Yahoo Finance Anti-Woke Oklahoma School Boss Is Due for a Wakeup Call
A routine state audit released on Wednesday offered a remarkable list of items purchased during a 2021 federal program to help low-income Oklahoma families homeschool during the pandemic.
Big screen TVs.
Washing Machines.
Kitchen appliances.
Power tools.
A “classic Pokemon video cabinet.”
The program was Bridge the Gap. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt delegated its implementation to Ryan Walters, who was then head of a nonprofit called Every Oklahoma Kid Counts. Walters has since been elected Oklahoma superintendent of public instruction.
Bridge the Gap’s mission was simple enough: 5,000 families would each receive $1,500 to spend at designated retailers. To facilitate the purchases, Walters joined his counterparts in 27 other states in contracting a digital outfit called ClassWallet to dispense the funds. Every other state established parameters on what the recipients could buy and reported no inappropriate purchases. But not Oklahoma.
“Proper system controls were offered by the digital wallet vendor to limit the families’ purchases to education-related items but those controls were declined by the individual placed in charge of the BTG program,” Oklahoma Auditor & Inspector Cindy Byrd wrote in her report. The audit added, “Almost 20% of the total purchases were spent on items not related to educational learning.”
The individual referenced was Walters. Stitt had also placed Walters in charge of a program called Stay in School, which had a budget of $10 million to provide tuition assistance to 1,500 or more low-income families with children enrolled in private school.
Governor of Oklahoma Kevin Stitt.
The audit determined that there was “a deliberate operation to give selected private schools and individuals preferential treatment by allowing early access for application submission prior to the date this program was offered to the general public.”
The audit further found that “awards were provided to 1,073 students whose family attested that they had not suffered an economic hardship due to the pandemic. Sixty-five percent of the total budget, $6.5 million worth of grant funds, were identified as questionable because the grant objectives were disregarded.”
The audit added, “As a result, 657 students of low-income families who qualified for the SIS program did not get the financial assistance they requested because the funds were exhausted.”
And that was not all; of the $6.5 million total outlay, $1.8 million was paid to private schools in excess of what they charge in tuition.
In other words, in Walters’ world, actual low-income kids are turned away before they even have a chance to apply because all the money has already been given to kids who are not needy, but attended preferred schools, which get extra.
The following year, Walters ran for state superintendent. He vowed to oppose “all things woke” and perpetuated the myth about kitty litter in classrooms for kids who identify as cats. He won even though reporters from Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier got wind of some of the outlandish things families had purchased when he was running Bridge the Gap. He simply blamed the digital wallet company, and that seemed to be that.
Then came a routine audit of the federal grant money received by Oklahoma in 2021 to ensure the funds were spent within the guidelines. Byrd released the results as Walters was preparing to head to this weekend’s Moms for Liberty Summit in Philadelphia. He had often echoed the far-right organization’s clamoring against “woke” and LBGTQ “indoctrination” in the schools. He is scheduled to speak at a “Future of Education in America” panel on Friday.
The audit and numerous other failings prompted an anonymous group in Oklahoma to form Families 4 Liberty. Its stated goal is to make Walters a figure of education’s past by impeaching him.
“Ryan Walters is a danger to Oklahoma’s public schools,” declared the group’s website, which summarizes the audit results and cites other “examples of WHY the Oklahoma legislature needs to begin impeachment proceedings immediately.”
The website further notes that at the May meeting of the Board of Education, Walters “debuted an attack ad on teachers which contained, by his own definition, sexually explicit material.”
“There were multiple minor children in attendance at this meeting where Walters proactively shared explicit material without giving any type of warning to the parents in the room, removing their option for the minor children to leave the room before being exposed to the images,” the group added.
Walters did not respond to a request for comment on the audit and the various allegations made by the Families 4 Liberty. A spokesman for Byrd told The Daily Beast that she could not comment beyond her public findings because the Oklahoma attorney general is launching a second, investigative audit.
“It has become a criminal investigation,” the spokesman said.
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