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Colonel Jim Putnam, Candidate for Edmond School Board – Virtual Presence Is Actual Absence

Edmond school board candidate Colonel Jim Putnam

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!

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This Week At The Capitol, Legislators Dick Lowe and Danny Sterling UNprotect Students With HB1937

Bartlesville, Oklahoma fights drag queen performances

Wednesday, February 19th, Michael and I welcomed back our friend ‘Mary’ with V1SUT to talk about a couple of items. Check out the full LIVE video on our YouTube and Rumble channels. We always have some great discussions and the only way to catch those is watching the full video.

First, we talked about the fact that – with the onset of DOGE – we’re learning how USAID has funded billions of dollars in research and social activism to undermine the Republic and the way citizens think about America.

One of the ways this has occurred is through the financing of grants to organizations such as Oklahomans for Equality which has then used the funds to push out messaging and other support for LGBTQIA+ issues in Bartlesville. Mary has written several articles about the influence of this group on the town and how this has effected residents. So controversial has been their methodology, that Bartlesville’s last city council elections saw 3 out of 5 city councilman ousted by the citizenry over the issue of allowing public drag shows sponsored by Oklahomans For Equality.

Mary’s blog on the topic at V1SUT Substack is quite good. You should check it out.

We also discussed HB1937 a bill to essentially undo the bill written last year (HB3958) by Sherrie Conley that prevents public school employees from having conversations with students through any medium without a parent present on the thread to overwatch.

Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the House Common Education Committee, Dick Lowe and Danny Sterling (respectively) wrote HB1937 because they believed it was too cumbersome for parents and coaches to have to see every conversation with students, essentially UNprotecting students. The bill passed the Common Education Committee 8-5 with the Speaker of the House voting.

Take a very hard look at who voted YES WITH THE DEMOCRATS. Below, Mary talks more about the bill and the vote and how this bill puts children at risk because parents may feel pressured to opt out, leaving their kid unprotected. Lowe and Sterling appear to be more for the status quo than protecting kids.

In the video below Mary talks about how educators are doing a great job at covering for other educators, but not protecting children – which is really their FIRST RESPONSIBILITY. Mary also mentions that maybe one or both Sterling or Lowe had been involved in ‘passing the trash’ before, as she asked them for a comment on that very issue and neither responded. Find out more in her Substack.

This bill has yet to have a hearing in the Education Oversight Committee, but those are ad hoc committees that only require a 24 hour agenda notice (for some reason), so PLEASE, email the members of the Education Oversight Committee and ask them to VOTE NO on HB1937.

Rep. Kerbs, Chair (R) District 26

Rep. Caldwell, Chad Vice-Chair (R) District 40

Rep. Hasenbeck, Toni

Rep. Kane, John

Rep. Lowe, Dick

Rep. Provenzano, Melissa

Rep. Waldron, John

Rep. West, Tammy

Rep. Wolfley, Max

Copy and paste the block below into your email ‘to’ line.

dell.kerbs@okhouse.gov, chad.caldwell@okhouse.gov, toni.hasenbeck@okhouse.gov, john.kane@okhouse.gov, dick.lowe@okhouse.gov, melissa.provenzano@okhouse.gov, john.waldron@okhouse.gov, tammy.west@okhouse.gov, max.wolfley@okhouse.gov

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Michael And Jenni Talk, Public Education and Green Energy

Friday (1.17.25), Michael and I had a guest slated to appear for our podcast that wasn’t able to come on. Consequently, we did what all good LIVE podcasters do – we scrambled!

Fortunately – and unfortunately – there’s never really a lack of anything to talk about in Oklahoma politics, so we began by discussing our previous podcast with Senator Kendal Sacchieri. If you haven’t seen that yet, I highly recommend it. It created the MOST IMPORTANT 7 MINUTE VIDEO YOU’LL EVER SEE. The Senator is absolutely invaluable when it comes to explaining complicated things like property tax – which she did amazingly well.

At any rate, we replayed the 7 minute video and had Kendal on for a few minutes to clarify a few things and then we moved on to talking about education.

It was during this segment that Michael said the following about the teachers he talked to when he was running for school board. Suffice it to say, his comments were extremely distressing to a former teacher like me who LOVED the autonomy of my classroom.

We had heard this about teachers during the Common Core years. It’s astounding and, frankly, horrifying that we let this continue.

