UPDATE: Voting has re-opened. All you have to do is log on to facebook (if you belong), click "like" on this page and then vote for the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics.
Hudiberg Toyota is holding a contest on Facebook to award $10,000.00 to a local school.
The Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics, one of the best high schools in the nation, has suffered more than 35% in budget cuts and is the only state agency that has to furlough faculty and staff, and the legislature is reducing their budget again this session.
OSSM is a boarding school for junior and senior high school students that teaches college level classes. 100% of the students earn academic scholarships, the students have the highest ACT and SAT scores, they spend a portion of their senior year mentoring in a career field related to their studies, many of these students come from small, rural school districts and OSSM is the only way they can get the advanced classes they want and need.
The faculty and staff are willing to work take those furloughs (and many still work) just to keep the school open and functioning. Many of the faculty travel to distant vo-techs to provide extra AP classes in physics and math to rural students for whom the school had no dorm space. The graduating students are amazing people doing amazing things.
The faculty and staff are doing the best they can to prevent these steep budget cuts from affecting the quality of the education they provide the students and to provide the students with experiences, and this $10,000 will do a lot to help them.
If you truly believe in providing a quality education, please go here and like the page and then vote for OSSM
EDITED TO UPDATE (Thursday, May 31):
They changed the rules again. Voting is re-opened, but the vote tallies are now hidden. They are taking votes between now and 2:00 pm CST, when it will close and they will determine the winner. When they closed the voting last night, OSSM was behind the front-runner by 20 votes.
If you are interested, are already on FB, please consider helping an awesome school with its budget woes.
EDITED TO UPDATE (Wednesday, May 30):
The contest runners are now auditing the votes. I think that means the contest is over and they'll be announcing the winner shortly.
The winner will probably be the other school.
The contest runners changed the rules yesterday to say that instead of ending at a set time, they could choose when to end the voting at any time up until the original end time.
To me, this means they were able to select the winner by ending the voting when the school they wanted to win had more votes.
If I win the lottery, I'm giving this school part of my winnings. The work they do and how they manage it with as little money as they get, and in spite of the local opposition to the school, is amazing.
I have no clue why the state seems to be dead set against this school - it is far and away one of the better schools in the whole country, and is recognized internationally as a premier school offering a quality education. The students from OSSM compete on international levels, and generally place, and sometimes win. Few other American high schools can make that claim and the ones that do are often charter schools or private schools, not public high schools.
With all the rhetoric of the need to improve science and math education, it seems very few people actually put their money where their mouths are. OSSM receives no more funding than any other public high school of equivalent size and relies heavily on donor support to make up the difference in cost. Since the students are residential, that means there are a lot more costs involved - dorm rooms, residential faculty and staff, higher security, more kitchen staff and food, and so on.
To have their budget slashed year after year by the state legislature and the burdens of education increased is brutal. Their wages aren't stagnant, they're receding. Most faculty and staff are earning less now than they were 5 years ago. It's not the economy because Oklahoma economy wasn't as badly hit as other states We have a surplus. We can afford to give the school a sufficient operating capital so none of the faculty and staff would need to take furloughs. Maybe not enough to bring pay up to industry minimums, but at least enough so they aren't losing ground.
But our legislature doesn't see the need for this school. They get more than 300 applicants from all around the state each year and can only accept 75.
OSSM has produced 323 National Merit Finalists and 167 National Merit Commended Scholars - more than 10% of their graduating students. 124 students were nominated for the Presidential Scholar award, and 13 were semifinalists and 5 have achieved it. 227 students have received a Robert C. Byrd Scholarship that recognizes the exceptional high school student. Over 19 years, OSSM has had 92 students named as Academic All-State Scholars, and 553 students have received the State Regents for Higher Education Scholarships. 12 have received the National Hispanic Scholars award. in the national competition of Engineering, Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science (TEAM+S), OSSM has placed first for 12 consecutive years. 15 students have been accepted into the US Naval Academy, 15 into the US Air Force Academy, and 3 to West Point. OSSM students have received Bronze, Silver, and Gold Medals in the Chemistry Olympiad and the International Physics Olympiad.
50% of OSSM students attend Oklahoma colleges and participate in mentorship programs in the local scientific community to work on concentrated research or project development. More than 50% of OSSM students come from communities with populations of less than 10,000 people.
The other 50% of the students attend Ivy League colleges like Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, U of Penn, and other prestigious universities such as Rice, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Stanford.
That's out of a total of 1,211 graduating students so far. Each graduating class is about 60 students.
In addition to that, OSSM has taught more than 14,000 middle school students in workshops and seminars for math, physics, computer sciences, and biology. More than 3,000 students outside of OSSM have participated in OSSM sponsored math competitions.
In addition to that, OSSM has 2 summer workshops for teachers to improve their classroom skills in Math, Physics, and Biology that counts towards their ongoing required accreditations - and pays those teachers a stipend for taking the workshops.
In addition to that, OSSM staffs 19 regional centers to teach students who can't attend the main OSSM campus Math and Physics classes to help prepare them for college.
In addition to that, OSSM offers space to the A+ program to teach their teachers, as well as meeting space for Oklahoma Leadership and other community programs.
It boggles my mind that the state of Oklahoma expects OSSM to continue to be excellent, to be a point of pride for the state, and to be a reason businesses and parents want to move to Oklahoma with such steep reductions in budget and with furlough days.