Voice analysis of found 65% of districts in the state saw their student count decline last school year, impacting rural, urban and suburban schools. 

Public school enrollment fell by 10,640 students statewide in the 2025-26 academic year, the largest one-year drop in decades and the third straight year of decreases in Oklahoma. The next annual count will happen Oct. 1.

The three-year decline began in 2023-24, notably the first year of Oklahoma’s parental choice tax credit program, which now supports private school tuition for about .

The number of children attending public schools nationwide also is while and the country’s birth rate has steadily .

Still, Oklahoma’s 10,000-student “cliff” last year was “surprising to all of us,” state Superintendent Lindel Fields said. He attributed the decrease to changing birth rates and private school enrollment.

“Is it a bad thing? I don’t know,” Fields said. “It was just so abrupt. And like Tulsa Public Schools, if you know the enrollment’s dropping, you just have to make the necessary adjustments. So, I don’t know that it’s a bad thing, but in general you don’t want to see things decline.”

In Tulsa, a decade-long drop is expected to continue. The City of Tulsa Planning Office projects a population decline of 2.5% in children age 17 and younger over the next five years within the district’s boundaries, school administrators said when presenting their consolidation plan.

Tulsa, with an enrollment count of 31,700, already has lost more than 5,700 students since the 2017-18 school year as leaders consider rolling out closures for 2027-28. All 17 schools suggested for closure received a D or F grade on the most recent , and each is using less than 65% of their facility capacity.

In a state where public school funding is distributed per pupil, the district “cannot continue to spread our resources across a model that does not consistently produce the experience we want for our students,” Tulsa Superintendent Ebony Johnson told her school board, which is expected to vote on the plan on Oct. 19. Student access to exceptional programs is too inconsistent from school to school, which she said is “not acceptable.”

Closing underutilized buildings, consolidating students and teachers into fewer schools, cutting job positions and seeking out other cost-saving opportunities is expected to save more than $12 million a year in the district’s budget, Johnson said. 

While pledging not to raise class sizes above allowed limits, district leaders said the plan would free up funds to guarantee art, music and physical education programs at every Tulsa elementary school, and it would increase the number of students assigned to a high-quality teacher.

Tulsa school board member Stacey Woolley said closing schools might seem unfair to some, but “it’s also not right to serve students in a way that’s not as effective as we could be if we did things differently.”&�Բ�����;

“My vantage point on this is that the only way that we can justify doing what we’re doing is by saying in the process we’re going to make sure that we provide better for all of these kids,” she said.

Similar changes and challenges have been at play in Oklahoma City.

Total public school enrollment declined by more than 5% from 2014 to 2024 within Oklahoma City Public Schools’ boundaries, despite growth in the city’s overall population and in local public charter school enrollment, , an organization focused on improving public school quality.

A declining birth rate is a factor, but families with children also are choosing to live outside of the urban core in search of schools they believe will be better, said Brent Bushey, the organization’s CEO.

He said the Oklahoma City district has taken positive steps toward improvement, particularly by setting academic goals and discussing student outcomes at every school board meeting. 

School consolidations carried out in 2019, which closed 15 buildings and reconfigured 17 others, also left the district in a stronger place, Bushey said.

Although closing schools can be “heartbreaking,” he said shedding underused buildings and adding school programs are a better use of funds.

“I think if we’re serious about Oklahoma City being the city that it can be — the city that hosts Olympics, the city that has a world championship basketball team — that it should be attractive to families,” Bushey said. “And so, to me, it’s a call to action that we can build schools and we can make changes that are attractive to families.”

Rural schools experienced some of the steepest enrollment declines last year, when considering the percentage of the total student population lost, state records show.

District leaders say they’ve lost families to online schools, homeschooling or to larger cities, where more job opportunities and housing options exist, said Robert Trammell, executive director of the Organization of Rural Oklahoma Schools, a collective of rural districts.

Even in a shrinking climate, rural districts are wary of consolidation and annexation, fearing their schools — and therefore their community identity — will be lost, Trammell said.

Many districts simply have to tighten their belts, he said, by cutting job positions and closely managing rising expenses.

“They’ve done more with less for so long it just becomes a way of life and business,” Trammell said. “They’re doing everything they can to survive in this uncertain time.”

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.

Tulsa, Oklahoma

With her long, wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, the young mom sat alone outside courtroom 6 at the Tulsa County Family Center for Juvenile Justic, checking her phone and anxiously waiting for a court official to call her name for an eviction hearing.

“I’ve never been through this,” Courtney said in early May. Her two kids, ages 5 and 6, were staying with her mother out of town while she tried to catch up on rent or find another place to live. It was the best for the children, she said, but “they want to be with me.”

Between losing one job and starting another, she feared she’d still come up short of the  $1,004 she owed.

She didn’t have much time.

In Oklahoma, the eviction process moves faster than the ability of most renters to respond. State law gives tenants five days to pay their debt or move out. A tenant has to appear in court just three days after a summons arrives. 

Tulsa has one of the worst eviction rates in the country — the as of a decade ago. Since then, the rate has grown from 8% to . Last school year, landlords filed evictions affecting more than 600 children in the state’s largest district, the Tulsa Public Schools. 

Her kids’ schools, Courtney said, didn’t ask why she withdrew them with a month left in the school year.

That’s hardly surprising, experts say.

“[Parents are] looking for, ‘How do I find a place where my kids are going to sleep?’ ” said Eric Hallett, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma. “They’re not thinking ‘What can a lawyer do for me?’ or even ‘What can Tulsa Public Schools do for me?’ ”

But in a state with one of the in the nation, that’s something the district is trying to change. Since 2020, leaders have worked with ImpactTulsa, a nonprofit, to prevent disruption in kids’ education and quickly direct parents under threat of eviction to resources like legal aid and rental assistance. When a student’s address appears in an eviction filing, the parent receives an email from the district offering help.

The alert is a promising example of schools being “first responders” in a housing emergency, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization focused on students experiencing homelessness. Tulsa’s system has caught the attention of organizations doing similar work from Dallas to Dayton, Ohio. But the resources available to families fall far short of the demand, and the threat of eviction itself can be so traumatic that parents are often too overwhelmed to respond.

“There is a culture of defeat,” said Ana Barros, the director of collaboration and partnerships for ImpactTulsa. If the eviction seems like a “done deal, why would I reach out for help?” 

Roughly nationally are caught up in evictions each year, with households headed by single Black mothers . Housing instability lands the heaviest on families with young from a Stanford University survey shows that nearly 30% of parents with children under 6 were worried about being evicted in the next month and 8% had already received an eviction notice. A federal program provides homeless students with educational and transportation services. But families who are evicted don’t immediately qualify for the same support, and the damage to students’ learning is clear.

“The gaps in children’s education are huge,” said Emily Turner, an attorney who is part of ImpactTulsa’s eviction prevention team. Missing days and weeks of school because of an eviction raises concerns about kids’ safety, she said, and the more they miss, the harder it is to come back. “They feel behind or they feel scared or they feel like this isn’t my space anymore.”

In the Oklahoma City schools, 65% of students whose families received were chronically absent, almost as many as those who were actually evicted, according to , part of Mental Health Association Oklahoma. On state assessments, students with an eviction notice or judgment had 25% lower proficiency rates in math compared to their peers. In reading, the academic impact was more than twice as much — 56% lower. 

“We have slipped to the bottom in education rankings,” said state Rep. Amanda Clinton, a Democrat who this year to give tenants facing eviction access to free mediation before a judge heard their case. The bill passed the House, but died in the Senate. She agrees with Republicans that the state should focus on turning around its dismal performance in . “But we cannot be serious about improving student outcomes unless we get serious about keeping kids in the classroom to start with.”

At Kerr Elementary, on the east side of Tulsa, Principal Jennifer Thomas sees the academic impact of evictions every morning. Students with unstable housing are frequently absent, and when they do come to school, they often arrive at least an hour late and hungry. 

“We have students who have been at four different schools within a month,” she said. As with Courtney’s kids, Thomas said it’s not unusual for grandparents to provide backup, but that adds to the learning disruption. “Grandma doesn’t know where the school is, or Grandma’s not used to having to get the kids up at 7:30.”&�Բ�����;

Lawmakers took up the issue last year and worked to pass a bipartisan bill that would have given tenants a few more days to show up in court — a rare development in such a deep red state. But Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, . With a background in , including rental homes in Florida, he argued that the extension would be too “burdensome” for landlords. This year, a died in committee. 

“This is a very, very landlord-friendly state,” said Delia Kimbrel, the director of research and policy at ImpactTulsa. “The scales are really stacked up against the family.”

‘Human realities’

landlords are the most likely to evict, . Those include Vesta Realty, which owned Barcelona Apartments, the Spanish-style complex at a busy intersection in southeast Tulsa that filed the case against Courtney.

Hannah Remick, a former administrative assistant for the company, who herself from one of its 40 complexes, estimates that Vesta filed about 25 evictions a week. Whether tenants have kids doesn’t make landlords any less likely to force them out, she said.

“They would just say ‘units.’ They wouldn’t think about who is living in that unit,” she said. The process, she said, is “very separated from the human realities of what’s going on there.”

When ImpactTulsa identified management companies evicting families with school-aged kids, some of the affected properties had and code violations that had gone for months. In 2024, one mom of a kindergartner told reporters she was to the media about a lack of hot water and cockroaches in her apartment. 

Poor living conditions for renters are not unique to Tulsa. A showed that 13% of renters moved in the past two years because their home needed repairs. Five percent said they were either evicted or trying to avoid eviction.

Remick described as “one of the worst,” with workers instructed to layer coats of Kilz primer over walls with mold. Courtney told ����Ӱ�� she had six work orders pending, including one for a leaky water heater, when she was evicted. Because an eviction can prevent a tenant from getting another lease and affect future employment, she asked ����Ӱ�� not to use her last name. 

The company’s financial condition was likely one reason for the backlog of repairs. Vesta’s owner, Marc Kulick, is facing . In February, Fannie Mae, the mortgage lender, against the company, and in July, as a result of litigation, a , YSA Investments, took ownership of multiple Vesta properties, including Barcelona. Vesta was also among the Tulsa landlords that fell months behind on .

“We all got letters on our doors saying they were going to charge for water,” Courtney said, even though that cost is supposed to be part of the rent. 

According to a city official, the company caught up with water bills, and Vesta issued a statement saying that because of a pending “ownership dispute,” all questions about conditions, staffing or maintenance at Barcelona should go to the current operator. 

YSA spokesman Parker Detweiler said his company is “doing everything humanly possible within the law to get living conditions where they should be.”

Sherri Daley, executive director of the Tulsa Apartment Association, said while it’s important to address the “underlying causes of housing instability,” landlords have to worry about their bottom line.

“Property owners and managers typically focus on the lease obligations, payment history, and compliance with the rental agreement rather than whether a household includes school-aged children,” she said. One of the arguments against extending the eviction timeline was that it would hurt small, independent landlords. “Even one missed payment can create a ripple effect, leading to deferred maintenance and other financial pressures for the owner.”

Tenants falling behind on rent can sometimes avoid an eviction if they communicate with their landlords, said Amy Coldren, who launched Shelterwell in Oklahoma City in 2023.  As part of its eviction prevention work, the organization provides nonprofits and schools with a free, tenant education program called . It covers topics like how to understand a lease and manage a budget.

Coldren said one of the first women she met after starting Shelterwell was facing eviction because her children, who had previously been in foster care, were considered unauthorized occupants.

“I’m a former foster parent, so I know the work that she did to get her children back,” she said. “A simple solution would have been for her to have a conversation with her landlord and put her kids on the lease.”

‘A sensitive manner’

ImpactTulsa’s work began with a disturbing realization.

Property owners  are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods as schools with the highest . That’s what the organization found when it began scraping the eviction court docket six years ago for addresses that match those of district students.

Between 2020 and 2023, Kimbrel identified eviction filings affecting roughly 4,400 Tulsa students. The disruption wasn’t brief. A year after a district family’s eviction showed up on their radar, nearly three-fourths of those students were still chronically absent. 

“That just slapped everybody in the face,” she said. 

But even the most sophisticated of district data systems can’t stop families from being displaced. The district’s homeless education staff last school year emailed all 621 families identified through the alert system, said BreAnna Shine, director of student engagement. Less than 100 ultimately received support through the district. Most didn’t respond. They might have landed somewhere else, ignored the message or resolved the issue with their landlord.

The other half of the system is a resource hub in one of the district’s most heavily impacted clusters of schools, East Central. The schools on that side of town draw from apartments like Eastgate, which filed eviction notices during that 2020-23 period affecting 47 students at Cooper Elementary and 26 students at East Central High School, Kimbrel’s analysis showed.

