Quotes of the Day

I just don’t have much confidence in the grades, and just because we did well, I’m not going to change my mind on the validity of the A-F grades. The system doesn’t give me the information I need to remediate students and be able to attack the needs of each individual student.

-Waurika Public Schools superintendent Roxie Terry (Source: http://bit.ly/17w3m4N)

I have heard people comment that incarcerated women are simply bad and deserve prison time. What the general public may not realize is that the typical woman behind bars is nonviolent and has been assessed with a need for substance abuse treatment. Many women in prison are mothers. At one time, they were girls, mostly victims of abuse, without access to resources that would help them recover.

-Kristin Davis, executive director of Oklahoma Women’s Coalition (Source: http://bit.ly/1ape7Un)

[Ex-felons] see their incomes fall, their credit ratings worsen, their prospects for housing and employment dim, and their chances of ending up back in jail or prison increase. Despite serving their sentences, these debts keep them tethered to the criminal justice system — sometimes decades after they complete their sentences — and under constant threat of being sent back to jail or prison, solely because they cannot afford to pay an unmanageable legal debt.

-Ryan Kiesel and Eric Balaban, on the trend of Oklahoma’s court system assessing increasingly large fines and fees and incarcerating those who cannot pay (Source: http://bit.ly/17sgRlZ)

It’s promising that here in Oklahoma, early education isn’t seen as a Republican or Democratic initiative. It is simply considered an experiment that works.

-New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (Source: http://nyti.ms/1ajVGk4)

The tax cut we passed— we delayed it a year. I am confident if we had not done that we would have seen an increase in revenue.

-House Speaker T.W. Shannon, on reports that Oklahoma may face a budget shortfall this year (Source: http://bit.ly/1aa0NDa). Income tax cuts went into effect in Oklahoma in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2012; this year’s real appropriations budget remains below what it was in FY 2006.

Gov. Fallin, school superintendents and teachers are all on the same side: the side that argues that public education is important, that it can make a difference in the lives of our children, and that additional funding can improve our schools.

-Gov. Mary Fallin’s spokesman Alex Weintz (Source: http://bit.ly/1a7wMDW)

In many homes, food stamps are the only means and access to quality, nutritious foods. A proposed nearly $40 billion cut in SNAP, which funds our state’s food stamp program, will have a dire effect on hundreds of Native families in northeast Oklahoma, harming the health and well-being of many Cherokee citizens. … Cutting the $40 billion will only drive up health care costs and create real problems for the generation that follows us.

-Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker, on food stamp cuts being pushed by Congressional Republicans (Source: http://bit.ly/1a2U9yA)

The cheapest traffic ticket we write is $160. People are struggling. There’s not a lot of income. And that has a cascading effect.

-Tulsa County Undersheriff Tim Albin, after a Tulsa World analysis found the percentage of people booked in the Tulsa jail due to failure to pay fines or court costs has more than tripled during the last decade (Source: http://bit.ly/1a2FOlD)

By giving them a voice, they felt good about themselves. They transcended their own tragedy. They felt they are part of the solution than part of the problem.  All the ladies I photographed were united by misfortune of circumstances and non-violent crimes. I refused to see them as inmates and I only saw them as human beings.

Yousef Khanfar, about a project involving several women currently incarcerated in Oklahoma prisons (Source: http://bit.ly/19f1Hi8)

Why should anybody who is not Latino care about the education of Latino students? The nation as a whole will not be able to compete in a global marketplace unless we can educate these young people. How can we accept having huge swaths of our population simply marginalized, left out

-Patricia Gandara, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, in a PBS documentary on the Latino dropout crisis and efforts to increase graduation. One of the students featured in the film is a Tulsa teen (Source: http://bit.ly/19evebK).