A teacher filed the complaint with the state after she claimed training videos she was required to watch “…specifically shame white people for past offenses in history, and state that all are implicitly racially biased by nature.”
TPS issued a blistering response to the state board’s decision and said the schools “are teaching our children an accurate — and at times painful, difficult, and uncomfortable — history about our shared human experience,” according to the statement.
The TPS says it provided a training that included the topic of implicit bias. But, “it is clear there is no statement or sentiment pronounced that people are racist — due to their race or any other factor. We would never support such a training,” the statement says.
In its statement reacting to the state board’s decision, TPS took aim at the governor.
“It is notable that Governor Stitt’s state board of education spent significant time today talking about the complaints of one teacher in our district (among the hundreds of accreditation deficiencies statewide) and no time on the catastrophic teacher shortage facing every district in our state,” the statement said.
“At the request of two Tulsa School Board members, today I am calling for a special audit of Tulsa Public Schools and the potential mishandling of public funds. As one of the largest districts in the state, TPS received over $200 million in COVID federal relief funds,” Stitt said
In a previous CNN interview, Deborah A. Gist, Superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools, called the governor’s call for an audit “baseless accusations.”
“We have excellent management of funds, and there is no basis for anyone to be questioning our management of those federal dollars,” Gist said. “There is no evidence to support anything that he is saying.”
“I welcome anyone who wants to come and take a careful review,” she said.
The suit — backed by the ACLU, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Oklahoma state conference of the NAACP and the American Indian Movement (AIM) Indian Territory — sought to block enforcement of the law it says inhibits free speech and education of complete history through the framework of critical race theory.
CNN’s Raja Razek and Rebekah Riess contributed to this report.
