State superintendent candidates present markedly different political rhetoric

But nowhere is the contest more of a hot potato than Edmond-based Deer Creek Public Schools.

There, the race isn’t just political. It’s personal.

“One candidate is a Deer Creek dad and the other candidate is a Deer Creek mom and former Deer Creek educator,” said Kristy VanDorn, the district’s executive director of schools. “That puts us in an interesting little spot because we have teachers on both sides, but we’re trying to maintain relationships and figure things out and move public education forward.”

Before Democrat Jena Nelson, 44, and Republican Ryan Walters, 37, became politicians, they were both midcareer teachers recognized by their peers as among the best and brightest in the profession across the entire state.

Both also have work experience outside the classroom.

But nearly all comparisons of the candidates end there.

At recent campaign stops, the Tulsa World had a front-row seat for their markedly different political rhetoric — then sought to get beyond all of their prepared soundbites in one-on-one interviews.

Vouchers or “scholarship” programs — which send taxpayer funds currently dedicated to public education with students whose parents would rather choose a private school instead — represent polar opposites to the candidates.

For Walters, they would be a powerful way to reform education. He is currently CEO of Oklahoma City-based Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, a nonprofit fully backed by national school privatization and charter school expansion advocates.

“If Governor (Kevin) Stitt and I are elected, we are going to champion parents and grandparents — and we will empower you so your kids can have the best education possible,” he told dozens gathered one evening last week at the monthly meeting of the Washington County Republican Party in downtown Bartlesville.

For Nelson, diverting more public school funds to private schools would mean cutting resources for the public schools that the vast majority of Oklahoma parents choose for their children.

“Seven hundred thousand kids are depending on us and of those, 300,000 live below the poverty line,” she told local school support workers in Tulsa at the most recent monthly meeting of their bargaining unit. “I know common sense is not a seed that grows in everyone’s garden, but vouchers are a rural school killer, a public school killer, and they close down our communities.”

Some of Walters’ actions as Stitt’s appointed secretary of education since September 2020 and campaign positions have been controversial, but controversy also begets name recognition.

From selfie videos recorded in the driver’s seat of his car — which Walters told the Tulsa World is just a simple way for him to speak plainly and directly to voters — Walters has said public schools need to be rid of “woke indoctrination” by teachers and federal policies he attributes to President Joe Biden on topics including critical race theory, anti-American exceptionalism and “transgenderism,” as he put it during his speech to the Washington County GOP.

“The far left wants to turn kids against their families,” he said at the event. “They want to convince them that America has a racist, socialist history. Instead of allowing your kids to see the fundamental principles that guide this country … What they want is your kids to hate America.”

Walters has taken on the Stillwater school district over what school bathrooms transgender students can use, a now-former Norman teacher for giving students a code that provides public access to banned books from an out-of-state public library system, and Tulsa Public Schools for having two sexually graphic novels on some school bookshelves.

He brought up one of those book titles, “Gender Queer,” in his recent stump speech in Bartlesville.

“They want your kids to learn about sex in the early grades,” Walters said. “If an adult went to a park and showed some of these books to kids, that adult would be arrested.”

Nelson would rather talk about something she says is an “actual” and growing problem for most schools — post-pandemic student mental health.

“We need to stop using education as a political weapon,” she said during a recent stop in Tulsa.

She proposes further expanding Oklahoma’s school counselor corps that just had pandemic relief funds poured into it in the top three counties with students with the most risk factors.

She told would-be voters she has already been working to recruit new partners to add telehealth options to ensure rural districts without access to appropriately trained professionals can get their students help and support.

Nelson shares that she personally benefited from a high school teacher who recognized that she was struggling because her mother had mental health issues and, as she puts it, her dad “was the source of a lot of trauma.”

“Mr. Stephen Smallwood, 1996 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year. He saw there was an issue. I was very quiet, but I was angry and he saw that anger in me,” Nelson said. “Like every great teacher, he showed me that he cared. He redirected me to a more positive outlet, which was speech and drama and music. Even when I would struggle and act up, he was patient with me and he saw the potential in me. He gave us hope of what we could be and he also helped guide me to apply for colleges.”

Nelson took a leave of absence from her current teaching assignment as a sixth- and seventh-grade English teacher at Oklahoma City’s Classen School of Advanced Studies to campaign full time.

She told the Tulsa World in her travels to schools across the state in the last few months that she was shocked to see how “scared and demoralized” public school teachers have become from this year’s political rhetoric.

“They tell me, ‘We have one foot out the door, and we’re waiting to see the results of this election,’” Nelson said. “They’re afraid because of the way they’re being depicted — people think maybe they’re harming children or they’re doing something terrible. They aren’t that way and yet they’re being depicted that way, and they feel in danger.”

On the campaign trail, she tells Oklahomans: “We don’t have a teacher shortage. We have 30,000 certified teachers in this state not teaching by choice.