The hub at East Central Middle is two offices near the front entrance where Angeles Gonzalez, a family “navigator” with Tulsa Responds, and Turner, an attorney for the YWCA, meet privately with parents to triage their immediate needs — items like rental assistance, a free hotspot or food stamps. But district staff initially wrestled with whether they even wanted to know which families had been evicted. 

“It’s a sensitive matter,” said Stephanie Andrews, executive director of student and family support services. It’s uncomfortable to contact a parent who might not want anyone to know they’ve hit such a low point. “It’s not been without some bumps.”&�Բ�����;

The district can guide a family to a nonprofit offering short-term rental assistance or temporary housing, but that often means they end up on a waiting list for services. Restore Hope, a nonprofit, spends about $100,000 a month in rental assistance, but those funds only cover about 30% of the eviction cases, said Josh Geppelt, executive director. Plus, to qualify, applicants have to show they have “means to maintain the rent after we do the assist.”

Living in limbo during that application process, while also bouncing from one living situation to the next, is draining, said Aspen Allen, a mother of three.

“You’re waiting for them to call you, and if nobody answers, they move to the next person,” she said. 

She leaned on the district last fall for clothes and backpacks for her kids in between leaving a rental home with plumbing problems, spending time in a run by a local church and moving into Parkview Terrace on the west side of town, a public housing development known for . It’s the same complex where she’s currently waiting for a subsidized apartment. 

“I haven’t been able to have my own spot for my kids to be happy, go to school, go on vacation and just have a good life,” said Allen, who works as a DoorDasher and was waiting to hear back about a part-time FedEx position. “I’m trying to keep them in school, not missing any days, which is very difficult at times.”

‘They grab what they can’

Inspired by Tulsa’s example, nonprofit leaders in other cities nonetheless face the same obstacles in trying to serve families with scarce resources. 

“There is no system,” said Aqua Porter, executive director of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative in New York. “There are just things that people have to navigate through, and they are not connected.”

Most of those other nonprofits have something Oklahoma does not — a longer timeline between eviction notices and court appearances.  In New York, for example, nonprofits have roughly 30 days from an eviction filing to help families find legal aid, point them toward sources of financial support and encourage them to attend their first court appearance.

Because Oklahoma’s system is designed to get renters with delinquent payments out as soon as possible, it’s often too late to prevent eviction. Those with nowhere to go may stay in the apartment after they’re evicted until they’re forced out by the sheriff’s department, said Melissa Vowell, a homeless education program specialist for the Tulsa Public Schools.

They usually have about an hour to collect belongings. 

“If it’s a sheriff’s eviction, they grab what they can in the time a sheriff will allow,” she said.

Their next stop might be Vowell’s office, which connects to a storeroom packed with school uniforms, socks and underwear, and personal hygiene products.

She also maintains a detailed spreadsheet filled with organizations offering food, transportation and housing. One nonprofit on the list is , tucked into a serene, wooded area west of downtown. Out of a small white cottage, Executive Director Tina Massey runs an eviction diversion program that provides one-time payments of up to $1,000 for those who have fallen behind on rent. Massey estimates that the program reached close to 90 district families last school year.  For those who lose their housing, a shelter on the same property offers fully furnished apartments for up to three months.

Brooklyn Cloud found Family Promise on Facebook last year while living in a Mazda SUV with two daughters, one in preschool and another in second grade. After an eviction from Harmony Glen, a 74-unit complex owned by a , they spent six months sleeping under the lights in Walmart and QuikTrip parking lots. 

“I didn’t even know a 7-year-old could get depressed,” Cloud said. “Her grades started to slip, lack of appetite. She wanted to sleep all the time.”

While staying in one of the apartments, Cloud and her husband paid off the eviction and saved for a new home. Their oldest now “has her own space.”&�Բ�����;

“She’s more bubbly and her personality is back,” she said. “She’s not so down-in-the-dumps and snappy.”

‘Legal first aid’

Most parents in a crisis like Cloud’s don’t even show up to court. 

“They can’t get time off work or child care,” said Hallett, the legal aid attorney.

That was clear the day Courtney’s case appeared on the docket. Of the 89 eviction filings before Judge Tammy Bruce, who hears about 13,000 eviction cases a year, less than half of the tenants showed up. 

If they do appear, they’re unlikely to have . In nearly every case, Judge Bruce told them they could either meet with their landlord’s representative or see if they qualified for legal aid. Court documents show Courtney represented herself, while a Vesta employee appeared for the company.

Courtney was evicted two weeks later. Attempts to reach her by phone and text since then were unsuccessful.

Last year, Hallett began asking tenants if they have children in the Tulsa schools. It’s his contribution to the district’s effort to identify more families. 

On the district side, about 40 teachers at East Central MIddle learned how to offer “legal first aid,” like helping parents construct timelines of the events that led up to eviction. Missed or partial payments, maintenance issues reported, and messages to landlords and property managers are important to document because when apartments change ownership, new managers don’t always honor previous attempts to pay. 

Barros, with ImpactTulsa, expected some resistance from staff to the training. She’s a former social studies teacher at East Central Middle.

“Teachers are like ‘Whoa, that’s not my job. You’re adding something else to my plate,’ ” she said. But schools play a unique role in eviction prevention, she said. “Kids are legally required to be here. So let’s take advantage of that.”

Now he’s likely to be the next state superintendent after defeating teacher and conservative pastor James Taylor in the Republican runoff Tuesday. 

“I thought to myself, ‘If we lose, at least it edifies the work that you’re doing. You’ll have a much more grounded perspective,’ ” he told ����Ӱ�� in an interview.

He’ll face the Democratic candidate Jennettie Marshall, a pastor and former Tulsa Public Schools board member, in November. But in such a conservative state, Franklin is expected to be the frontrunner. 

With strong support from pro-public school networks, Franklin’s primary win represents a clear departure from the state’s last elected state superintendent, conservative firebrand Ryan Walters. The former history teacher pushed Bibles in classrooms, threatened to revoke teachers’ licenses for teaching topics some view as divisive and filled his calendar with appearances on conservative talk shows. Critics said he neglected the state’s education system. 

Franklin, a moderate Republican, has more than 40 years in education as a teacher, administrator and associate superintendent at Tulsa Tech, an independent district offering career training to high school students and adults. As a former member of the state’s now-defunct virtual charter school board, he voted against allowing the state to open the nation’s first religious charter school, separating himself from Walters and other officials who battled unsuccessfully all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to establish the school. With the state now trying to improve its poor educational rankings, where it is nearly last in the nation, one political expert said Franklin seemed “like the safer choice.”

“Ryan Walters is pretty fresh in a lot of folks’ memories across the state, including Republicans,” said Deven Carlson, a public policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma. As an inductee into the state’s Educator Hall of Fame, Franklin, he said “is kind of a known quantity in the education space.”

Franklin stepped into the race after Rob Miller, former superintendent of the Bixby Public Schools and an outspoken critic of Walters, withdrew . Teacher groups quickly shifted their support to Franklin, who along with Taylor, edged out five other candidates in the June primary, including state Sen. Adam Pugh.

Walters, who had been expected to run for governor, left his job a year early and now runs an organization that encourages teachers to opt out of their unions. Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Lindel Fields, a retired career and technical education administrator, to complete the term and has since appointed him as education secretary. 

Fields some of Walters’ policies, like requiring classrooms to have Bibles and expecting applicants for teaching positions from blue states to take an , a conservative media company. The multiple choice test covered civics and history topics, but also included ideological questions about parental rights and gender issues.

Education advocates see Franklin as one who can further mend the relationship between school districts and the department.

“Franklin is hands down the most qualified person that we’ve ever seen run for this position in the history of the state,” said Erika Wright, founder of and now a community organizer with the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

Taylor, meanwhile, appealed to many of the same groups that helped Walters win in 2022, like the . He for more Christianity in the classroom and teaching students “the word of God” through historical documents. 

He proposed to under countywide school boards as a way to save money, but Franklin warned that such an approach would take away local control.

The state’s Republican party ahead of the runoff. It has historically remained neutral until the nominees are named. Some in the party criticized the move as an attempt to influence voters ahead of the runoff.

Taylor said his job as a history and government teacher in the Little Axe Public Schools, outside Oklahoma City, would give him the insight he needed to lead the state education department. But some called his success as an educator into question after records showed that he taught in an Advanced Placement U.S. Government class took the exam. He only taught the class once in 2024.

After his defeat Tuesday night, Taylor posted on , “I exit this race with zero regrets.”

‘Pockets of excellence’

Franklin faced his own controversy during the campaign, a 2014 incident in which he accidentally with disabilities at a camp he co-founded in 1986. The issue came to light when the child’s mother warned not to vote for Franklin and accused him of having “explosive anger issues.”

In a statement, Franklin, a former special education teacher, explained that he was trying to get control of a child who had become aggressive. When he grabbed the boy, he left scratches behind his ears. 

“I’ve worked with thousands of individuals with special needs,” he told ����Ӱ��. “I’ve had to intervene a lot with young people. Sometimes it just doesn’t go according to script.”

The camp’s director confirmed that he was trying to de-escalate a situation and said the camp’s leaders took appropriate action.

Whoever wins in November will oversee implementation of a that requires struggling readers in the early grades to be held back or receive extra help. Third graders not proficient in reading would be required to repeat the grade unless they qualify for an exemption. This year’s state test scores show that about 24% of students reached the proficiency level, a slight drop from last year.

“Oklahomans expect both candidates in the general election for state superintendent to make the case for how they will lead the successful implementation of our state’s landmark reading reforms,” said Dave Bond, vice president for advocacy at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank. “Those reforms passed our state legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support earlier this year, and our next state superintendent has a mandate to approach them with a no-excuses focus on student success.”

Franklin or Marshall will also inherit a system in which districts often rely on emergency certified teachers to staff classrooms. 

Franklin said it’s important to look for “pockets of excellence” in the state where schools are outperforming in reading outcomes even though they serve a higher-poverty population. He suggested establishing regional support centers to make expertise more readily available to districts.

But “we just don’t have enough trained educators in front of young people,” he said. Turnover rates are higher among teachers with emergency credentials. “We’re just kind of spinning our wheels, trying to train people and get them up to speed.”

The state, he said, should consider tax breaks for teachers, like it has for . 

Marshall, the Democratic candidate, has also made teacher recruitment and retention a part of her platform, and has said that serving on the school board in Tulsa, the state’s largest district, to lead the state education agency. She said she would focus on being a smart steward of state funds and that a lack of resources “is one of the main reasons that we’re struggling.”&�Բ�����;

Her diverse career includes 17 years with the Department of Corrections as a parole officer and three years as a child welfare investigator.

Like Franklin, Marshall has pledged to keep policies focused on core academics and not politically divisive topics that put children and teachers in the middle of polarizing debates.

But the future state chief may have to work with a governor who, during , said the state has “541 school districts that are run by liberal, left-leaning radical socialists.”

Businessman and former state senator narrowly defeated Attorney General Gentner Drummond in the GOP runoff Tuesday. Endorsed by President Donald Trump, he’s called for partisan school board elections as a way to tip districts toward more conservative policies. He’ll face Democrat Cyndi Munson, minority leader in the state House, in the general election.

Governors appoint the state school board, which the future superintendent will have to work with to implement any new policies. Carlson, with the University of Oklahoma, said Mazzei doesn’t have much of a “political track record.”

“We really don’t know what we’re getting,” he said.

Mazzei has promised to appoint a state literacy director, but Marshall sees a potential conflict with that arrangement. 

“That person is going to usurp the authority of the department and there’s going to be a whole new battle,” she said. “That’s why education is hurting; there are too many irrelevant distractions.”&�Բ�����;

But Wright, with Appleseed, said Franklin is capable of navigating political differences as they arise. 

“If there’s anyone that can bridge that divide,” she said, “it’s Dr. Franklin.”

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 ����Ӱ��. “My biggest dream is for one of our scholars to eventually sit in my seat.”

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.”

The student population has not only , but the district saw an unprecedented influx of English learners. 

“It’s a huge testament to the work being done in Tulsa,” he said at a state board meeting. “I think that you’re seeing parents that have confidence in what’s being done there.”

But now he wants parents in Tulsa and other districts throughout the state to share their citizenship status when they enroll their children — a proposal that not only violates but is likely to keep some parents from sending their children to school. 

Districts say they don’t know how many undocumented students they have, but In Tulsa, the population of English learners grew from 10,168 in 2023 to 11,149 last year. 

President-elect Donald Trump’s are celebrating Walters’ effort to end “sanctuary schools,” but district leaders say the plan is traumatizing vulnerable families.

“It’s hurtful, and it’s going to create fear,” said Nick Migliorino, superintendent of the Norman Public Schools, south of Oklahoma City. “Not educating kids because of the status of their parents helps nobody.”&�Բ�����;

The Oklahoma State Department of Education says the is needed to determine how many tutors and teachers districts need for English learners. But it comes as many national Republicans are eager to challenge a longstanding Supreme Court ruling, , which  guarantees undocumented students an education in the U.S. 

