Wednesday, March 19th at a special time – 10:00am – Michael and I had the privilege of interviewing Oklahoma’s State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd. Cindy is – hands down – one of my favorite interviews because SHE KNOWS HER STUFF! After being an auditor for over 20 years, she’s got the answers to pretty much any questions you can ask. I’ve pulled several short clips from the interview, but you’ll want to watch the full interview on our Rumble or YouTube channels.
We started talking about the Tulsa Public Schools audit that she just recently finished at the request of the Governor. She talks about that – how does Cindy determine what agencies to audit? Is it up to her? Early on she tells us that she doesn’t have the power to independently audit agencies or political subdivisions. At about 14 minutes in, she tells us who has the authority to have her audit – and that includes taxpayers!
As I mentioned, we didn’t just discuss the TPS audit, there were a number of questions that came in from viewers that Cindy was kind enough to take. Additionally, she had a number of points she was interested in making herself – like this one in the clip below.
Isn’t it interesting how the people who make the laws don’t seem to be terribly interested in the topic of how to make state agencies more transparent with taxpayer dollars? How frustrating! But it gets worse! Cindy tells us in the clip below that even if she finds that a person or entity is breaking the law, there are no laws in Oklahoma that actually hold ‘bad actors’ responsible for the gross mismanagement of tax dollars. How can that be? That’s flat crazy and something that an Oklahoma legislator needs to resolve NEXT YEAR for certain!
In this last clip, Cindy tells viewers not to give up hope! If we’ll report what we know, or think, to be wrong and if we’ll stand up and make our elected officials do what’s right – get Cindy’s office to audit – we’ll get the finances of our Oklahoma government back in order! She believes we can do it, but we have to be citizens active in the process, so stayed involved and educated!
Wednesday, March 12th, among other things, Dr. Randy Grellnar spoke with us about his thoughts on SB569 and the House companion bill (HB2298) which would allow nurses an expanded scope of practice to include prescribing medication. You can find the full video on our YouTube and Rumble channels.
Dr. Grellnar and I started speaking about the scope of practice bills at about 13 minutes. I suggest you tune in if possible. It is a very interesting topic. We neglected to mention (I think) that one of the ways we know that leadership (not the people) want a bill is that the bill is introduced as BOTH a House Bill and a Senate Bill. This is kind of a bet hedge. If the bill falls in the Senate, it could pass in the House and if it passes in the House, then Senate leadership will get the caucus on board so it’ll pass the second time around. Yes, it’s gross, but this game is played quite consistently with bills leadership wants to pass.
I wonder if the Oklahoma Medical Association is behind this bill. They are a huge lobby at the Capitol and leadership tend to push the bills lobbyists want. Who knows – but this is a bad bill. Here are just a couple reasons why:
Governor Stitt vetoed the bill last year, why bring it up again?
The authors are asking for the ability of nurses to give Schedule II drugs – which are opioids – with no oversight. Didn’t we just try to stop the opioid crisis in our state, and stop pill mills. If this bill passes, overnight there will be hundreds more prescribers.
The bill’s authors also ask for nurses to be able to prescribe schedule III-V drugs as well.
some of these can kill unborn babies
ARNP’s and certified midwives will have to carry 3 million in malpractice coverage per year at 1 million/incident because in 2019 the Supreme Court found unconstitutional the 350K cap on pain and suffering adjudicated during Oklahoma’s torte reform legislation. What nurses can afford that?
Why have a State Medical Board if the legislature is just going to pass laws for doctors to follow? This bill usurps local control of health care.
Please, tell your Senator and your Representative to vote NO on these bills.
Dr. Grellnar also gave us some great, conservative thoughts during the podcast that more legislators at the state capitol should share.
This was my favorite – check it out – “the only way to protect freedom is to choke off the government”. YES!
Here, Dr. Grellnar talks about how important it is to take PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR HEALTH, but people aren’t because, well, ‘science’. Today, so many Americans treat science as if it’s a God. How many times during COVID did you hear something stupid like, “respect the science”? Here, Dr. Grellnar talks about that.
Don’t forget to call your Senator and Representative about these bills and keep watching…we’re almost halfway through the session already!
Friday, Michael and I had Carolyn McLarty on during the first hour of the podcast to talk about citizen lobbying. It was a great show! I really urge you to check out the whole thing on YouTube or Rumble.
