Oklahoma's education board downgrades a school district's accreditation over racial slurs

Tulsa Public Schools (TPS)

Just a few weeks after the governor of Oklahoma asked for a special audit of Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), the State Board of Education voted to lower the district's accreditation for breaking a law that limits how race and gender are taught.

Mandatory training session

As a result of a complaint that a mandatory training session for teachers broke state law 1775, the board voted 4-2 on Thursday to downgrade the school to "accreditation with a warning."

Add Block

HB 1775

A teacher filed the complaint with the state because she said the training videos she had to watch "specifically shamed white people for past offenses in history and said that all people are implicitly racist by nature." The Oklahoman says that this is the first time a district has been punished for breaking HB 1775.

Harsh response by TPS

TPS gave a harsh response to the state board's decision, saying that the schools "teach our children an accurate, but sometimes painful, difficult, and uncomfortable, history of our shared human experience."

Add Block

The purpose of Oklahoma's HB 1775

The purpose of Oklahoma's HB 1775, which does not use the term "critical race theory," is to stop discrimination, the bill says. The law says that any teacher who teaches that "an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously," or that "an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex," could have their license suspended or taken away.

Add Block

Accredited with deficiency

The Oklahoman says that the training session about which the teacher was upset was "This was done in August 2021, before the administrative rules went into effect. It was done by a third-party vendor. If a school district is found to be in violation of HB 1775, these rules say that it should at least be called "accredited with deficiency."

State board's decision

The TPS says that it held a training session that talked about implicit bias. But, "It's clear that nobody says or thinks that other people are racist because of their race or anything else. We would never agree to this kind of training, "the sentence says. TPS took aim at the governor in its response to the state board's decision.

Add Block

Governor Stitt's

"It is interesting that Governor Stitt's state board of education spent a lot of time today talking about one teacher's complaints in our district (out of hundreds of accreditation problems across the state) and none of that time talking about the terrible teacher shortage that every district in our state is facing," the statement said. In recent months, the state has been looking closely at the Tulsa school district, which is one of the biggest in the state and has a majority of minority students, according to available data.

Add Block

Misuse of public funds

In a video message earlier this month, Gov. Stitt said that the Tulsa school district would be audited for possible misuse of public funds and said that he was worried that the district may have broken state law.

Tulsa School Board members

"At the request of two Tulsa School Board members, I am calling for a special audit of Tulsa Public Schools and the possible misuse of public funds. As one of the biggest districts in the state, TPS got more than $200 million in federal relief money from COVID "Stitt said

Related: Millions of people are suffering from loss of smell or taste from Covid!

Add Block

Deborah A. Gist’s new interview

In a previous news interview, Deborah A. Gist, who is in charge of Tulsa Public Schools, called the governor's request for an audit "baseless accusations."

"We do a great job of managing money, and there's no reason for anyone to question how we spend federal money," Gist said. "Nothing he says is true because there is no proof to back it up." "Anyone who wants to come and look things over carefully is welcome," she said.

Add Block

The ACLU

Late last year, a group of students and teachers filed a complaint against an Oklahoma law that makes it hard to teach about race and gender. The ACLU called this the first federal lawsuit to challenge a statewide ban on teaching about race and gender.

Lawsuit backed by the ACLU

The lawsuit was backed by the ACLU, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Oklahoma state conference of the NAACP, and the American Indian Movement (AIM) Indian Territory. Its goal was to stop the law from being enforced because, according to the lawsuit, critical race theory hurts free speech and the teaching of a complete history.