“It’s reasonable to presume that this is an attack on Plyler,” said Julie Sugarman, associate director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration at the Migration Policy Institute. “If the Supreme Court was to say, ‘Well, we changed our mind — you actually can ask about immigration status,’ that would really put all of Plyler into question.”&�Բ�����;

The public has until Jan. 17 to submit comments on the rule. The state Board of Education will hold a public hearing the same day. 

The plan follows an election in which President-elect Donald Trump referred to the U.S. as a for undocumented immigrants. He has called for on Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at schools on the day he takes office and said he would — even if their children were born in the U.S.

Walters foreshadowed the new rule in July when he asked districts to account for the “cost and burden” of illegal immigration. And on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and ICE Deputy Director Peter Flores for $474 million, saying their “failed border policies” have placed “severe financial and operational strain” on Oklahoma’s schools. He a bill for the same figure in October. 

The state, which has an under 16, will need an additional 1,065 teachers for English learners over the next five years, he wrote in his letter to Harris. He offered no specifics on where he got that figure. 

“We cannot effectively budget or allocate critical resources when we have no accounting of the cost that illegal immigration places on our schools,” the letter said.

shows that the percentage of English learners in the state, about 10%, hasn’t increased since the 2021-22 school year. But teachers in Tulsa have definitely noticed the influx of newcomers. 

“Some of them just show up on Monday and they don’t speak any English,” said one teacher in the district who did not want to be named in order to protect students. She often communicates with students through bilingual staff members. “I just hear the saddest stories every day. The kids are really sweet, but they’re afraid.”  

She worries about what might happen if recent immigrants are unable to attend school. 

“We provide coats,” she said. “We provide groceries on the weekends.”

‘Will not comply’

Norman, where about 8% of students are English learners, was among the many districts that didn’t submit any data to the state last summer. Regardless of their needs, Migliorino said, “educators invest in the students who show up in our district.”

Leaders of other districts, including the , and the , pushed back on Walters’ demands, saying they haven’t  asked about families’ immigration status and don’t intend to start. 

Bixby Superintendent told ����Ӱ�� the proposed rule was “clearly unconstitutional.”&�Բ�����;

“Bixby will not comply,” said Miller, an outspoken critic of Walters who is suing him for .

He compared Walters’ plan to the state’s legal battle over a first-in-the-nation religious charter school. While the Oklahoma Supreme Court said the Catholic charter violates the law, the school and the state’s charter board have appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court has not yet decided whether to hear the case. 

“I believe they are trying to create a case for the Trump Supreme Court,” he said.

In , a Texas school district sought to charge tuition to students not “legally admitted” to the country. The U.S. Department of Education has long interpreted the court’s opinion to mean that states “cannot do anything to chill the atmosphere or to make people feel afraid to send their kids to school,” Sugarman said. 

Oklahoma isn’t the first state to attempt to curb illegal immigration’s impact on schools. In 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187, which denied undocumented immigrants access to public education and other services. The measure directed teachers to report students they suspected were undocumented to authorities. But advocates and federal courts found it .

Since then, , Arizona, Maryland and Texas have sought to ask parents about their citizenship, all for the stated purpose of determining how much it costs to serve unauthorized students. Only Alabama’s law was enacted, but a federal appeals court in 2012, after only a year. 

The issue could prove appealing for the Supreme Court, which took a sharp right turn during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term. That ideological shift resulted in the end of and the reversal of that gave federal agencies significant leeway to interpret the law. 

“We have a different court now,” said Sugarman of the Migration Policy Institute. “The court’s willingness to overturn legal precedent means that lots of things are on the table that we wouldn’t previously [have] thought were in play.”

Attorney general agreement

The education department has until March to submit the rule to the legislature, where both the House and Senate must approve the measure for it to pass. If they don’t take action, the package automatically goes to the governor to sign. 

Walters, who frequently clashes with Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond on issues like religion in public schools and education funding, has found common cause with his frequent opponent on the issue of seeking parents’ citizenship status. 

“The Attorney General has said he believes Oklahoma has the right to collect citizenship data in connection with government services,” said spokesman Phil Bacharach.

In a , Drummond, who announced his Monday, spoke about efforts to cooperate with the incoming Trump administration to deport undocumented immigrants who are committing crimes in the state. But he didn’t address education.

As “protected areas or sensitive locations,” schools have been off limits for ICE agents at least . Ignacia Rodriguez Kmec, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, said she wasn’t aware of any past ICE raids at U.S. schools. But that enrollment of Hispanic students in school drops, especially in the elementary grades, when ICE and local law enforcement partner to enforce immigration laws. Following a raid at a Tennessee meatpacking plant in 2019, in the local district were absent. 

For now, some districts have tried to reassure parents who might be hesitant to enroll their children or send them to school. Oklahoma City Superintendent Jamie Polk issued a statement saying the district’s schools “are a safe and welcoming place for all students, and our mission remains unchanged.”

But the state’s recommended rule is especially controversial in Tulsa, where conservative Board Member E’Lena Ashley told a Republican group that many English learners are undocumented and could pose a safety risk to other students.

Superintendent Ebony Johnson has tried to put families at ease, saying that rulemaking is a long, drawn-out process.

“There is a place for you and your children here,” Johnson said in a . “We want students here at school every day.”&�Բ�����; 

Oklahoma colleges and universities are working to bridge gaps in the state’s health care workforce, particularly in rural areas, by incentivizing students to pursue careers in various health care professions.

Some students pursuing degrees in health professions will be eligible for tuition payments through a new partnership between Southwestern Oklahoma State University, or SWOSU, and Comanche County Memorial Hospital, while partnerships at other schools, like the University of Oklahoma’s College of Nursing, are also taking aim at meeting workforce needs.

Critical shortages can be found in nearly all of Oklahoma’s health care professions and those shortages are intensified in rural areas, according to the

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SWOSU students who are pursuing degrees in specified health care and administrative programs can receive tuition payments if they work at the Comanche County Memorial Hospital after graduation. Students will also receive hands-on experience at the hospital while in school.

“We will serve as one of SWOSU’s clinical sites for various health care related professions,” said Brent Smith, CEO of the hospital, in a statement. “We appreciate this collaborative effort and are eager to begin this program that will help meet the growing health care needs of our community.”

Joel Kendall, provost and vice president for academic affairs at SWOSU, said the partnership was modeled after a previous one between SWOSU and for nursing students.

“It’s just really important that we provide that workforce, for nursing and other allied health programs, especially in rural health,” he said. “In Oklahoma that’s critically needed right now, so partnerships like this are trying to address that.”

Kendall said around 1,500 SWOSU students could be eligible to participate in this new partnership. This includes specialties in nursing, radiologic technology, physical therapy assistant, surgical technology and health care administration among others.

He said the dollar amount for the tuition payments will be decided by Comanche County Memorial Hospital and may be dependent on how many graduates accept jobs at the hospital.

Melissa Craft, interim dean of University of Oklahoma’s College of Nursing, said OU is also working to meet workforce needs by expanding the number of students accepted into the school’s nursing program.

In a 2022 OU news release, the Oklahoma Nurses Association that the state had 712 nurses per 100,000 residents, which ranked Oklahoma 46th in the nation in terms of nurses per capita.

“Our qualifications for application and what would make someone an eligible student have always kept the same. What we changed was our ability to accept,” Craft said. “The goal is still that we accept all qualified applicants.”

Craft said “health care is needed everywhere,” not just in Oklahoma’s metro areas.

She said OU works with five regional sites in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Lawton, Duncan and Norman to provide nursing students with hands-on learning experiences, like the SWOSU students.

But beyond the learning experience, Craft said partnering with regional hospitals helps the students find and build a community with those they work with and the patients they serve.

“Nursing is about relationships … we know that if we can partner with a facility and the nursing students, while they’re in school, can feel like they are a part of that community the chance that students will go to work there is really very, very high,” Craft said.

She said that OU graduates more nursing students than “anyone else” and while it’s an honor, “we graduate them for the workforce of Oklahoma.”

Craft said that in 2020, OU’s College of Nursing graduated 313 nurses. In 2024, that number has grown to 456 nurses.

She said that OU offers financial assistance to qualifying nursing students through various grants. The offers loan forgiveness to nurses who go on to educate the next generation of nurses after graduation. The Oklahoma Workforce Innovations and Nursing offers financial assistance to dozens of advanced practice nursing students per 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. Follow Oklahoma Voice on and .

OKLAHOMA CITY — Tulsa Public Schools now faces the possibility of closing schools as the state adds new demands for academic improvement.

The Oklahoma State Board of Education created another set of goals for Tulsa to achieve by the end of the school year, and state Superintendent Ryan Walters said “all options are on the table” for penalties if the district falls short.

Walters and the board urged the school district to consider consolidating resources and funding into fewer school buildings, which means some sites could close.

“We think they need to be looking at school closures,” Walters said. “I’m not telling them which schools they need to close, but I am telling them when you look at these numbers of that many F schools, you look at the resources that you’re making available, you look at (the fact that) some of them have been on this (F) list for years, it absolutely has to be part of the decision-making process.”

Tulsa interim Superintendent Ebony Johnson said the district is exploring the possibility, as well as significant changes to staff.

“There will be district-office and school-level changes in personnel that will take place this school year,” Johnson told the state board. “We are also having conversations regarding ensuring that we provide the best quality learning experience for our students. And in that conversation, that could lend itself to some school closures.”

Such a move would not be unprecedented. Oklahoma City Public Schools closed 15 schools and reconfigured 17 others in 2019.

Rather than spreading students and resources across more schools with lower enrollment, the plan concentrated services, like counselors and academic programs, into fewer schools while cutting costs of building maintenance.

The for four months, as state officials continue to scrutinize the district’s poor academic output. Former Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist resigned in September to help stave off such a drastic measure from the state.

To avoid further penalties, Tulsa now must have 50% of its students score at least at a basic level on state reading tests this spring or see a 5% increase in academic growth in reading.

Academic growth measures students’ improvement over the previous year in a subject area. Scoring at a basic level on state tests indicates partial mastery of a subject.

Last school year, 57% of Tulsa district students scored below basic in reading, according to recently released state report cards.

Walters said he hopes to require all Oklahoma public schools to achieve at least 50% of students scoring at or above basic in reading and math. Adding this to every school’s yearly accreditation evaluation will require a 60-day period of public comment, state board approval and a review by the state Legislature — a process Walters said will begin in the coming weeks.

The state Board of Education also required Tulsa to improve its 18 schools that have been designated for “more rigorous intervention,” a label given to low-performing schools. Twelve of the 18 schools must show enough improvement that they aren’t marked for “more rigorous intervention” next year.

The district also must train all of its teachers in the science of reading.

Additionally, the board demanded the district’s finance team meet with staff from the Oklahoma State Department of Education to review district expenditures. The department’s general counsel, Bryan Cleveland, said Tulsa staff delayed the finance meeting multiple times.

However, email records show it was state agency staff who suggested postponing the meeting to after Thanksgiving because of the large volume of documents the state had asked the school district to compile, according to records the Tulsa district provided to Oklahoma Voice.

Cleveland questioned the thousands of dollars Tulsa spent on items listed as “miscellaneous” expenses. He said the district should explain these expenditures in greater detail.

“I’m not even saying these expenditures are necessarily bad,” Cleveland said. “The problem is you don’t know if they’re good or bad if you keep having different ways of using the word ‘miscellaneous.’”

Tulsa Board of Education President Stacey Woolley said she worries the new academic expectations won’t be attainable.

State officials complained the district’s academic plan wasn’t ambitious enough, but Woolley said Tulsa’s goals were developed with school data experts.

She said the possibility of closing schools will be a “very challenging conversation” for the Tulsa school board, but she didn’t dismiss the idea.

“What I’m certain of is our board wants to do what is best for students and that Dr. Johnson wants what is best for students,” Woolley said. “If she can tell us that she believes that her actions will help improve student outcomes, then that is critical for our students and we have as a board said that we will support her in doing what it takes to achieve outcomes.”

Any site closures would be a local decision made with input from families, the community and the Tulsa school board, district spokesperson Luke Chitwood said in a statement.

“Ultimately, the Tulsa Public Schools Board of Education considers any recommendation made and decides if any closures, consolidations, or changes in school format will be approved and implemented,” he said in a statement after the meeting.

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. Follow Oklahoma Voice on and .

A history teacher and 2016 finalist for Oklahoma teacher of the year, he encouraged vigorous debates on pivotal moments like Roe v. Wade and, closer to home, the forced relocation of Native Americans known as the “Trail of Tears.”

During homecoming week, students gently mocked him on “Dress Like Ryan Walters Days,” sporting his signature slim-fitting suits, skinny ties and color combinations that didn’t always blend well. 

