Quotes of the Day

“It looks like we’re going to be in this for a little while.”

– Chad Wilkerson, vice president and Oklahoma City branch executive at the Federal Reserve in Kansas City, on Oklahoma’s economic downturn (Source)

– John Tapogna, a consultant working with ImpactTulsa to study best practices for education in the area. ImpactTulsa’s second annual report found that 3,000 eligible Tulsa-area 4-year-olds are not accessing available prekindergarten programs (Source)

“When we got on the waiting list, they said it would be several years, so I knew going into it. Hopefully, we’re getting close, because we’re seven years in.”

– Broken Arrow resident Olivia Morgan, whose nine year-old son is one of more than 7,2000 Oklahomans on a DHS waiting list for services for people with developmental disabilities (Source)

“Seven-hundred thousand inmates are released every year and too many of them return to their communities as strangers, are less likely to successfully re-assimilate and more likely to continue to the cycle back to prison because studies estimate that only 38 percent of them are able to maintain at least regular monthly contact.”

-FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn, speaking about the agency’s ruling that prisons and jails must reduce charges for inmate phone calls. The new rule means a 15-minute phone call between an Oklahoma inmate and another person will drop from $3 to $1.65 (Source).

“On average, Oklahoma’s most at-risk students are taught by teachers who are the least attached to their schools. When a teacher is retained, students are likely better off because they would have been taught by a less experienced replacement. Addressing this disparity and its implied inequity ought to be a top priority for policy makers.”

-University of Tulsa economist Matthew Hendricks, whose research found that teacher turnover rates are highest in Oklahoma’s low-income schools and urban schools (Source).

“I have had conversations with Homeland Security. They’re concerned about the tanks mostly.”

-Daniel McNamara, a research geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, speaking about concerns that man-made earthquakes at Oklahoma’s oil storage hub in Cushing have become a national security threat (Source).

“The A-F model does not help students learn, teachers teach or aid parents in evaluating their child’s education in a constructive manner. To put it in simple business terms, the current A-F grading system is exacting a hefty price to our schools’ bottom line. It is costly to teacher morale, district focus and the state’s limited resources. That is a price we cannot afford.”

-Brian Paschal, Senior Vice President for Workforce and Education with the Tulsa Regional Chamber, writing about flaws in Oklahoma’s grading system for schools and school districts (Source)

“These results show we must take bold action in order to truly compete. While Oklahoma did see growth in NAEP assessments, we are still in the middle of the pack nationally. Our goal is to be a state other states strive to reach.”

– Supt. Joy Hofmeister, on new  National Assessment of Educational Progress results showing that Oklahoma’s fourth-grade reading scores improved slightly over 2013 scores, while eighth-grade reading scores, as well as both fourth- and eighth-grade math scores, remained about the same (Source)

“Budget cuts are service cuts; it’s state government doing less for its residents. The people who educate your children will have less to work with. So will the people who keep your drinking water safe, contagious diseases under control, help the poor find food and shelter, and help children find a safe home.”

– The Journal Record’s Editorial Board, on Gov. Fallin’s executive order requiring agencies to submit plans for reducing expenses by 10 percent (Source)

“We don’t need more beds. We need less offenders. We don’t need to have this many people in prison, especially when they (lawmakers) don’t want to pay for this many people in prison.”

– Sean Wallace, executive director of Oklahoma Corrections Professionals (Source)