After Carolyn had gone, Michael and I talked about numerous issues, but one of those was about the data being collected on students. In the video below, Michael and I talked about how many apps and computer programs students now use at school and how those are often collecting data from their interaction with the program/application.
This article is from our original blogspot and was written in 2014 when we were trying to stop the State Longitudinal Database. I suggest you at least open it and scan it because it gives some pretty good examples as to how classroom data mining is happening through programs and applications used in the classroom.
Here are Michael and I talking about that very thing on Friday’s show.
This morning, I found a message in my Facebook messenger from an old “common core” friend. She sent me a website – the Kids Count Data Center. I remembered having seen that years ago, but I hadn’t looked into it recently. I scrolled through Oklahoma’s collected data categories and was – once again – completely freaked out by what I found.
The data is apparently provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) – a non-profit organization started by the man who created UPS. The AECF credits itself with helping to start the foster care system while moving toward the abolishment of orphanages.
I ran AECF through Data Republican and was not able to find that they take tax dollars of any kind, nor are they granted monies from organizations that take tax dollars. I was able to find some of the organizations they fund, however, and two things are clear; they donate to large organizations that do collect lots of taxpayer dollars and they donate lots of money to leftist, ‘social change’ organizations. This makes me wonder at the reasons for which they are collecting so much data on kids.
This is interesting and concerning. Statistics can be made to say whatever the person using the statistic wants them to say. What do leftists want with all this data?
The AECF makes no bones about the fact that they are collecting all their data to influence policy decisions made by legislators.
Here’s a PERFECT example. “The First Eight Years” is a report created by the AECF populated with data collected through the Foundation. Why? To give policymakers reason to FUND early childhood education with tax dollars – tax-funded DAY CARE essentially – on the notion that it’s the “best way to ensure a successful workforce in the future”.
Apparently their strategy has worked in Oklahoma since 2006, when the Oklahoma legislature created OECP – the Oklahoma Early Childhood Program (OECP) – headquartered in…wait for it…TULSA. The OECP is tasked to “improve the quality of early education and expand capacity to serve children from birth through age three statewide.” (bold for emphasis)
Because I was offended by the fact that the AECF would/could collect information on kids NOT IN SCHOOL, I clicked on the data point called, “Young Children Not In School”. This data came from the U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey. So, families actually taking this survey, coughed up to the federal government that their kids weren’t in school and that information was entered into the US Census Bureau database – which is shared with the public and across government databases.
This is the reason the AECF gives for collecting this data on babies.
High-quality prekindergarten programs for 3- and 4-year-olds can improve school readiness, with the greatest gains accruing to the highest-risk children. Head Start and the expansion of state-funded programs since the 1990s have greatly increased access to preschool. But many children, especially 3-year-olds, continue to be left out, exacerbating socioeconomic differences in educational achievement.
What is ‘school readiness’? What is high-risk? Whatever the AECF, CAP, OECP says it is – usually based on a definition created by some group in the ‘get money from tax payers to take babies away from their parents’ scam.
At this point, I’d like to point out information from the OECP’s 2024 Annual Report.
Please note, this is supposed to be a state agency, yet George Kaiser funds the majority, while the state of Oklahoma comes in a paltry second. Also note, wages and benefits are the majority of the spending here because all the staff are involved in thinking about things related to how to grade childcare centers and the children inside. Here are two things the staff did last year.
They determined how attached to the caregiver BABIES and TODDLERS were. Shouldn’t we care more about the fact that these babies are in a place where they are NOT becoming attached to their parents?
And then there’s this:
Yes, Oklahoma is measuring the literacy of babies and toddlers and the state of Oklahoma is using tax dollars to do this, while partnering with an Obama donation bundler.
And let’s think on this just a minute. According to the OECP annual report, 3,666 children were ‘served’ by this program. Do the math. That’s an expense of almost ELEVEN THOUSAND dollars a child – for DAY CARE that the state and its private partners have dubbed EARLY EDUCATION.
In closing (for now), I’m going to add the diagrams I created while studying the State Longitudinal Database back in the 20-teens. THIS is why all this data collection is a problem. Once the data is collected, it goes everywhere and everywhere it goes, it populates databases that follow kids throughout their public school and work careers. Hopefully, it’s obvious why this is bad. Hopefully, it’s obvious why we need our lawmakers to protect our kids from this kind of intrusive nonsense that does nothing but build reasons for taking more and more tax dollars from citizens to fund more and more ways to take their tax dollars – and babies.