Life-size cut-outs of Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan in his classroom spoke to his conservative values. But if he was a firebrand, none could tell. 

“He made us feel validated. He never told us that we were wrong,” said Starla Edge, who had Walters for homeroom, history club and classes each year she was in school. Having come out as queer in eighth grade, she served as president of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance junior year. But she never felt shunned by her favorite teacher. “I got excited when he went into politics, because I thought, ‘This is my voice.’ ” 

Now Edge barely recognizes the man who was elected Oklahoma’s state superintendent last November. In selfie videos from his car, Walters denounces “woke ideology” and frequently of pushing a radical agenda based on atheism, racial justice and gender identity. In a series of provocative statements, he’s called the state’s teachers union a and dismissed the separation of church and state as a  

The relentless focus helped push the small-town teacher who never ran a school or a district into the national spotlight. In July, he spoke along with other conservative luminaries at a summit in Philadelphia held by the right-wing parent group,  a platform for several GOP presidential hopefuls.

To Edge and many of Walters’s former students and colleagues, the transformation is dizzying. 

“This is not the man that I knew for a large chunk of my life,” she said. 

To supporters in blood-red Oklahoma, however, it’s not Walters who’s changed, but the education system that’s gone off the rails.

“We want our teachers to teach … reading, writing and arithmetic,” said Wade Burleson, a retired Baptist minister who ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year and met Walters on the campaign trail. Burleson also wants school prayer and to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom — key tenets of a Walters formed in June. He called the state chief “one of those rare individuals who will do exactly what he said he was going to do.”&�Բ�����;

Walters declined interview requests from ����Ӱ��. But as the 38-year old builds his national profile, he’s coming under increasing scrutiny at home. Following his recent threats to take over the and a social media post that sparked bomb threats in a neighboring district, Democrats stepped up calls for his They cite investigations into his handling of COVID relief funds and a “pattern of inflammatory language.”

Even some Republicans think his rhetoric has gone too far. 

“This guy cares more about getting on than he does about doing his job,” said Republican state Rep. Mark McBride, who leads a House education subcommittee. “Someone has whispered in his ear that he could be governor or … secretary of education.”

Religious upbringing

Walters may not have set out to become a culture warrior, but his values and politics, like those of many in McAlester, reflect a deep religious upbringing.

Nestled between an Army munitions plant and a state prison, the former coal mining center some 91 miles south of Tulsa is a town of and more than .

His father was a and his mother worked at . Both remain active in the , where he is a minister and she is elementary education director. Like them, Walters attended Harding University, a conservative Christian college in Searcy, Arkansas. His brother and sister also attended.

In honoring him as an “outstanding young alumnus,” Walters, who is married and has four children under age 10, said he chose the school for its “Christian mission.”

Harding students take mandatory Bible classes and attend chapel daily. Its explicitly forbids same-sex relationships and maintains that “gender identity is given by God and revealed in one’s birth sex.”

It’s an atmosphere that contrasted sharply with the McAlester Walters returned to in 2011.

His eight-year tenure at the high school coincided with greater visibility by the LGBTQ community. In 2015, students at the high school founded a Gay-Straight Alliance. Based on from the Obama administration, the district also set aside a “family” restroom for transgender students to use. 

Brenda Calahan, a retired art teacher who served as the GSA’s first adviser, said many in the community didn’t welcome the developments.

“It was rough for those kids,” she said. 

Members of the wrestling team one of the club’s founding members, setting up a point system for everything from slashing his tires to killing him, said Debra McDaniel, his mother. He left soccer practice one day to find screws stuck in the tires of his car.

The principal at the time told Calahan to remove students’ LGBTQ-themed artwork from a display case near the front of the school. Some students petitioned the school board to disband the club, which still operates today.

Edge remembers overhearing a “few grumpy teachers” complain about the gender-neutral bathroom. Not Walters. Other staff members, she added, made crude references to the GSA, mocking it as “gay shits allowed.” But Walters, she said, “would have shut that down.”

‘There was no black or white’

That view is widely held among former students at McAlester, where Walters taught three Advanced Placement courses — U.S. history, world history and government — and also coached boys basketball and girls tennis.

Former students interviewed by ����Ӱ�� admired his approachability and sense of fun. When Edge struggled to grasp the finer points of Islam during his AP World History class, for example, he offered to lend her his own copy of the Quran. For another class, he took students to McAlester City Hall, where they took over for the day, playing the roles of mayor and department heads. In a mock council meeting, they voted in favor of allowing residents to own a potbelly pig as a pet.

“When we got done, I was pushing that we needed to do it again,” said Mayor John Browne, a Democrat who is now roundly critical of Walters. “When I found out that he was going to be running [for superintendent], I thought, ‘He’ll be good.’ ” 

During classroom debates — with desks pushed to either side of class — Walters critiqued each side’s argument and expected students to back up their claims with evidence.

Shane Hood, another former student, remembers a classroom discussion of the Indian Removal Act, which President Andrew Jackson signed in 1830. Students split over whether the law was racially motivated and unjust or actually benefited Native Amerians. While giving students their say, Hood said, Walters held firmly that white expansionism caused the suffering and death of tribes as they traveled 1,200 miles to what would later become Oklahoma.

“He was much more nuanced,” said Hood, who, like Edge, took all three of Walters’s AP courses. He now attends Oklahoma State University in Stillwater and credits Walters with inspiring him to study political science. “In his classroom, there was no black and white. It was all shades of gray. Now it’s, ‘I’m right and you’re wrong.’”

That reticence in the classroom stood out in a town where 74% of voters chose former President Donald Trump in 2016. Some teachers, Hood remembers, wore MAGA hats in the classroom and let student slurs like “libtard” go unchallenged. But not Walters. Some students even questioned if he was a “closeted Democrat,” Edge said.

Tennis and politics

If his students were ignorant of Walters’s private views, that was intentional, according to those who know him. “No one knew if he was a Democrat or a Republican, and that’s why they loved him so much,” said Chad Waller, a friend and former head coach of the girls tennis team.

After tournaments, Waller remembers the young educator grading papers past midnight. Walters, he said, gets a “bad rap.”

“The man eats, sleeps and breathes education,” he said.

But it was tennis that paved the way for his friend’s foray into politics.

In 2018, Kevin Stitt, a mortgage company owner, became the GOP nominee for governor. At a tennis tournament that year, Walters met Stitt, who was cheering on his .

“We kind of struck up a friendship,” in the Harding alumni video. After his victory, Stitt invited him to be part of an education working group that advised the incoming administration. 

That year, Walters got busy shoring up his conservative bona fides. With no visible prior record of writing for national publications, he gave full-throated voice to views he’d long kept out of the classroom. In for The Federalist, an influential conservative journal known for its vetting of federal judicial nominees, he warned of “runaway district courts” that would “undermine the will of the people.” Foreshadowing some of his future positions, he criticized the establishing a right to gay marriage, saying it demonstrates why justices shouldn’t have final say on constitutional matters.

A year later, he landed a job running Oklahoma Achieves, the education arm of the State Chamber, a commerce organization that, like Stitt, supports school choice. more than doubled his teacher’s salary. As superintendent, he makes over $124,000.

His rise did not go unnoticed. 

“This random, unknown, fresh-faced teacher from McAlester all of a sudden popped into the State Chamber spotlight,” said Erika Wright, founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, a nonprofit that opposes private school choice. “That is the moment where I first questioned ‘Who is this guy, and what’s the bigger plan?’ ”

‘Isn’t that a woke idea?’

At the time, those with more left-leaning views said they could still find common ground with Walters.

In 2019, Rep. Jacob Rosecrants of Norman, a Democrat and former Oklahoma City Schools teacher, began drafting to preserve a “play-based” teaching approach in early-childhood classrooms. He and Walters agreed on the value of recess and hands-on learning.

“He didn’t spout the far-right talking points he does now,” Rosecrants said. Progress on the bill stalled in 2020, and by the time they spoke of it again the following year, Stitt had appointed Walters as his education secretary. 

This time, Walters seemed skeptical. “I could hear his tone change, and he began to ask questions … like, ‘Isn’t that a woke idea?’ or ‘How is this not indoctrination?’ ” Rosecrants said. “Why? Because the words ‘social and emotional learning’ were in my bill.”&�Բ�����;

What happened? The pandemic, for one. The long closures that followed lockdowns in March 2020 mobilized parents, particularly those on the right. School board meetings became battlegrounds over decisions to keep schools closed and kids tied to their laptops. The timing coincided with a right-wing backlash over many aspects of classroom life. Many parents began demanding restrictions on everything from library books on gender and sexual issues to the teaching of racial discrimination in U.S. history. 

Social-emotional learning — a decades-old practice associated with teaching kids resilience, empathy and self-control — got caught up in the fight. Some conservatives criticized its  and called it “l” and “too intrusive.”

Oklahoma was not immune. In 2021, it became one of the first states in the country to pass a law prohibiting teachers from offering lessons that suggest students should feel guilt or anguish because of their race. The following year, Stitt signed the “Save Women’s Sports Act,” which forbids transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports.

With his young daughter Violet smiling and giving a thumbs up beside him, Walters made one of his earliest to celebrate the law’s passage. “We are not going to fall prey to the far left,” he said.

Making the culture war personal

His November election as state superintendent allowed him to step outside Stitt’s shadow. Many hoped taking control of the department of education would mark a turn to more substantive matters, particularly in a state that saw in student performance nationally following the pandemic.

But if anything, Walters doubled down on his rhetoric.

He a teacher’s license after she protested the state’s divisive concepts law by giving students a link to banned books from the Brooklyn Public Library. She later resigned and is for defamation. More recently, he pressured the Western Heights district to who performs as a drag queen on nights and weekends and launched an into its hiring practices. 

While other GOP education chiefs occasionally wade into the culture wars, Walters spends most of his time there. He’s established a “granular-level focus” on specific districts, and that makes his sharp rhetoric seem personal, said Deven Carlson, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma.

In with conservative talk show host Steve Deace, Walters acknowledged taking the host’s advice to make his campaign “a referendum on groomers.” Typically used to describe sexual predators, the term is often employed by conservatives to describe anyone who supports LGBTQ inclusion — potentially minimizing real threats of child sexual abuse, experts say, while demonizing non-heterosexuals.

In May, he portraying teachers unions as a threat to children’s safety because of their liberal views on LGBTQ issues. 

For Walters, the fight is existential. “The forces that you all are fighting … want to destroy our society,” he said at the recent Moms for Liberty event in Philadelphia. “They want to destroy your family, and they want to destroy America as we know it.”

‘Let’s not tie it to skin color’

The rhetoric has many in McAlester wondering how well they actually knew the man who taught and coached their children for so many years.

Stacy Gorley Williams said her son, Vinny, who played small forward for McAlester High’s basketball team, thought Walters “walked on water.”

Walters’s wife Katie, a therapist, worked for Williams at a nonprofit providing mental health services, and the two often sat together during games. Williams, who chairs the county’s Democratic party and was a charter member of a local LGBTQ advocacy group, said if Walters had given her the impression that he was biased, she wouldn’t have let Vinny play for him.

“I have zero tolerance for people who don’t accept diversity,” she said. 

The questions only compound when it comes to Walters’s handling of his area of expertise: U.S. history.

In July, during a Republican meeting at a library in Norman, he appeared to suggest that one of the most shameful events in the state’s history, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, was not racially motivated. A white mob destroyed the thriving Black business district of Greenwood. The violence led to the deaths of an estimated 300 Black people, an episode that was suppressed in Oklahoma for decades. 

An audience member suggested the state’s divisive concepts law put teachers in a tough spot: How can they discuss the Tulsa massacre without running afoul of its tricky requirement to shield students from distress?

As a teacher, Walters served that in 2018 confirmed the episode’s place in state , calling it one of many examples of “rising racial tensions” in the 20th century. At the Norman meeting, he insisted the massacre should be taught, but through the lens of individual responsibility. 

“Let’s not tie it to skin color,” he said.

He later called the violence “racist” and “evil,” and said the media twisted his words.

Remembering how skillfully Walters handled the lesson on the Trail of Tears, not flinching from its racial dimensions, Hood, his former student, often wonders if Walters believes what he says.

“It’s too much of a transformation in my opinion to be natural,” he said.

Ryan Walters is not who you think he is.

Branding and performing

For his part, Walters rejects the notion that he’s changed. Responding to a debate question , he said, “The reality is my students didn’t know what my political background was.”

“I didn’t tell them what to think,” he said of his time in the classroom. “I challenged them to think.”

Regardless of his actual views, many of them — like his support for funding a religious charter school with public funds — go down well in a state where two-thirds of Republican voters favor candidates who talk about God and Christianity, according to a poll last fall. 

