Back in 2008, as President Obama took his seat in history, several of us realized that something was not right with the world. We created an organization called, the OKC912Project and were deep into learning the way the legislation and elections worked, when we also realized that there was something rotten in Oklahoma’s public education system.
I had four of my five kids in Quail Creek Elementary – in fact, we’d sold our modest home in The Village (an older neighborhood in Oklahoma City) to move to Quail Creek just so my kids could go to the WONDERFUL school where I’d learned as a child.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go as I’d planned. There, my kids were taught Global Warming as fact, they weren’t actually educated much, and one was mercilessly bullied by his teacher and fellow students.
By the time 2nd grade ended for my oldest child, he was moved to homeschool. The rest were moved home the next year and, as parents, we never looked back.
In 2010, a friend from OKC912Project and I started a group called Restore Oklahoma Public Education (ROPE). We naively believed that if we shone light on the antics of public school, we could ‘restore’ it to the way it was before political correctness (DEI/SEL) and propagandist teaching standards.
One of our first jobs was removing Common Core State Standards from law. It took four years of lobbying a Republican legislature to scrap just one of Obama’s federal education initiatives (Governor Mary Fallin and State Superintendent Janet Barresi brought in every single one of them). Though it was successfully repealed from Oklahoma law, we learned the hard way that the repeal was meaningless in practice and schools carried on as they had been before.
Frustrated and realizing we were going to have to go at public school reform in a different way, we renamed ourselves Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment in 2015, making use of our previous initials and agreeing to focus more on educating parents about Oklahoma’s public education system and how to make changes at the local level.
Sadly, we were never able to gain a lot of traction with parents. No matter how many places we spoke, no matter how many times we explained the importance of the local school board, there seemed to be little effect.
In April of 2023, new Board Member Michael Grande, Board Member Julia Seay and I, started what Julia dubbed, “The ROPE Report” – a podcast. Something we’d never tried before, but seemed to be something God was calling us to do, when I got the impression several times over the week of Christmas in 2022, “my people perish for lack of knowledge”.
I had always been the primary writer and researcher, but that was our focus – the written word. With the world turning to the point that few people even read for longer than five minutes at a time, but would watch endless hours of TikTok videos, it seemed the next logical step. We kept the name Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment, but moved to a two-day-a-week podcast on Wednesdays and Fridays – The ROPE Report.
This change ushered in a different way of doing things altogether. Instead of really focusing on researching and writing, we were bringing in people who had important information about important topics affecting our state. We’d interview them for as little as an hour or as much as two. It was – and still is – very organic, not driven by time, but by what’s being said – how we can help viewers gain knowledge to make changes to increase our individual liberty here in the state.
After nearly two years now, the focus of ROPE is no longer parents, or education, but ALL things Oklahoma, from climate change to legislation, we try to find interviews with interesting people to educate viewers. Consequently, it just made sense to change our name to the ROPE Report.
Today, you’ll see our new logo on our social media pages and website, but we’ll still be the same group we’ve strived to be from the beginning – a source of news and information you can turn to that will report the truth the best we can about the things that affect you in your own back yard, right here in Oklahoma.
We’re glad you’ve been with us for the ride, but STAY TUNED, there’s lots more to come.