Wednesday, March 5th, Michael and I talked to Jana Belcher and Robert Scott – both Homeschooling parents who have been heavily involved in lobbying the legislature to remove homeschoolers from the Parental Choice Tax Credit voucher legislation. It was a really great conversation and covered much more than just homeschooling. Please find the full live video here on our YouTube channel and on Rumble as well.
For years, trying to fight this tax credit, so many of us have said that private schools will just raise their rates once the tax credit comes online. If more students come to the school, more teachers and instructional materials will be necessary, raising the price. And not only that, it just gives a school a good excuse to raise rates. In the clip below, Robert gives an example of exactly that happening.
In the clip below, Robert talks about the data bill we’ve been warning about. Though we didn’t talk about the specific inclusion of homeschoolers in the database, years ago when Julia Seay, Lynn Habluetzel and I were studying data collection and trying to stop implementation of a State Longitudinal Database, we had found information indicating that there were fields in the database for collecting data related to homeschooling – which concerned a whole lot of homeschoolers.
And finally, in the last clip I pulled from the full video, Robert shows us that every individual who files for the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit has their name and the amount of their tax credit listed in the Oklahoma Tax Commission, Tax Credits database online. There is no address or phone number listed, just the name and the amount of the tax credit, but the point is, anyone can look you up to see your ‘award’.
Below is a PDF of Robert’s slide presentation. Please share this information with friends and family – and especially homeschoolers who want to take this government handout.
A truly unfortunate event happened in the classroom of Ashlyn Jade’s niece at Waurika Public Schools Monday afternoon.
According to an interview with Ashlyn this afternoon, Coach Roger Jesse, a teacher/coach with 40+ years in Oklahoma education – and someone with many years of service and an excellent reputation in Waurika Public Schools – gave his 11th grade psychology class an assignment that has now made internet viral status.
Coach Jesse was asked to teach a new extra curricular psychology class at Waurika High School this semester. Ashlyn believes that, in a hurry and under duress from a strenuous teaching/coaching schedule, he downloaded a STATE APPROVED psychology curriculum to use during his class on Monday afternoon, copied it and handed it out without really reviewing it.
Ashlyn’s niece, very uncomfortable with the subject matter, took a picture of the assignment and uploaded it to Snap Chat during class, where it stayed 24 hours – long enough for her 5th grade daughter to see it in her feed in the morning. Her daughter then screenshot the post and sent the photo to her mother.
Immediately upset, Ashlyn put in a call to Waurika High School Principal, Derek Milburn. When Principal Milburn returned her call, Ashlyn explained to him exactly what had happened and that she was very upset that, not only was her 11th grade niece exposed to this kind of assignment, but that her 5th grade daughter had found it on SnapChat.
According to Ashlyn, Principal Milburn seemed rushed and dismissed her by saying that ‘it was already taken care of and that she shouldn’t worry about it. All the parents of students who had been effected had been made aware.’
Ashlyn knew the Snap had gone viral and that a very large number of Waurika Public Schools students had already seen it. She told me she doesn’t believe that Mr. Milburn knew that fact, but because she felt as though the Principal was essentially dismissing her concern that her 5th grade daughter (and other students in the school system) had seen it, she posted the assignment to her Facebook page out of frustration and to make a point.
The post went viral in a short time, with even State Superintendent Ryan Walters posting it – unedited – from his social media accounts.
Not long after the post went viral, so did the accusations from community members pointed in her direction.
Ashlyn says she’s being accused of calling a beloved Coach a predator and she wants to say that this perspective isn’t at all true. During our interview, she called my attention back to her original post, the top of which is posted above. She never mentioned any names, nor even the school system. It only became known that the assignment was from Waurika because someone commenting on her post asked if the incident had happened in Waurika and she answered “yes”.
It wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that Waurika Public Schools addressed the incident publicly with a letter posted to their Facebook page written by Cody Simmons, WPS’ Superintendent.
According to Ashlyn, Coach Jesse has been put on leave and is being asked to retire. She doesn’t believe that’s fair.
Ashlyn said that she made the post to “shed light on the fact that the teacher used a state approved curriculum. Coach Jesse copied and pasted an assignment that was approved by the Oklahoma State Department of Education. He was not a psychology teacher, he was a coach teaching a psychology class. He copied and pasted the OSDE curriculum and gave it to students without really reading it. He was just overworked.”
