Ryan Walters has been stonewalling the people of Oklahoma and the journalists working to inform them for months, but it’s taken until now for state lawmakers to take it seriously.Why? Because Walters is treating Republican legislators just like he’s treated everyone else who dares question the path forward for our public schools.And to these GOP leaders, that’s infuriating.Oklahoma’s education superintendent has punched a hole in their egos, and sent a flare that unless they’re affiliated with Fox News, youth-focused content creator PragerU or any other conservative national brand that can help Walters further his national ambitions of grandeur, they’re not urgently worth his attention.Walters is refusing to comply with basic requests for information from lawmakers. He’s denying them access to his meeting rooms. He’s sending confusing signals about how he’s allocating funding.He’s calling some of his Republican legislative critics, gasp, RINOs – Republicans in name only. He’s described a superintendent, who is a military veteran, as a “clown” and “liar” for complaining about a lack of information flowing from the State Department of Education regarding his district’s Title I funding. Walters has dared question the way legislators have written their budgetary priorities and questioned if they comply with state statute.And his decisions are starting to impact rural schools, whose administrators likely have lawmakers on speed dial.One might feel a tad sorry for our Republican legislators — if the average Oklahoman hadn’t been living the same nightmare since he first took office in 2023.Regular folks have been begging for access to State Department of Education meetings for nearly a year now, so desperate to get in that they’ve camped out overnight hoping to hold a spot in line. Most just wanted the opportunity to look their public officials in the eye as they voted on consequential education policies. Or, they just want to simply be in the room to hear for themselves new policy ideas or budget priorities impacting their local schools.Lawmakers deliberately looked the other way as our education officials stubbornly refused to move the meeting to a bigger location so that more people could participate.So it’s OK for constituents to be barred from being in the room, but not lawmakers?The State Department of Education openly acknowledges that there’s a massive backlog of open records requests. Lord knows, our newsroom has had some that are so old that I couldn’t even initially remember why we requested them in the first ...