Some see his tactics, like the car videos and steady stream of audacious statements, as elements of brand building and securing a base — perhaps in anticipation of a  gubernatorial run when Stitt leaves office in 2026.

“He’s very ambitious, and I think that’s what took over,” said Rosecrants, the Democratic representative. “It leads me to believe that all of this is for a bigger purpose.”

Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, compared Walters to another high-profile state leader with national aspirations — Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Last year, Newsom paid for in seven red states promoting California as a sanctuary for those seeking an abortion.

“For an elected chief in blue and red states, unfortunately, the incentives are there to become a performer,” Hess said. “Walters is responding to the incentives, no matter how unhealthy they may be.”

But with his star on the rise, Walters faces at home. The state ethics commission fined him for failing to report campaign contributions, including one from the conservative 1776 Project PAC. And two audits criticized of a federally funded program to help poor families while he was secretary of education. Over $650,000 in federal relief funds went toward TVs, arcade games and furniture instead of curriculum and tutoring. The Republican state auditor’s office and the FBI are also .

In a podcast with 1776 Project PAC founder Ryan Girdusky,  the attacks against him “absurd.” Dan Isett, department spokesman, said the Democrats’ calls for an “represent a direct threat to our democracy.”

Supporters say outrage from the left proves he’s been effective. “This is a man of principle. Has he made mistakes? Possibly,” said Burleson, the retired minister. “But when you are attacked by people unjustly, there’s a tendency to come out strong.”&�Բ�����;

Confrontation in Tulsa

This summer, he took his most aggressive stance yet against Oklahoma’s largest school system, the 33,000-student Tulsa district, and its former leader Deborah Gist.

He threatened a state takeover after Tulsa officials reprimanded a Moms for Liberty-backed board member who He later accused Gist of failure to disclose how much the district was spending on , which she’d described as a ”closely-held core value.”

To prevent the hostile action, she Aug. 22. The state board accredited the district, but “with deficiencies,” noting low academic performance and poor financial oversight. fell even more than . But students in the state’s second-largest district, Oklahoma City, lost just as much ground in math, and rank lower than Tulsa overall. 

The intensity of the fight worries observers in other districts, who see in Tulsa a harbinger of where the growing toxicity in education might lead nationally. “We’re now seeing partisan politics become retaliatory politics,” said Susan Enfield, superintendent of the Washoe County schools in Reno, Nevada. “This is ego-driven, reckless leadership.”

As the state board deliberated the Tulsa district’s future, events at the nearby Union Public Schools demonstrated how incendiary Oklahoma’s education politics had become. The district received bomb threats six days in a row after Walters from a far-right account featuring a local elementary school librarian. The threats continued well into September.

The librarian’s original TikTok video seemed to poke fun at Walters, saying her “radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind.”&�Բ�����;

Walters, who once got a kick out of reading his about his tight pants and patchy beard, apparently didn’t see the humor.

“Woke ideology is real and I am here to stop it,” he wrote.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation has provided financial support to Every Kids Counts Oklahoma and its predecessor Oklahoma Achieves, and currently provides support to ����Ӱ��. Ryan Walters led both state advocacy groups.

Shaheen fled Iraq in 1998 during Saddam Hussein’s regime, made a harrowing escape to Jordan and eventually settled in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Shaheen is now a substitute teacher for the Lincoln public schools, but not without the financial burden of enrolling in courses to meet English language requirements and taking student loans because her Iraqi degree wasn’t recognized.

“It was almost impossible for me to start from the beginning, which is very difficult for someone learning a new language,” Shaheen told ����Ӱ��.

A new program launched by for internationally trained immigrants and refugees who want to become teachers in the U.S. aims to ease the challenges Shaheen faced. 

According to the , more than one in three educators, or 34 percent, are unemployed or not using their degree.

Yet, thousands of teacher vacancies across the country persist — with more than , according to Kansas State University’s College of Education.

“Even as we experience the Great Resignation, which heavily impacted the education sector, there’s still individuals who want to be part of this workforce,” said Mikaela Santos, senior program manager of World Education Services.

“The cultural perspectives and new ideas immigrants and refugees bring to the table becomes wasted talent because of the many regulatory and systemic barriers in the American education system,” she added. 

To combat this problem, three organizations were awarded a $100,000 grant in July 2023 to create pathways for foreign trained teachers to become educators in the U.S.

In the next year, the in Lincoln, Nebraska; the in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and in Chicago, Illinois will place more than 150 teachers trained in their home countries at schools in their communities.

Here is a snapshot of each organization’s effort to help internationally trained teachers and address racial disparities in the classroom.

Asian Community and Cultural Center

Nearly 50% of Nebraska’s school districts had unfilled teacher positions during the 2022-23 school year — with 66% saying there were either unqualified or no applicants, according to the .

Lee Kreimer, the CareerLadder director at the Asian Community and Cultural Center, said the organization is looking to place at least 35 foreign trained teachers into Nebraska’s Lincoln public schools and South Sioux City public schools.

The need for diverse teachers is especially great in rural areas like South Sioux City that have had a high influx of Latino families immigrating partly because of the that has historically relied on foreign-born workers, Kreimer said.

The reported a growing 47.8% Latino population in South Sioux City with more than 63.6% Latino students .

“We see this as a great opportunity to tackle multiple challenges at one time and it’s truly a win-win way to help everybody,” Kreimer told ����Ӱ��.

The organization recently set up programs at schools in both districts for immigrants and refugees to be mentored as they finish up their U.S. teaching licenses.

“Investing in schools by providing teachers that look like their students helps them succeed,” Kreimer said. “And from a racial equity standpoint, children seeing teachers that look like them and have experiences like them helps with retention, staying out of trouble and getting better grades.”

Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity

In Oklahoma, there were nearly 180,000 unfilled teacher positions in 2022 — more than twice the average a decade ago, according to the .

The Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity estimates nearly 650 internationally trained teachers in Tulsa have education degrees but don’t work in the field.

Chief resilience officer Krystal Reyes said the city wants to hire at least 65 teachers trained in their home countries — largely from Latino, Afghan and Ukrainian backgrounds to reflect the families immigrating to Tulsa.

“Because we have a diverse student body, we need our teachers to reflect that,” Reyes told ����Ӱ��. “So we know that our immigrant community can help us meet that language and cultural need.”

Programs include expanding job training with ESL courses and creating free courses for those seeking alternative certification.

“We need to do more as a government to make sure that there’s full participation, representation and economic opportunities from all our communities,” Reyes said. “There may be a money barrier or an English barrier, but they’re still trained educators that could be filling a great need in our schools.”

Richard J. Daley College

In Illinois, 73% of districts report teacher shortages — with 30% saying positions remain unfilled or filled with someone less qualified, according to the .

Janine Janosky, president of Richard J. Daley College, said the school aims to connect at least 50 foreign trained teachers to schools across Chicago.

“We’re seeing many immigrants and refugees coming with professional experiences already from their home country,” Janosky told ����Ӱ��, adding how more than 10% have teaching licenses.

Trish Aumann, vice president of academic and student affairs at the college, said the need to hire diverse teachers is especially great because of the influx of immigrant families — particularly Ukrainian refugees.

“We need multicultural and multilingual individuals in positions in our schools,” Aumann told ����Ӱ��. “So it’s that bigger picture of supporting K-12 schools that will in turn help immigrants and refugees with their economic mobility.”

Janosky said the college is creating a pilot program for internationally trained teachers to fill vacancies in Chicago’s schools.

“Within the middle part of the United States, there’s very few of us doing this work,” Janosky said. “That gives us a huge responsibility, but also a huge opportunity, to make a big difference for Chicago, Illinois, and the entire country.”

“I had them when they were infants,” said Barraza, who has worked for the Long Beach-based Educare since 2017. Compared to the other state-funded program she used to work for, Educare fosters more trusting relationships with parents. “They become like a family.”

A modern facility tucked into a residential neighborhood, the program is part of a network of 25 Educare centers nationwide. In a field with high turnover, Educare is known for keeping children with the same teacher until age 3. Other features — small class sizes, a full-day schedule and strong family support — further set the model apart from most early-childhood centers serving young children from poor families.

Those elements pay off once children enter school, according to who spent their early years in the program entered kindergarten on pace academically with students from more affluent families, the study found.

“It wasn’t their elementary school experience that was different; their early-childhood experience was different,” said Diane Horm, director of the Early Childhood Education Institute at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa and part of a nationwide network of researchers evaluating Educare. “There was no evidence of fade out and no evidence of catch up.”

‘A strong model’

Even the best preschool programs have faced a common criticism: Gains made by participants frequently during the early grades. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly used such results to argue for budget cuts to

The Educare results, Horm said, suggest that the achievement gap can be avoided if children start preschool before age 2.

The size of the Tulsa study sample wasn’t large — just 75 children — but other researchers say it’s an important contribution to the early education field. 

“You have a strong model [over] multiple years and strong persistent outcomes,” Steve Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said about the Tulsa study. 

A previous , focused on the first Educare center in Chicago, showed that former students continued to perform well in elementary school and that parents stayed engaged in their children’s education. But the Tulsa study is considered more rigorous because Horm compared the students’ achievement to those who didn’t attend Educare.

The study’s results, experts say, support the argument for more federal spending on high-quality programs for infants and toddlers, especially since now provide some funding for pre-K.

“If the states are going to put money into pre-K, maybe a better use of federal resources is for birth to 3,” said Linda Smith, director of the Early Childhood Development Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank. 

Educare, which Horm called an “enhanced” version of Head Start and Early Head Start, could even serve as a blueprint for the future of those programs, which are long overdue for , Smith said.

Head Start began in the 1960s’ as part of the War on Poverty. Early Head Start followed in 1995 to serve infants and toddlers. Housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, they are two separate programs, but Smith would like to see that change.

“It’s time to make this a birth-to-school-entry program and let communities determine their needs,” she said.

‘The kids are ready’

Educare prefers to locate its centers as close to an elementary school as possible to help ease the transition into state-funded pre-K or kindergarten. The Long Beach center even shares its property with an elementary school.

“The Tulsa results confirmed the work that we do,” said Maria Harris, who served as an Educare principal until becoming Head Start director for the Long Beach Unified School District. “What we’re hearing from our receiving elementaries is, ‘The kids are ready.’ ”

Most Educare classes have three teachers — a lead with a bachelor’s degree and two assistants — providing children more individual attention and opportunities to talk about their routines throughout the day.

Janet Rosales, whose 10-year-old son attended Educare in Tulsa, thinks the consistent structure he experienced during his earliest years is why he’s doing well in school now. He’s in the gifted program at Eliot Elementary, is quick and accurate with math problems and loves to draw. 

When her youngest, now 10 months, got a slot at the same center, with the same teacher who taught her son, Rosales said she “cried with happiness.”&�Բ�����;

“It’s just hard to find a place that is so engaging with your children,” Rosales said. 

Much of what the world knows about the Tulsa massacre, one of the most consequential events of state-sanctioned racial violence and displacement in America’s history, started with the work of one woman. Although Mary E. Jones Parrish’s name has made a resurgence in recent history, the impact of her book about the disaster still isn’t fully recognized — a situation one of her descendants is looking to change.

From May 31 to June 1, 1921, Tulsa’s thriving Greenwood district — dubbed “Black Wall Street” by Booker T. Washington — was decimated. One of the most affluent all-Black communities in the country at the time, Greenwood had an estimated 10,000 residents, many seeking refuge from the racial violence in other parts of the United States. Its 35 blocks boasted 121 Black-owned businesses and the nation’s largest Black-owned hotel.

Over less than 24 hours, hundreds of people were killed, more than 800 were injured, and over 1,200 homes and Black-owned businesses were burned and bombed to their foundations, leaving the community with damage amounting to over $27 million in 2021 dollars.

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The events leading to the massacre began on May 30, 1921, when unfounded allegations that a 19-year-old Black boy, Dick Rowland, had assaulted a 17-year-old White girl, Sarah Page. The allegations energized White residents of Tulsa as rumors of and plans for his execution spread.

Many argue that the impetus of the massacre was not the allegations, but the way the Tulsa Tribune, a White newspaper, sensationalized the events, weaponizing the afternoon’s headline as more a call to action: “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.”

A mob of White Tulsans, estimated to be in the thousands — at least 500 of whom were deputized by the police chief and given weapons — took to the streets of Greenwood.

In the days after the massacre, White media remained complicit in hiding its true nature, naming it a riot and obscuring details. The full number of people killed and true nature of the economic impact remain unknown, but what historians have been able to uncover is due to the work of Parrish, a journalist and typewriting instructor whose 1923 book, “Events of the Tulsa Disaster,” was the first book to be published accounting the massacre.

“Parrish’s work became a vital primary source for other people’s writings,” wrote in his recently released book, “Built From the Fire.” “Yet her life remained unknown, even as the facts that she had gathered — such as several firsthand accounts of airplanes being used to surveil or attack Greenwood — became foundational to the nation’s understanding of the massacre. She was, quite literally, relegated to the footnotes of history.”