She advocates for the return of Roger Jesse and says that she “believes that the responsibility and repercussions for this terrible situation should not fall on the shoulders of the teacher, but on Principal Milburn, Superintendent Simmons and State Superintendent Ryan Walters” because this was part of a state approved psychology curriculum.
Ashlyn has a point. It seems as though the teacher made a really terrible mistake. If you were a hurried teacher and you went to the OSDE website and downloaded curriculum that had been approved for use in high school, would you really worry too much about it being inappropriate for use in state classrooms? I’m not excusing Coach Jesse of all the responsibility for the issue – whether it came from the OSDE or not, he should have really examined what he was using in class – but in light of Ashlyn’s comments, there is some plausibility for his lack of diligence.
Who’s fault is that? Ultimately, it’s our Superintendent’s fault. The buck stops on his desk. He’s had no trouble pounding his dashboard during in-car videos railing (rightly) against discriminatory practices in schools, but he should be doing less pounding/videos and concentrating more on what’s on the state website for teachers to download.
Then, there’s the tepid, dismissive response of the Principal to Ashley. He – and the Superintendent – should have known that students would share that kind of crazy assignment on social media like crazy and be more concerned about ALL the students who could have seen it, instead of just those students in class.
Ashlyn Jade did what she felt like she needed to do as a parent, and an Aunt, and she’s taking a pretty good beating over it in the community. But then, our Superintendent posted an UNEDITED version to his social media. HOW RESPONSIBLE IS THAT? Shouldn’t he have focused on just the part about the investigation?
In the end, there’s a whole lot of blame to go around when it comes to this incident, but I don’t see Ashlyn as a party to that. Parents NEED to speak out when they see this kind of thing – that’s how they protect their children – and they should do that whether anyone else likes that or not.
For those of you who have followed ROPE since the days (2008-2014) when we were called Restore Oklahoma Public Education (ROPE), you’ll recognize the flowchart, that Lynn Habluetzel (former ROPE Board member) and I created together to show how Obama’s Race To The Top grant program was fueling ways in which the government would track YOUR CHILDREN all under the guise of ‘helping’ them. What did Reagan say, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help”?
This session, our ‘helpful’ legislature – particularly Representative Chad Caldwell and Senator Ally Seifried – have decided to add to the State Longitudinal Database System (SLDS) so loved by former REPUBLICAN State Superintendent Janet Baressi. Here is the text of the bill. In addition, Seifried and Dick Lowe (SB141) are directing the OSDE to issue RFP’s for a “statewide student information system”. I guess, we’re the only ones that remember the information below apparently.
I was going to publish a list of reasons why this bill shouldn’t even be considered, but I’ll just say this – WE ALREADY HAVE A STATE LONGITUDINAL DATABASE (aka Statewide Student Information System) and according to everything we learned years ago, it was set up to do all the same stuff outlined in the bill by the person responsible for setting the whole scheme up by the Obama administration in the first place, John Kraman – now the Chief Information Officer for the Mississippi State Department of Education.
STOP COLLECTING DATA ON KIDS! THERE IS NO NEED FOR THIS UNLESS THE IDEA IS FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO EDUCATE STUDENTS FOR JOBS LIKE THE EU DOES.
And if there’s still any concern that Oklahoma needs more excuses to collect data on kids, below is the presentation I made to the House Admin rules, Government Oversight and Repealer Committee during October of 2013. It’s a MUST WATCH because it contains the flowcharts I prepared that show how the state – and the feds – collect student data.
Here is the paper that contains all the LIVE links to all the research Lynn, Julia Seay (former ROPE Board member) and I did on the SLDS during the time Oklahoma was implementing that monster.
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE share this information with every parent and grandparent you can and IMMEDIATELY contact your Representative and Senator and tell them that they MUST vote NO for SB224 and SB141 and any other data collection bill in the state legislature.
One day, while surfing the web for information relating to green energy, I stumbled onto the fact that Oklahoma has the largest carbon capture plant in the United States and the second largest in the world.
Immediately, I contacted friends in Osage county – where the plant is located – and no one I spoke with knew anything about it at all; from long-time politically active folks who get around in their community regularly, to the two County Commissioners I spoke with, to the outgoing Sheriff, to the county clerk. NO ONE had any idea that the LARGEST CARBON CAPTURE PLANT IN THE NATION was right down the road in Shidler off an old oil company road.
Interestingly, neither the Corporation Commission nor DEQ knew much about it either according to the employees I spoke with and neither one of them knew who regulated the site to keep Oklahomans safe from accidental discharge of CO2 (which has injured people in Satartia, Mississippi).