Next stop, AI teachers with your kids plugged into Skynet all day. Don’t scoff or laugh. We’re so close to there.

After that, we discussed the green agenda.

It’s my contention that people have no idea what nature is anymore and therefore don’t even really know what’s good for it or not, what it looks like raw and wild, or how to appreciate it in that state. Hint: A park is a tiny microcosm of nature that is usually trimmed and watered and fertilized – it’s not really nature. We’ve gotten so plugged into the web and so unplugged from outside, we don’t understand that our idea of what’s green and what’s not, is super skewed.

I talked about an article I wrote for the Federalist several years ago, “How Living In Chaos Makes It Impossible For Us To Run Our Lives And Government“. In the article, I wrote about our family’s move to our farm and how weird it was for all of us to leave the city. I advanced my thesis about nature by way of three paragraphs from the forward – written by one of his sons – to one of my favorite books, “Witness“, by Whitaker Chambers. It’s a very long book, but WELL worth the time it took to get through it.

As I say on the podcast frequently, I read, via earbuds and a subscription to Audible because I have so many chores in the growing season that it’s the only way I can actually “read” written material! Sometimes, when the book is very good, I buy it and add it to my ever-expanding research library – the one I hope my children fight over when I’m gone!

I read these three paragraphs on the podcast as we were talking about the green agenda. I feel them so deeply, I actually got choked up, so if you want to see me cry on the podcast, definitely check out the full live version on YouTube or Rumble! Please, read these paragraphs and tuck them in your heart. We’re having our humanity stolen from us daily, certainly don’t give it up voluntarily.

“The farm was your kingdom, and the world lay far beyond the protecting walls thrown up by work and love. It is true that comic strips were not encouraged, comic books were banned, the radio could be turned on only by permission (which was seldom given or asked), and you saw few movies,” he says, addressing his children. “But you grew in the presence of eternal wonders. There was the birth of lambs and calves…There was also the death of animals, sometimes violent, sometimes slow and painful – nothing is more constant on a farm than death.”

“Sometimes, of a spring evening, Papa would hear that distant honking that always makes his scalp tingle, and we would all rush out to see the wild geese, in lines of hundreds, steer up from the southwest, turn over the barn as over a landmark, and head into the north. Or on autumn nights of sudden cold that sent the ewes breeding in the orchard, Papa would call you out of the house to stand with him in the now celebrated pumpkin patch and watch the northern lights flicker in an electric clouds on the horizon, mount, die down, fade and mount again till they filled the whole northern sky with ghostly light in motion.”

“Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know – the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More important, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe – that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and been replace by man’s monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain.”

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V1SUT Talks Transgender Teacher

Friday, December 13th, our friend “Mary” with the V1SUT Vantage substack, joined Michael and I to talk about trans teachers. (Find the full video on our YouTube and Rumble channels)

Earlier in the week, Mary published, “First Drag Queen Now Secretly Trans Principal: Progressive Public Ed in America’s Reddest State” about the Western Heights Public School district, where the Superintendent hired a drag queen to Principal a district elementary school (Shane Murnan who has since been fired), who then hired another drag queen as a para professional and then a Chinese immigrant who was found soliciting sex from (what he thought was) a 15-year-old boy.

Now, Mary has found that a biological woman has been working in the district as a male in MANY different roles in the school for over eight years.

In the clip below, Mary talks about how hard it is to find a trans person once they change their identity. Should it be this hard – especially if this person is working with children?

She then goes on to talk about the fact that, according to Oklahoma law, a trans person must use the bathroom of their birth sex, not their preferred sex. If this is the case and it’s hard to find a trans person working in a school, how could we be sure they weren’t using facilities with biological boys?

Mary asked Ryan Walters and other OSDE employees about this issue, but received absolutely no answer in response. Why? Isn’t this a situation parents might want to know about?

In this last clip Mary talks about whether or not parents should know that their child’s teacher doesn’t present their biological sex in public. Not every parent agrees with alternative lifestyles and though there are no accusations of inappropriate interactions with this teacher and other students, don’t those parents have a right to know that his teacher is teaching their child?

I know I would certainly want to know. As I’ve said on the podcast from the beginning – I don’t care what people do on their private time, but people employed by taxpayers to shepherd children must meet a higher standard for their behavior and their lifestyle choices. Children are vulnerable and in need of protection in every way possible – especially at school where personal safety goes hand in hand with learning.