Parrish’s great-granddaughter Anneliese Bruner is following in her footsteps as a writer and editor but didn’t learn of her connection to Parrish — or the events of Tulsa — until she was in her 30s.

A routine visit to her father, William Bruner Jr., for the holidays was all Bruner had set out for. She arrived at her dad’s expecting the usually jovial and lighthearted man she’d grown up with but found him uncharacteristically serious as he waved her into his room and closed the door behind them.

He produced an envelope and out of it pulled a small, red, cloth-wrapped rectangular book that wore its age well and had the words, “Events of the Tulsa Disaster by Mrs. Mary E. Jones Parrish” embossed on the front in gold lettering.

“This is a book your (great) grandmother wrote,” Bruner’s father said, revealing to her for the first time the depth of her ancestry, who her grandmother, Florence Mary was, and why the events of the Tulsa massacre were such an integral piece to her bloodline’s story. “I’m giving this to you. I want you to see what you can do with it.”

When “Events of the Tulsa Disaster” was first published in 1923, it was done so privately by Parrish out of an abundance of caution. Today, few copies of the original work exist.

In 2021, Bruner answered her father’s call, promising to spread Parrish’s work, and worked with the Trinity University Press to secure wide release of the book, titling the new edition, “”

“I want people to know this work,” Bruner told The 19th. “As well as the person who did this work. I want people to see her courage. Her motherliness. Her agency and certainty in herself. Her spirit. … I want them to see her humanity.”

Just two paragraphs into the book, Parrish writes, “How recent seems the beginnings of this little book!” For Bruner, aside from its stature, there was nothing small about the book. She pored through it in one sitting with what felt like a sense of urgency, learning of the horrors of those two days and those that followed, uniting with her great-grandmother all the while.

After the massacre, against the wishes and caution of her friends and loved ones, Parrish stayed in Tulsa to accept a job from the Inter-Racial Commission to report on the events. The commission, created not even a month after the massacre, was an amalgam of what Parrish describes as “fair-minded white” and “no less representative” Black people with the common goal of creating a “greater and better Tulsa.”

Parrish used this opportunity to take a microscope to the events, contextualizing race relations in Tulsa as she interviewed scores of eyewitnesses, cementing the accounts of survivors, salvaging photographs of the ruins and lives lost and even creating a list that would become the foundation of what is known of the economic loss.

Parrish begins her book with her own account. Her knowledge of the massacre began when her 9-year-old daughter, Florence, said, “Mother, I see men with guns.” After waiting for the sounds of the violence to diminish, Parrish wrote that she “breathed a prayer to heavenly father for strength” and escaped with Florence.

The book then details survivors’ accounts, including James T.A. West, a local high school teacher, who recalls being rounded up with other men.

“They (the Home Guard) told me to line up in the street. … They refused to let one of the men put on any kind of shoes. After lining up some 30 or 40 of us men, they ran us through the streets to Convention Hall forcing us to keep our hands in the air all the while. While we were running some of the ruffians would shoot at our heels. They actually drove a car into the bunch and knocked down two or three men.”

“When we reached Convention Hall we were searched again. There people were herded in like cattle. The sick and wounded were dumped out in front of the building and remained without attention for hours,” West said.

Parrish intersperses her own recollections as well. “I can never erase the sights of my first visit to the hospital,” Parrish wrote. “There were men wounded in every conceivable way, like soldiers after a battle. Some with amputated limbs, burned faces, or bandaged heads. There were women who were nervous wrecks, and some confinement cases. Was I in a hospital in France? No, in Tulsa. One mother was so thoughtless as to burden her infant for life with the name of June Riot.”

“There were to be seen people who formerly had owned beautiful homes and buildings and people who had always worked and made a comfortable honest living all standing in a row and waiting to be handed a change of clothing and feeling grateful to be able to get a sandwich and glass of water,” Parrish wrote.

“Dreamland,” as Greenwood was called for the exceptional economic and social potential it held for Black Americans, was no more. “Soon we reached the district which was so beautiful and prosperous looking when we left. This we found to be piled of bricks, ashes and twisted iron, representing years of toil and savings.”

“We were horror-stricken but strangely we could not shed a tear.“ Parrish writes, “We did not enter there through the section of town, but they brought us through the White section, all sitting flat down on the truck looking like immigrants, only that we had no bundles. Dear reader, can you imagine the humiliation of coming in like that, with many doors thrown open watching you pass, some with pity and others with a smile?”

“It is my sincere hope and desire that this book will open the eyes of the thinking people of America.”

Quality of schools in the region, which encompasses Boise, could be a factor, according to a from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation that identifies the nation’s best and worst metro areas for educational effectiveness. 

“Literally, you see the houses springing up like mushrooms,” said Terry Ryan, CEO of Bluum, a nonprofit supporting charter and district schools in the area. 

The region is among those where schools made above-average academic progress prior to COVID-19, the report shows. With the pandemic now accelerating toward suburbs and smaller metro areas — and often away from high-priced coastal cities — the authors say families and business leaders looking to relocate should factor in school quality when deciding where to settle down.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Institute, cautioned that there’s no guarantee the pandemic hasn’t stalled progress in areas where student performance once trended upward. Some experts, for example, have called recent “staggering.” But he said the message to districts and charter schools that were effective before the pandemic is to stay the course, and those that are ineffective “cannot just go back to normal.”

“I would assume that school districts and charter schools that were doing well by kids before the pandemic are probably largely the same ones doing well by them during the pandemic,” he said.

Using the — a national database of student performance — and graduation data from the U.S. Department of Education, the Fordham-Chamber project focuses on 100 large and mid-sized metro areas. The top locales include Miami, which recently received back-to-back from the state; Memphis, where Black, Hispanic and low-income students have shown above-average academic growth; and the Atlanta region, which ranks fourth in the study.

Atlanta has been ranked among the best places to start a new business, attracting tech leaders like . Collaboration among districts across the metro area is one reason why students were making progress before the pandemic and are “well-positioned to return to growth,” said Kenneth Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life, a nonprofit working to improve education outcomes across the metro Atlanta area. “Substantial inequities still exist, but the gap in several key indicators has been slowly eroding.”

Smaller metro areas, such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Brownsville, Texas, also emerged as places where schools performed better than expected based on demographics.

Those on the lower end of the spectrum include the Salt Lake City area, Las Vegas and Tulsa. Average achievement in math and English language arts has improved over the past six to 10 years in the Las Vegas metro area — essentially the Clark County School District — but schools still perform below average nationally, according to the report. 

Eighty percent of the population

The researchers focused on the nation’s metro areas because that’s where 80 percent of the U.S. population lives and where economic activity and labor market trends tend to have the most impact. Issues such as school choice and racial segregation also affect multiple districts. 

In addition to identifying areas with above- and below-average academic growth, the researchers factored in progress among Black, Hispanic and disadvantaged students, a region’s improvement over the past six to 10 years, and high school graduation rates. They combined these indicators into a measure they call “student learning accelerating metros” — or SLAM. The report includes interactive features so users can isolate results for specific indicators, subject areas or demographic groups.

The authors stressed that while achievement scores might seem to be an obvious indicator of high-quality schools, achievement alone often reflects students’ family backgrounds instead of a school’s effectiveness.

That’s why “Best Places to Live” lists should provide families a more comprehensive view of school quality instead of relying on standardized test scores, the authors wrote.

The SLAM rankings show that a metro area in which students have high achievement scores overall might not perform as well on the other measures. 

In North Carolina, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, in the state’s Research Triangle region, has among the highest ACT scores in the state, but also large in achievement between Black and white students. 

That hasn’t stopped the region from attracting Google, Apple and Nike, which are in the area.

And the Raleigh area ranks fourth in raw achievement scores, but falls to 48th in the report when the other indicators are considered. On the other hand, the McAllen, Texas, area — which includes the Sharyland, Edinburg and Hidalgo school districts — ranks 41st in raw achievement, but third based on the report’s SLAM measure.

Brenda Berg, president and CEO of BEST NC, a nonprofit organization of business leaders in North Carolina, praised the report for providing relevant data for her state, where countywide districts include both urban centers and higher-performing suburbs. 

She said in an email that she’s “most concerned” about Wake County, which includes Raleigh, and is “most eager” to see where the Guilford and Charlotte-Mecklenburg districts go in the years to come.Those two districts, she said “have some really interesting promising practices emerging” around literacy and teacher recruitment in high-needs schools.

The authors note that while charter growth and district reform efforts have often focused on the cities at the heart of a metro area, the “suburbs are where many of the kids — and much of the action — are at, and they often explain a metro’s grade.”

Looking at broad trends across metro areas, however, can hide “meaningful variation” from one district to the next, said Alex Spurrier, associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners. In October, the think tank released a report showing how a lack of affordable housing in some of the nation’s most sought-after districts limits educational opportunity. 

“Even if families decide to move to a metro area with higher-performing public schools,” Spurrier said, “their access to specific public school systems may be limited based on where they can afford housing,” Spurrier said.

On Oct. 19, a group of educators and civil rights groups backed by the ACLU sued the state of Oklahoma over , alleging that the law violates students’ and teachers’ right to free speech by tamping down on classroom discussions of race and gender. 

“There is a pretty good chance that students can show their First Amendment rights have been violated,” Frank LoMonte, director of the University of Florida’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, told ����Ӱ��.

The Oklahoma law, which took effect in May, prohibits teaching that anyone is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” or that students should feel “by virtue of his or her race or sex, (he or she) bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.” Observers described the rule as an “.”&�Բ�����;

Though the bill text does not expressly mention critical race theory, the state legislature quickly took up and passed the law while a wave of similar legislation swept through Republican-held statehouses nationwide, some of which did explicitly prohibit CRT. 

Critical race theory is not an ideology, but a lens of thinking that considers how political institutions may perpetuate structural inequities, experts previously explained to ����Ӱ��.

As a result of the law’s approval, according to the ACLU, school districts in the state have told teachers to avoid using terms such as “diversity” and “white privilege” in their classrooms, and have removed To Kill a Mockingbird, Raisin in the Sun and other seminal books from reading lists.

When schools restrict academic content, it can amount to a First Amendment violation if the court concludes that the censorship was politically motivated, said LoMonte, referencing a 1982 Supreme Court precedent in a case over . The ruling established students’ right to receive information, he explained, but also gives school boards some latitude in choosing to pull books.

“If the complaint is right, that classic books like To Kill a Mockingbird are being removed from the curriculum for no reason other than political ideology,” said the legal expert, “then that is a First Amendment injury to the students.”&�Բ�����;

Bill sponsor Oklahoma Rep. Kevin West, however, does not believe that H.B. 1775 contributes to classroom censorship.

“The law ensures that all history is taught in schools without shaming the children of today into blaming themselves for problems of the past, as radical leftists would prefer,” he wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. “The legal complaint is full of half-truths, and in some cases blatant lies.”

West did not specify which of the case’s arguments he considered inaccurate, and did not respond to questions asking whether he had intended for the bill to result in book bannings.

Plaintiff Regan Killacky, a public school teacher in Edmond, a city on the northern edge of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, said he was instructed to steer clear of certain concepts and phrases in his curriculum, and is no longer allowed to engage his students in educational conversations on race and gender.

“H.B. 1775 limits my ability to teach an inclusive and complete history within the walls of my classroom, ultimately restricting the exact type of learning environment all young people deserve — one free from censorship or discrimination,” said Killacky.

Discussions on race in Oklahoma schools are especially important, advocates say, because of incidents of racial violence in the state’s past, including the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. In a larger effort to grapple with “hard history,” Tulsa Public Schools began teaching that episode more comprehensively last spring, weeks after H.B. 1775 was signed into law.

In addition to free speech claims, the ACLU lawsuit also argues that the state has committed a 14th Amendment violation because of the vagueness of the legislation. Innocent misunderstandings, says the legal team, can place teachers’ jobs in jeopardy. 

“H.B. 1775 is so poorly drafted — in places it is literally indecipherable — that districts and teachers have no way of knowing what concepts and ideas are prohibited,” said Emerson Sykes, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

including Oklahoma have enacted laws to restrict teaching on race and gender, according to a tracker from Education Week, many using near-identical wordings.

With similar legislation in force across the country, LoMonte doubts the case against the Sooner State will be the last of its kind.

“I’m sure more lawsuits are coming,” he said. 

Just your typical summer vacation shenanigans, but with a twist: It’s all at school.

This July, over 11,000 students in Tulsa, Oklahoma — about a third of the district’s total enrollment — have returned to academic buildings for fun-filled programming that explodes the typical conception of summer school.

“I did summer school before and it was really boring,” said Tulsa rising sophomore Jesse Skocny. “This one isn’t. It’s a lot of fun.”