This all makes complete sense when reading a Senator Dave Rader-authored bill that passed through the Energy Committee this session to give the Corporation Commission jurisdiction over carbon capture facilities. So who’s monitoring the CO2 capture facility now? Does our Governor just do these deals on his own and not worry one little bit about the safety or security of Oklahomans? It surely seems that, in Oklahoma, it’s the ‘green’ energy wild west where everything goes so long as we’ve got an “all of the above” energy policy to push forward.
In fact, I only learned anything about the facility at all because I found a video of Governor Stitt excitedly congratulating the company Heimdal for the creation of the carbon capture plant, ‘Bantam’, on Heimdal’s LinkdIn page. Heimdal is the brainchild of a 30-something named, Marcus Lima – a chemist from Norway.
Lima created Heimdal’s carbon capture technology through Y Combinator in 2021, specifically to take advantage of green energy handouts such as the IRA’s $180 per ton credit of CO2 that is captured and stored through at least 2032. Yes, you read that right. He started the process SPECIFICALLY to get the ‘free’ money.
After my article about Oklahoma’s carbon capture fame came out in the Federalist, a post on Marcus Lima’s LinkdIn page, caught me by surprise
These remarks were made after he read a serious article in a national online magazine.
Because I’m me, I commented on the post:
Not long after I posted this, I received a reply in my message box from Lima:
Either he’s a very considerate European, or someone suggested he respond to me and then delete the post. Either way, the original post has been deleted from his LinkdIn page. Note that in his response he mentions only the Native American populations. What about the ‘regular’ folk? Again, no one I spoke to knew anyone who knew anything about this ‘groundbreaking’ plant. This is telling.
I noted that in his post he lists his “fellow secretive luminaries” as Kevin Stitt, Scott M, Victoria Tran, John Podesta and James Lankford. We know Stitt, Scott M. is either Scott Mueller (briefly Secretary of Commerce and Workforce Development, who now works for Goldman Sachs), or Scott Mitchell (an Oklahoma broadcaster). Victoria Tran was the Deputy Secretary of Oklahoma Secretary of Energy & Environment at some point, but I can’t find her listed in that position any more. John Podesta is the creepy democrat political operative who’s worked for everyone from the Clintons to the Obamas and who served as Senior Advisor to President Biden for International Climate Policy from 2024 to 2025 after which he became the Chair of the leftist Center for American Progress. Then, of course, there’s our liberal Republican Senator Lankford, who has a lovely picture with Lima still up on Lima’s LinkdIn page.
He also has a photo of himself with the AG – “We discussed CLass VI well permitting and primacy for the State of Oklahoma, as well as Heimdal plans for DAC facilities in the State, with the launch of Bantam, as well as our expansion plans. It’s clear direct air capture (DAC) and carbon management broadly has an ambitious future and home in Oklahoma.”
I’m not sure what the AG has to do with any of that, but this was upsetting. He wants MORE Direct Air Capture (DAC) facilities in Oklahoma. Why? This has nothing to do with oil and gas exploration (although there is experimentation with injecting liquid CO2 into old wells as a way of fracking out new oil, instead of using salt water). This has everything to do with carbon credits and ‘sequestering’ CO2. In fact, in an article posted to Heimdal’s website but released by Bloomberg News, Lima says, “The world must cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, and research shows reducing the use of fossil fuels is the fastest way to do so.”
Why in the world are we chasing after DAC technology in Oklahoma? This is the entire basis for the Carbon Credit scheme and the Green New Deal. This should be upsetting I would think – especially to REPUBLICANS as this whole thing is just a way to usher in a new economy based entirely on NOTHING. This whole technology is about nothing more than investors creating investment projects to make themselves more money.
We can almost forgive the Altman’s and Lima’s – as Rush Limbaugh is quoted as saying, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.” But our Governor should be expected to DO better – if not KNOW better – if not for his age, but for the fact that he should have advisors to dispense topical thoughts and a pulse on his constituency, listening to their desires. Yet he doesn’t. He rules Oklahoma like a King – on his own with advisors he picks himself and changes depending upon whether or not he likes what they have to say – look at the State School Board, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, his Energy and Environmental Secretary and the Oklahoma Veterans Commission – and these are but a few examples. This history does not at all indicate an affinity for Oklahomans, but a myopic, self-centered, elitist view of governing that can only acknowledge his constituency as “the little people”.