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A Teacher’s Story – Why I Quit Teaching In Oklahoma Public Schools

Becky Pellam, PhD, spoke to Michael and Jenni on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024, about her teaching experiences in Oklahoma.

Dr. Pellam came from Texas, where she taught in the Dumas district. She loved it there, but she met a man from the Oklahoma panhandle and settled in on a ranch they bought there together. Hungry to teach again, she applied to Guymon PS and was hired as a Teaching Coach.

Before she started, she had great feelings about her time there and what she could do to help the kids – the majority of whom had ACT scores in the single digits. After she began, her experience changed drastically.

During her year of employment in Guymon, she was bullied by the other teachers, many of whom told her she was a ‘plant’ from the central office sent to spy on the other teachers and refused to submit their benchmarks to her. She talked to her superintendent about the situation but she seemed to get nowhere.

She talked to the school board president, who listened intently and believed her report, but asked her to contact the Board’s vice-president. When she did, the long-time, active OSSBA (Oklahoma State School Board Association) member told her that he had heard she was a trouble maker and knew she was the problem, not anyone else.

Needless to say, after she was told by the Superintendent to falsify benchmark data to the school board, she had it in her mind to quit, but then the school essentially fired her anyway.

Here’s Becky’s story about her employment with Guymon in her own words:

After being forced to leave Guymon public schools, she was hired at DOVE Virtual Acadmy (DVA) – an Oklahoma online public charter school.

Dr. Pellam talks about how – just like her experience with Guymon PS – everything started fine, but quickly turned sour.

The Principal almost immediately had Dr. Pellam teaching THE ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL class of nearly 100 kids to the tune of 12 and 13 classes per week. For those who aren’t teachers, that’s 3 TIMES a ‘normal’ amount of coursework. For each class, there is a certain amount of ‘prep’ that has to happen to develop the course and to assist/grade/monitor the students. This level of coursework would exhaust anyone, but Becky also was helping to run a ranch and raise their daughter at the same time.

In the end, she found that DVA was ALSO cheating the accountability system by enrolling ‘ghost students’ to get their enrollment up (in Oklahoma, schools are appropriated funds via the number of ‘butts in seats’), but then unenrolled over 40% of their students – the ones on the lower end of the academic spectrum – when it came time for state testing.

Here is Dr. Pellam telling the story about her employment with Dove Virtual Academy:

Toward the end of the LIVE 2 hour+ broadcast, Jenni and Dr. Pellam began to talk about what education actually is.

Few people – including teachers and administrators today – know what it means to EDUCATE a child. It’s certainly NOT what we’re doing in Oklahoma right now. Right now, we’re training kids for jobs, not educating them in order to be the people best able to decide what they want to do.

There is method to this madhouse approach of education, however. Uneducated people are compliant people because they don’t know how to think for themselves. They do what they’re told because they’re conditioned to do that. They can’t think for themselves because they’re not educated, they’re conditioned.

Becky and Jenni took several minutes to flesh out this fact so that people could hopefully understand what it is that Oklahoma is doing wrong in public education. And that’s after we spoke about the horrible public school culture – the teacher/administration bullying that goes on against those who want to come in and actually teach and do the right thing.

Here are Becky and Jenni discussing the idea of what REAL EDUCATION looks like:

Dr. Pellam is VERY BRAVE for coming forward in this way.

Jenni had the very same kind of experiences while she was teaching in Oklahoma public schools 25 years ago, so this is not a new thing – THIS IS TEACHER/ADMINISTRATION CULTURE IN MOST OKLAHOMA SCHOOLS. Good Oklahoma teachers simply leave rather than try to do anything because they know nothing they will say will be heard or addressed.

See, no one listens to them because the fixes necessary REQUIRE HARD WORK, not just THROWING DOLLARS AT THE PROBLEMS and no one from public school administration, to our legislature, to our Governor really want to do the work that is required to solve the deeply entrenched problems with public school culture in Oklahoma.

Oklahoman’s shouldn’t BE FORCED TO PROVIDE THEIR TAX DOLLARS FOR THESE UNFUNCTIONAL SCHOOLS. If we really care about kids – and do we really? – we would FIX the broken public school administrative culture, instead of forcing taxpayers to provide private school tuition dollars to people who can already afford a private school education for their kid/s!