“We need to tone down the rhetoric. We need a state superintendent to elevate and celebrate the profession — not tear it down and threaten teachers.”

Walters has said he wants to revoke the licenses of teachers found to be violating a state law that prohibits certain teachings on history, sex and gender.

But does he think his positions and beliefs are well understood?

“I think my opponent and the teachers unions and the Democrats have intentionally lied and misled voters,” he told the Tulsa World. “Outside of my family, there has been no one who’s made a bigger difference in my life than my teachers. No one is more impactful on students in a school setting than teachers. They’ve strived to paint me as anti-teacher, anti-public schools, when in reality that’s ludicrous as someone who’s taught in public schools who sends their own children to public schools and is so blessed by that.”

Walters heaps praise on the teachers and school leaders who currently serve his own children at Deer Creek. And like Nelson, he, too, was inspired to go into the profession by his own teachers.

“My mom was a teacher — we had tremendous teachers at McAlester. Mr. Horn was my favorite — he has since passed — I was able to teach the history and government courses he taught me,” Walters told the World. “And math, Mr. Collier, and English, Mrs. Burden, and an ag teacher named Mr. Delmont also had a tremendous impact on me. They were all veteran teachers who were still there when I came back to teach, and they took me under their wings.”

At his recent stop in Bartlesville, Walters shared his vision for how history should be taught in Oklahoma public schools.

He vowed to require teachers here to undergo patriotic education training offered by a small, ultra-conservative, Christian college in Michigan called Hillsdale College, which is also trying to establish a national network of charter schools including a new one in Tulsa.

“I’m a classroom teacher. Ten years ago, I was at a training where they said we shouldn’t say anything good about the Declaration of Independence because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves,” Walters said, prompting audible gasps from among Washington County GOP voters. “What I will do is I will put together courses — I’ve been talking to Hillsdale College on this, they’re great, they’re great — and have every U.S. history teacher and every history teacher in the state go through that training so they know the basics and that every kid will have a teacher who is learned on U.S. history, on the constitution, on those fundamental principles.”

Hillsdale President Larry Arnn recently drew national backlash after he compared today’s education system to “a plague” and claimed public school teachers are trained “in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

Nelson’s been going from school group to school group, telling parents and teachers and school support workers that she wants to lead a complete overhaul of Oklahoma’s federally approved state testing system so teachers can get real-time test data about their current students — not a single snapshot view of their previous year’s class rosters.

“It would be similar to our benchmark system that districts already use — we look at the beginning of the year where our students are. Right before winter break, we do another benchmark to see what growth has occurred and then at the end, we do a final one to see if they’re where they should be by the end of the year. Other states are using that last benchmark as their state test. They show education gaps — and I also believe it would save us a lot of money.”

Walters echoed those exact sentiments.

“We need to find a way to get real-time data that is actionable for teachers and parents,” he said. “Getting more money out of bureaucratic costs and into the classroom — I think that’s where you see tremendous student success.”

Whether teachers actually turn out and vote has long been a wild card in Oklahoma elections. Local school boards aside, the single officeholder with the most daily impact on educators and students in public schools for the next four years will either be Nelson or Walters.

VanDorn, Nelson’s old boss at Deer Creek, where she was named 2020 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year, said: “It’s no secret who I’m going to be voting for.”

“There is not another Jena Nelson. She makes it her mission to reach every child and empower them and encourage them, just like a teacher who helped her growing up in Broken Bow,” VanDorn said. “She was one of my teachers during the teacher walkout. She took it upon herself to do a lot of research to get to the ‘why’ — Why are we here in Oklahoma? Why is this happening? She really seeks to understand everyone. I see her taking those same strengths — trying to understand what is happening in public education and working to bring people together from across the state to use public education to strengthen our state.”

Cody Autrey, one of Walters’ final close colleagues at McAlester High School, remembers Walters as someone who left big shoes to fill as a teacher of multiple Advanced Placement courses for college-bound students, and someone who was deeply concerned for the students he was leaving behind a few years ago.

In 2016, Walters was one of 12 finalists in the state teacher of the year contest.

“I worked with him his last year at McAlester — it was my first year. He did AP (Advanced Placement) courses and was very well-educated and a very good teacher,” Autrey said. “He helped me take over for him in teaching AP government. It was kind of a struggle at first, but we stayed in communication through text, emails, phone calls — he kept giving me support and direction.”

Walters, Autrey said, also handed off to him coaching duties for the freshman basketball team and took great care in sharing what he knew about each player on a personal level.

“He had a good relationship with the kids — they felt they could talk to him, but they knew whenever they got to his class it was going to be a challenging class,” Autrey said.

When the COVID pandemic sent students home in spring 2020, Autrey said Walters stepped in to help him teach AP government students via Zoom, and did the same for another colleague who had taken over Walters’ AP U.S. history course.

But what about Walters as a candidate? Will he vote for him?

Autrey responded: “I support him, but am still debating my final vote in the election.”