Here in Oklahoma, the only ones crying out about the continued shoving of the Green Agenda down our throats in a Red State are the CONSERVATIVE little people; land owners and rural people effected by CO2 pipelines that can break and discharge their deadly gas onto their livestock and families – farmers whose land can become ruined from the oil and fiberglass thrown down to the soil by fractured wind turbines – communities whose farmland is being usurped for huge solar panel installations that seed the ground with glass and toxic chemicals should they catch fire or be damaged by hail or a tornado, preventing local food from ever being grown there again.
Unfortunately, Oklahomans have tended to love these authoritarian types of Republican Governors, we can only hope to learn from our history and be wiser in 2026.
So enjoyed having Don Spencer on the program Friday morning! I have to say, once Constitutional Carry passed, I thought there really wasn’t much left for OK2A to do! Boy was I wrong! Catch everything we discussed on the full live video on Rumble and on YouTube.
When I said that on the program, Don laughed and then set me straight!
I have to say, I really enjoyed the history lesson! So, please, don’t forget that Don and OK2A have a few bills that need your attention this session. Go to Don’s channel on YouTube and hear all of them specifically. Also, as I’m sure Don would like to have me remind you!!! You can sign up for an OK2A membership – it’s only $25 – and you can get all his updates via email, video and text! Just navigate to his website to do that!
Before we talked to Don, we talked to Michael’s brother Mark about his recollections of Travis Combs – the guy who was a Branch Chief at the Department of Education who was outed by Project Veritas talking about how he and his group were covering for illegals. In the course of that conversation, Mark – who used to be a Professor at UT in Austin – talked about some of the crazy things that drove him out of teaching. It’s sad. So many people know what’s wrong in college education, but actually getting anything done about it in academia seems to be an absolute non-starter. Here Mark is giving the HATED answer to the liberal talking point that schools/teachers never have enough money.
Finally, at the end of the show, Michael and I talked about some news of the day and I brought up the interview that Governor Stitt gave to Politico – the one I made a video about because it was so contradictory. The one where he basically says that – no matter what Trump says – he’s moving full steam ahead on the green agenda and he needs the subsidies Biden put in place for that to happen. Not. Enough. Eye. Rolls. I also managed to get Gateway in there too for good measure. Someday, I hope to see Oklahoma have a TRUE REPUBLICAN governor, but I wonder – do any of us really know what that means anymore?
Michael and I had so much fun talking to Colonel Putman on the show Wednesday (2.26.25). I swear, that man had some of the best stories about his military career with the Air Force – and one of them is below. Just take a few minutes to watch this because it is guaranteed to make you giggle – although you can watch the entire live program on YouTube and Rumble.
But, among the stories, the Colonel had quite a bit to say about education in our state and I, for one, was bowled over by his thoughts and ideas. At one point, we were discussing ‘distance learning’ – learning out of school and what he thought about that. “Virtual presence is actual absence“, was the comment the Colonel made. How perfect is that? And no, he’s not a fan of learning on a computer in general. Just like Michael and I, the Colonel believes that learning is more functional with a paper and pencil and a teacher in a classroom.
In the clip below, we were talking about what Michael heard from teachers when he was running for school board. So much of it was about how micromanaged they were. The Col. talks about micromanagement and also about the student surveys that the district gives to students. These bother him for the same reason they’ve always bothered Michael and I – most of these surveys actually instill ideas in kid’s heads because they’ll introduce something they’ve never heard about or even thought about. That kind of thing has to stop. It’s a waste of education time and dollars because they don’t provide any real educational opportunities for students they’re just a way to collect data.
In the last clip, we talked a bit about the culture of the public schools and how many good teachers are frustrated by that. The Col. made the most common sensical comment – you don’t quit your job, you quit your boss. He then goes on to talk about how he is a huge supporter of teachers because they are on the front lines and in the classroom with the students and how they need to be supported by administration.
After Col. Putnam ‘retired’ from the podcast (lol), Michael and I start talking about some news for the week (1:15 on the video timer) and there was a lot of pretty interesting stuff there. You’ll want to check out the full video for that and I’ve embedded it below so you can.
Please – if you’re in the Edmond area, or you know someone who lives in the Edmond area – look up Colonel Putnam’s website. Get to know him and share these videos and his website with others in the area. School Boards are the most important thing in a school – they set the tone for the entire school. Let’s concentrate on getting good candidates elected to these positions all over the state!