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OK Rep. Sherrie Conley Talks Broken Trust – Her New Non-Profit

Wednesday, July 24th ROPE Report Regular, Representative Sherrie Conley, talked with Michael and I about her new non-profit Broken Trust.

After working with numerous former students who had horror stories about being molested or abused by public school employees, Sherrie decided that something needed to be done and she was going to do it.

The Broken Trust website is a place where people can contact Sherrie with tips and/or reports of abuse occurring within public education.

In the clip below, Sherrie talks about her desires for the organization and shares its first event.

If you would like to attend – or share this event with others who might be interested – click here.

It’s honestly sad to realize that this kind of event is needed today, but it is. So few parents understand what could be happening after they drop their child off at school – and fewer seem to understand what to do if their child comes forward to report abuse.

Sherrie reminds EVERYONE that, according to state law, EVERYONE is a mandatory reporter of abuse any time they find it.

For parents, the very best thing to do, should you suspect abuse, is IMMEDIATELY CONTACT LAW ENFORCEMENT – and that doesn’t mean your school’s School Resource Officer. SROs are employees of the school first and foremost. Their contracts are with schools, not with the police department to which they are attached and certainly not with parents. If school administration is told, the school will investigate – not law enforcement. Consequently, the first call if any parent suspects abuse from a public school employee is to your nearest LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICE.

In the clip below, Sherrie talks about the abuse taxpayers receive after a school is found guilty of abusing a student or students. In this case, 2 Kingfisher Public School’s coaches were accused of knowingly allowing students to abuse one another in the high school locker room. One family sued and won a judgement of 5 million dollars, of which the Kingfisher school district taxpayer will be required to pay.

As Sherrie explains, the school asks the county assessor to raise their millage rate to cover costs over their budget and this results in higher property taxes for the home owner while the school’s administration and board, get off scot free.

Please take a moment and share this article – and the videos – with others. The only way we FIX this problem is to educate others who can help us demand change!

You can find the FULL video on our Rumble and YouTube channels!

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We Need To Protect Children From Public School Predators – V1SUT Vantage On ROPE Report Live

For her regular Wednesday appearance on ROPE Report Live, our V1SUT Vantage blogger, ‘Mary’, Michael and I talked about yet another incident where a public school teacher had molested a child. This time while he and his husband were on vacation on a cruise ship.

How in the world does this happen?

One good piece of news ‘Mary’ gave us, was that State Superintendent Walters had spearheaded an investigation into Ashley Rolan’s sexual assault case, causing at least one of the perpetrators to come forward and VOLUNTARILY relinquish their license. One down. Many more to go.

In the short video below, ‘Mary’ talked about Statute of Limitation laws in Oklahoma and how they must change if we’re to protect children and make abusers pay for their crimes.

Since 2017, the Statute of Limitations on reporting sexual abuse is age 45. That seems awesome until you find out that this date is NON RETROACTIVE – meaning that no DA will file charges against someone who has abused this person IN THE PAST. How can that be? So the abused can REPORT the crime, but the abuser can’t be held accountable if the abuse didn’t happen in the same year?

Watch the short video below to see why.

The only way to solve this problem is by changing the statutes to allow for prosecution of sexual crimes against children even though the victim could be reporting the crime as an adult. Oklahomans should absolutely do all we can to protect our youngest citizens and we’ll be helping where we can on this issue for 2025 in the legislature.

In the next short video, ‘Mary’ talk about how it is that members of the LGBT community seem to have some kind of immunity when it comes to prosecution for crimes involving minors. Check out the short video below to hear ‘Mary’ talk about a situation she’s reported on from Bartlesville involving not one, but TWO children put into foster care with a same sex couple. One child ended up with a broken arm that was never investigated and a subsequent child died. This is simply not okay, yet it continues to happen over and over again.

We must pass on this information to everyone we know. Public outcry could make legislators act, but we need to spread he word so that awareness of these situations grow.

Continued to stay tuned every third Wednesday to hear what ‘Mary’ has for us next and check out her substack as well!

Take an hour or so to watch the full video on our Rumble or YouTube channels. You won’t be sorry. ‘Mary’ is always so informative!

ANNOUNCEMENT: Moms 4 Liberty, Yukon area, is hosting an event in conjunction with Sherrie Conley’s new non-profit Broken Trust called, “A Guide to Protecting Students from Predatory Behavior”, Tuesday, August 6th at 5:30, location to be announced. This event is free, but please sign up so they know to expect you.

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