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At his North Star Academy, students tend to an organic garden every morning complete with cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes. Twice a week they take field trips, including a recent visit to a local Mexican restaurant where, in addition to sampling the tacos, students learned what it takes to run a small business.

“It’s a different animal, it’s not all academic,” Mike Easley, assistant principal at North Star, told ����Ӱ��.

That shift in emphasis is by design, says Tulsa Deputy Superintendent Paula Shannon. After a year that’s been challenging for everyone, the district’s top priority this summer is to help reignite students’ enthusiasm for learning.

“Academics are important. We want to help kids with unfinished learning, but that’s not what we’re leading with,” she told ����Ӱ��. “We’re leading with fun.”

As national leaders including U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on the heels of a year marred by the pandemic, and with earmarked for summer enrichment activities, Tulsa Public Schools has seized the moment, delivering learning opportunities to students in tandem with community building and joy.

Its “Ready. Set. Summer!” initiative includes programs at nearly every campus in the city, available at no cost to families, with meals and transportation provided. Over 4 in 5 students served by the school system are economically disadvantaged, and 37 percent of all students are Hispanic, while 23 percent are Black, another 23 percent are white and 17 percent are Asian, Indigenous or multiracial. Enrollment has when the district last held in-person summer school, with a focus on remediation.

‘Connection before content’

With the district’s all-new summer camp-style approach, the goal is to “develop relationships and help [students] ease back to in-person learning in the fall,” Twanna Johnson, a social worker at Memorial High School, told ����Ӱ��.

At her site, activities range from strength training and yoga to leadership development and writing rap music, on top of opportunities for students to make up credits. One particularly unusual offering, however, stands out: medieval fight club.

With rules similar to tag, students dart after one another bellowing battle cries and chopping with padded swords in a semi-controlled chaos — delighting youth who initially doubted whether they would actually be allowed to joust on school grounds.

“My expectation was to sit down in front of a whiteboard and just learn about history on medieval sword fighting,” rising sophomore Trevor Wilhite told ����Ӱ��, breathing heavily after coming off the battlefield. “I didn’t know we would actually grab swords and go out.”

With about two weeks under his belt, his feelings toward the activity are not ambiguous. “If you ever have heard the expression of a child in a candy store, it’s basically that times 1,000,” Wilhite said.

In the midst of the melee there’s room for learning, says Heath Miller, band director and fight club faculty lead. Every so often, he pauses the combat to offer a fact for context on the activity and “trick them into learning something about medieval history,” he said.

As unconventional as the approach may seem, it actually aligns with best practices for summer learning. A 2018 study from the RAND Corporation recommends districts to make sure, first and foremost, that students are engaged and enjoying themselves.

That also reflects the needs expressed by families, says Jennifer Peck, chief executive of the Partnership for Children & Youth.

“It’s been loud and clear from parents,” she told ����Ӱ��. “They want their kids to have fun.”

Especially coming off a year that took an unprecedented toll on teens’ mental health, schools should work to meet students where they’re at, says National Summer Learning Association CEO Aaron Dworkin. His mantra, he told ����Ӱ��, is “connection before content.”

Tulsa, it seems, has done well on that front — even among its teenage “knights” and sworn enemies.

Coming in after a session of spirited combat, “we’re still all like a giant dysfunctional family,” Wilhite said.

‘This summer is part one’

The focus on connection with students was enough to entice Branden Grimes, science teacher at Booker T. Washington High School to come back for the summer.

“It’s for the kids,” he told ����Ӱ��. “I didn’t have to think twice.”

But another key incentive certainly didn’t hurt, added his colleague, English teacher Tametra Jamison: extra pay.

She’s making twice as much as she does during the school year, the educator said. Even after Oklahoma teacher walkouts in 2018 protesting the state’s low wages and poor working conditions — part of the nationwide “Red For Ed” movement — resulted in , Jamison normally has to pick up a second job during the summer to make ends meet. But funding from the CARES Act changes that, allowing the district to boost teachers’ summer stipend rate from about $30 to $40 per hour, Dept. Superintendent Shannon told ����Ӱ��.

Many teachers volunteered to staff the summer program, says Jamison, but because the school got a late start on promoting the offerings to students, their enrollment did not reach full capacity and they ultimately cut back on certain planned activities.

“It would be really awesome if we’re able to do this again next year, but also kick start the promotion of it earlier so that we have more kids who are signed up,” said Alison Campbell, math teacher at Booker T.

Fortunately for the team of high school instructors, some key players think similarly.

“We will continue to apply the lessons we learned this summer through our afterschool component as we enter the school year and then that will set us up for next summer,” said Shannon, noting that relief funding is designed to last three years. “This summer is part one.”

Into the future, the district is investing in partnerships with community groups, all through a “quarterback organization” called the Opportunity Project that serves as a liaison, so that it can deepen afterschool and summer options for its student body, she said.

In Tulsa and beyond, Peck, of the Partnership for Children & Youth, advocates for the fun-first summer learning model to stick around.

“This shouldn’t be a one-time thing how we’re doing things this summer,” she said. “This should be here to stay.”

At the start of the award-winning television series Watchmen, there’s a of destruction and terror, as a racist mob destroys a Black town. Civilians are shot, homes are bombed from planes overhead, and stores are set on fire. While Watchmen is fictional, this story is true.

“That really did happen,” says Phil Armstrong. “They just put visuals to what it must have been like, based on eyewitness accounts.”

Armstrong is project manager of a charged with commemorating the 100th anniversary of one of the largest racial massacres in American history, a two-day rampage by a white mob that devastated the all-Black community of Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission is also the guiding force behind , an interactive history center scheduled to open later this year. Created in partnership with (the design firm behind the , in New York, and the , in Alabama), Greenwood Rising will tell the story of the historic neighborhood before, during, and after the carnage.

A preview of the site suggests that visitors are in for an emotional journey. Much of the information will likely be new to them. Until recently, it was possible to visit Tulsa and remain unaware of the that began June 1, 1921, after , a Black 19-year-old, was accused of assault.

The center’s dual focus on both the past and the vital present spotlights the real people who were, and are, affected by historic actions and inaction, says Greenwood Rising project director Lorraine Arthur Mensa.

“Right now, in this nation, there’s a lot of talk about Black trauma and focusing on stories of oppression versus telling the whole story,” says Mensa, who says it was equally important for all involved to “show Black joy at times and to show the resiliency, the work ethic, [and] the communal spirit, and to get the visitor to connect to that.”

Black Wall Street

Before the massacre, was a place of economic opportunities, with theaters, groceries, confectionaries, and restaurants lining its main street, dubbed Black Wall Street. “By 1880, there were 30 all-Black towns in Oklahoma,” says Armstrong. “They actually began having discussions with the government to just declare Oklahoma to be an all-Black state.”

The “Black Wall Street” moniker derives from a comment made by on the proliferation of Black Oklahoma towns (Muskogee, Langston, and Boley, among them), a year before Greenwood was established. On the other side of the tracks from downtown Tulsa, Greenwood was founded on segregationist beliefs and cemented with . But while racist ideas set the soil, Black businesses did the planting, and success quickly took root.

By 1921, an estimated 12,000 African Americans were living within the 35 city blocks of the neighborhood. Homes and businesses were all owned and operated by Black people, says Armstrong.

But over the course of a few days in 1921, all of it disappeared. Most homes were destroyed, along with dozens of buildings, including churches. An estimated 300 people were killed (although still being uncovered suggest the number could be much higher). When it was over, the Black community was financially and physically decimated.

Since the massacre was labeled a “riot” at the time, insurance claims were denied, and courts dismissed all cases without hearings or reviews, says Armstrong. To date,

The only silver lining was that legal attempts to force families to adhere to newly created, expensive building regulations (an attempt, Armstrong suggests, to dissuade reconstructing the community altogether) were thwarted by an unprecedented Oklahoma State Supreme Court decision.

Here’s where the resilience shines through: The community rose phoenix-like from the ashes. Within five years, and with the support of Black communities across the country, Greenwood was able to host delegates from the 1926 National Negro Chamber of Commerce. And by 1943 the economic activity of the area doubled, says Armstrong.

“It’s an incredible American story,” he says. “Not only [did] they stay. They built it back bigger than it was the first time.”

The Third Wave

Urban renewal programs in later decades (including the routing of Interstate 244 through the heart of the community) and eventual gentrification continued to change the community makeup. Today, the neighborhood includes the , whose mission is to preserve African American heritage in the area and promote cultural exchange. The center is partnering with park on the Tulsa Riverfront this summer to co-host the —one of the largest collections of historic art and artifacts of its kind.

Although there is only one commercial building remaining on Black Wall Street that is Black-owned, the strong heartbeat of the community continues. This is where opened in July 2020, “a space where children and adults can walk in and see themselves reflected on the shelves,” according to owner Onikah Asamoa-Caesar. Also here, Venita Cooper founded , a vintage fashion and high-end sneaker shop and art gallery, which recently raised enough through community donations (including their own) to pay the rent for more than 25 local families who were in need. Other Greenwood Black businesses include spas, cafés, and galleries.

“It’s about the reclamation of a legacy that was interrupted,” says Asamoa-Caesar. “We’re the third wave of the rebuilding of Black Wall Street. We are carrying a torch for that entrepreneurial spirit that was here in Tulsa.”

“The destruction, the hate, the racism, all that stuff in the past, it prevented us from reaching our potential for all of these decades,” says Cooper. “There are so many cool things that are happening in the city now, especially from Black artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs. I wouldn’t be here if I felt like there was no hope.”

Black-owned businesses are also hoping the increased tourism to the neighborhood results in an economic win for the community.

A collaborative “Buy Black Tulsa” handbook, launched in February, is being developed into the website BuyBlkTlsa.com, as a resource for visitors looking to benefit the community through their shopping dollars.

“My greatest fear, especially for this year, is that people are going to go to Greenwood Rising, see the signs, and look at the plaques in the ground, but nothing is going to sustainably and tangibly change for the community that’s here,” says Asamoa-Caesar. “People need to be very critical and intentional about how they spend their time and their money once they’re here. It’s great to go to a museum but think about your impact while you’re there.”

Additionally, for putting money and resources toward cultural tourism rather than ensuring reparations. Others are focused on fulfilling the original promise of Black Wall Street.

Inside Silhouette Sneakers, Cooper keeps a framed picture of Grier Shoe Shop, which once stood in that very spot. Destroyed in 1921, it reopened against the odds a few years later, and now a plaque on the sidewalk identifies it for passersby.

By establishing Silhouette here, Cooper says she feels a responsibility to honor those whose own dreams were cut short. “It’s like a natural progression,” she says, “from what had already begun.”

This article originally appeared at and is published in partnership with

More than 100 years ago, a white mob attacked Tulsa, Oklahoma’s thriving Greenwood District, home to the city’s African-American community, killing hundreds and destroying businesses.

Now, a group of young students are bringing some of those businesses to life in a project that links coding and history.

Ahead of the centennial commemorating the Tulsa Race Massacre earlier this month, Urban Coders Guild was working with local students to build websites for the businesses destroyed during the horrific event a century ago, as if those businesses were still around today. The project can’t undo the horrors of what came to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history — but the people behind it hope that it will help spur knowledge around the horrific event as well as teach students an invaluable skill along the way.

“While a good many of the businesses were rebuilt after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, none of them exist today,” says Mikeal Vaughn, founder and executive director of Urban Coders Guild, a nonprofit organization providing STEM education opportunities to underrepresented communities in Tulsa.

So the students are reimagining what they would look like today by building the websites. Along the way, they are learning coding skills and learning about a historic event that has only recently been talked about in mainstream media.

“The students were given some creative license to use their combined skill sets to create an awesome website for each business that tells that business’ story as if it were an existing business today,” he says.

Erina Katoh, 14, is among a group of students focusing on , which was destroyed during the massacre.

“This and other websites that the Urban Coders Guild is creating represent what could possibly have been these stores’ online sites if [they] had not been destroyed during the Tulsa Race Massacre,” Katoh says. “Through this project, I have been able to learn more in depth of what occurred and caused the Tulsa Race Massacre.”

The site, Katoh says, was created to look like it might if it was still around today, meaning it has a variety of pictures and hairstyles that customers can choose from. It also includes information about the barber shop and location and the owner of the business.

Katoh says Urban Coders Guild is a “prep” course for the future because she has learned how to interact with others as well as listen to and accept input from others.

Urban Coders Guild offers web and mobile app development courses and lessons in the fundamentals of project management and entrepreneurship, Vaughn says. To date, more than 60 middle and high school students have been involved.

In past projects, students worked on prototypes for a Black business directory. “In everything that we do, we try to instill a commitment to using technology to address the needs of the community,” Vaughn says.

The first semester of the course was instruction, says Jeremy Benedik, the program’s web development instructor, while the second semester has focused on the creation of the sites, . Urban Coders Guild also partnered with Tulsa Community College students to create the content and logos as part of their coursework.

Like with many things, the pandemic has produced challenges for the program. The students turned to online lessons, which, according to Benedik, many of the students were already familiar with due to their student classwork turning virtual last spring.

However, Vaughn says the hurdle has been recreating teacher-student relationships and peer relationships in a virtual setting.

“Struggling at times to keep the students engaged after a day full (day of) Zoom classes and learning to code became a second hurdle, really a by-product of the first,” he added.

Emilia Nguyen, 11 and in sixth grade, says she was aware of the Race Massacre before the project but wanted to get involved to learn more about her community.

Nguyen says she was nervous going into the class but soon realized it was a very friendly and inviting atmosphere in which learning and asking questions is paramount.

“I was scared that it was going to be something where everyone kind of already knows coding and they’re looking at me weird when I’m trying to ask a question because I’m confused and I’ve never done this before,” she says.

“But no matter if you’ve done it before or you haven’t, they still include you and they ask you to reach out if we need to ask any questions, because they know that this is a very hard concept that we’re learning. They show that they’re very proud of us that we’re taking it all in and we’re working hard at it. So they definitely understand.”

She and some other classmates are currently working on creating the online presence for their second business, she says.

She adds that the coding has been challenging and they might do some back-and-forth with the instructor to get it to work.

“I’m not going to say that it’s super easy, but it’s definitely a good learning experience and it’s super fun because you get to spend time with other people and interact with them and ask them about their different opinions on things,” she says. “You get other people’s insight on your work and they’ll tell you what they know and you tell them what you know.”

This article originally appeared at and is published in partnership with

Oklahoma on Friday became the first state to enact legislation . and lawmakers have advanced bills to do the same — marking the start of a trend vaccine policy experts say is largely symbolic, but could still hamper the campaign to conquer COVID-19.

Oklahoma’s prohibition on vaccine mandates covers not just K-12 schools, but colleges, universities and career and technical centers. While more than 400 higher education institutions across the country have announced an immunization requirement for the fall, Oklahoma is one out of only 15 states without a college or university on .

Unlike post-secondary institutions, K-12 school districts do not have the legal grounding to mandate vaccines. Even before Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed , no public schools in his state — or any other, for that matter — were able to mandate COVID vaccines.

“The list of vaccines required for school is already set in the law. So you’d have to change the law anyway [before adding COVID vaccines],” UC Hastings law professor Dorit Reiss told ����Ӱ��.

Top Oklahoma school districts confirmed that the recent bill will not change their plans.

“[It] does not impact our ongoing efforts to ensure the safety of our students and team members,” Tulsa Public Schools spokesperson Lauren Partain wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. Though the district is providing opportunities for eligible students and staff to receive vaccinations, she said, “we are not requiring students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at this time.”

In Oklahoma City Public Schools, the state’s largest school system, media relations manager Crystal Raymond told ����Ӱ�� that “COVID vaccine requirements have never been on the table for students or staff.”

Nationwide, the power to add shots to schools’ lists of required vaccinations, experts say, rests with state officials who will be unlikely to make any changes until vaccines receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration, a clearance for which both and have applied. The federal agency authorized youth aged 12 to 15 for shots based on their existing emergency use approval in mid-May.

The value of the Oklahoma law, which goes into effect July 1, or similar bills pending in Michigan and Pennsylvania may be more symbolic than functional, Reiss says. Once vaccines gain full approval from the FDA, the legislature could theoretically add coronavirus shots to the list of vaccines required for school entry, such as those that protect against measles, mumps and rubella — if the political will exists.

“[This bill] indicates that it’s unlikely that Oklahoma will pass a COVID-19 vaccine mandate anytime soon,” said Reiss.

Also included in the bill is a provision against “vaccine passports” and a ban on any school policies that require only non-vaccinated populations to wear face coverings.

The University of Oklahoma, which in May, now asserts that face coverings for unvaccinated community members remain “strongly recommended,” but not required, spokesperson Kesha Keith told ����Ӱ��.

Oklahoma joins a range of states including Georgia, Alabama, Arizona and Florida, which have already . Elsewhere, however, vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals increasingly have access to two separate worlds.

New York City has rolled out its Excelsior Pass, the nation’s first government-issued vaccine passport, which allows residents to show proof of vaccination via an app and QR code — often as an . Outside the U.S., a digital record of vaccination on Tuesday.

Such efforts reflect policymakers’ confidence in coronavirus vaccines, which scientists agree are safe and . In Ohio, schools have seen a as inoculations have become more widespread. Even Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy touted his state’s high vaccination rates as a selling point to entice tourists this summer.

“Having one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, our people are safe and you will be, too,” Dunleavy said in the ad. (Alaska has since fallen to the in COVID-19 immunization.)

In Florida, the vaccine passport ban has put Gov. Ron DeSantis on a with cruise lines, one of the state’s top industries. While cruise executives seek to comply with CDC guidelines by ensuring that nearly all staff and passengers are fully immunized, given the inherent vulnerability of packing thousands of individuals into tight quarters at sea, DeSantis has largely dismissed their concerns.

“In Florida, your personal choice regarding vaccinations will be protected, and no business or government entity will be able to deny you services based on your decision,” he said. In response, at least one major line has threatened to leave the state.

For Oklahoma state Sen. Rob Standridge, one of the authors of the law prohibiting vaccine requirements in school, the logic behind the legislation follows a similar throughline.

“To force kids … to be vaccinated against their parents’ wishes … I don’t think we should be doing that as a government,” he said in a press conference.

On the Senate floor, however, before the bill was passed, Democratic state Sen. J.J. Dossett made the case that the ban represented a government overreach — an argument frequently voiced by Republicans.

“Why in this body are we telling local entities what they should or shouldn’t be doing?” he asked fellow lawmakers.

When ����Ӱ�� posed that question to Standridge, he did not offer a response.

These debates, says Reiss, of UC Hastings College of the Law, represent divisions that have emerged time and again throughout the pandemic.

“It shows us that the pandemic has been politicized,” she said, arguing that, ultimately, legislation discouraging vaccinations will extend the public health crisis.

“The virus needs hosts to survive. Less vaccines, more hosts, more room for the virus to stay around and keep hurting us.”

When Tulsa, Oklahoma fifth-grade teacher Akela Leach began her lesson this May on the race massacre that took place in the city’s Greenwood District 100 years earlier, her young students knew they were entering contentious curricular territory.

The state of Oklahoma had recently passed a that observers described as an “,” part of a across the country to scale back discussion of systemic racism in the classroom.

At the outset of the lesson, a student raised her hand. A family member had told her that the new law might prevent them from talking about the Tulsa Race Massacre in school. It wouldn’t, Leach told her students, explaining that the 1921 event was a key element of their city’s history.

“They literally cheered that we were going to still learn it,” remembers the social studies teacher.

Further, it seemed the political milieu deepened students’ interest in the lesson.

“I’m learning something that someone doesn’t want me to learn,” Leach’s fifth-graders thought, “so this must be really, really important.”

“We know forbidden information,” one student exclaimed with glee.

Educators in the city have been preparing to tackle the topic for over a year. In February 2020, state lawmakers moved to . Last summer, Tulsa Public Schools held a in collaboration with the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission to help teachers learn to confidently lead conversations on the grim event. And the district recently rolled out new resources for educators, complete with .

As of this May, Tulsa public school students in grades 3 to 12 now learn about the violent episode in social studies class.

As those lessons were first beginning to unfold in classrooms across the city, and as the race massacre’s June 1, 2021 centennial was fast approaching, state lawmakers took up and quickly passed a bill to ensure that no teacher would make a student feel that “by virtue of his or her race or sex, (he or she) bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.”

“Unfortunate is really much too weak a word” to describe the timing, Erica Townsend-Bell, associate professor at Oklahoma State University and director of the school’s Center for Africana Studies, told ����Ӱ��.

“It’s really troubling … that it is signed as we come to the 100-year commemoration and remembrance of the Tulsa Race Massacre.”

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the city marked the anniversary with a ribbon-cutting to the Pathway to Hope at Greenwood and a Monday night candlelight vigil. On Tuesday, to visit with living survivors and descendents.

Back in the classroom, as Leach ventured into this history, she said, her fifth-graders rose to the occasion. They discussed Jim Crow segregation and why Black Tulsans, in order to prosper, had to create their own thriving community. One student analogized the roiling racism of early 20th-century Tulsa to a volcano with pressure building up and up until it finally erupted in 1921 in white violence and destruction.

“They were able to tackle something that many people would think would be too heavy for them,” said Leach. “But it really isn’t.”

Teachers, she says, have a responsibility to address difficult topics — “hard history,” Leach calls it — even if it’s uncomfortable. In the 1921 massacre, a white mob killed hundreds of residents in Tulsa’s Greenwood district and , erasing years of Black success.

It’s about “teaching the truth of what happened and not just the surface level,” she said, even if it shows our country or our ancestors in an ugly light.

District leadership seems to agree.

“There is hard history that we need to confront,” Tulsa schools Deputy Superintendent Paula Shannon told ����Ӱ��, adding that the recently signed statewide legislation “doesn’t impact us at all.”

“We’ve worked very hard to build a culturally responsive curriculum that is not mired in politics,” she said. “And so we’re going to continue to do what we believe our kids deserve.”

Superintendent Deborah Gist, a Tulsa native who grew up attending the city’s public schools, said that she didn’t learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre until she was an adult living halfway across the country in Florida. “Our team will never let that happen again,” Gist wrote in a .

Critical race theory, the controversy du jour , is not an ideology, said Townsend-Bell, the Oklahoma State University professor, but a lens of thinking that considers how political systems are “racialized and exclude certain populations.”

The Oklahoma law does not expressly mention critical race theory. It also specifies that no content laid out in the , as the Tulsa Race Massacre lessons are, would be prohibited.

While Townsend-Bell sees how the bill may have been intended to “chill” educators’ efforts to teach the uglier sides of the state’s past, she says the actual content of the law does no such thing. Its focus is on ensuring students don’t feel guilty or culpable for historical events, but Townsend-Bell said teachers looking to grapple with such episodes ought to focus “primarily not on individuals, but on institution, systems and policies.”

In other words, explained Leach, the Tulsa fifth-grade teacher, the law is “more about how you’re teaching something, versus just the topic itself.”

She says the bill seems to be “written for a problem that didn’t really seem to exist.”

“I don’t think that it’s the norm that teachers are going around and telling students that they’re responsible for racism, or telling them that they are inherently racist, because they’re white,” she told ����Ӱ��.

The elementary educator was part of the team that developed lesson plans on the 1921 race massacre, and she emphasizes that the content is age appropriate and thoroughly vetted.

In fifth-grade classrooms, discussion focuses on resilience and rebuilding Greenwood. The predominantly African American district was known as thanks to its prosperity. Students learn about how its residents salvaged elements of the neighborhood and rebuilt their livelihoods, albeit with untold lasting damage, after the violent episode that reduced it to rubble.

Leach explained that a team of teachers, district leaders and curriculum experts carefully reviewed each unit. They considered how lessons would feel for people from every imaginable perspective: a new teacher, a white teacher instructing mostly Black students, a Black student, a Latino student, a white student and more.

“[The curriculum] was designed to be inclusive,” she explained. Her classroom has a majority of white students, but also includes Black and Latino students.

Thanks to the district’s careful planning and the training opportunities offered to staff, Leach feels confident that Oklahoma’s new law will not affect how she or other Tulsa teachers approach their lessons. But she could imagine that educators with fewer supports or less confidence in the content area might feel differently.

“Someone who was hesitant to teach this or doesn’t feel comfortable teaching it … it can make them fearful,” said Leach. “It kind of gives people an out.”

Oklahoma state Representative Kevin West, the bill’s sponsor, told ����Ӱ�� that it will be up to the state education department to implement the provisions of the bill. They will specify who decides whether a teacher is acting in violation of the law and what the repercussions might be, he said. That rule-making process will begin in the fall, Annette Price, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma State Department of Education, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

“Until then, the bill stands on its own for districts to follow,” she said.

But while Leach worries that the threat of repercussions could deter some teachers from covering tough topics like the Tulsa Race Massacre, Townsend-Bell wonders whether it might have the opposite effect and actually motivate teachers to prepare more thoroughly for such lessons, out of fear that tactless classroom leadership could land them in violation of the law.

“I could imagine a world in which, because of this bill, folks feel a little bit more compelled to make sure that they know what they’re talking about, to inform themselves a little bit better, before they walk into the classroom to share that with the student population,” said the professor.

“What we could actually ironically see is some better teaching around these histories because of this concern that, ‘I don’t want to mess it up.’”

Lead Image: The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black enclave, was reduced to rubble after the 1921 race massacre. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)