For decades, law enforcement officers have brutalized Black and brown people. They have targeted us either because of the color of our skin or the assumed fact that this society in large part disregards Black and brown people so much that any harm done to us would be overlooked. Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin felt so safe, so protected in this country that he kneeled on a man’s neck for more than nine minutes, killing him, while witnesses recorded Chauvin doing so. In Oklahoma, a Black 74-year-old grandmother and nurse filed a lawsuit against three Oklahoma City police officers she said broke her arm while they were arresting her son on Aug. 24, 2020. Ruby Jones told KOKO News when she tried to ask officers who had barged into her home what was going on, “they came and they pushed me to the side.”
These are the people Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt apparently sees fit to teach our children. He signed an executive order on Jan. 18 allowing state employees, including police officers, to serve as substitute teachers while receiving the compensation and benefits they would otherwise be due.
Stitt wrote in the order:
Recent staffing shortages are affecting many Oklahoma public schools’ ability to remain open or otherwise to provide adequate numbers of teachers to impart the best education possible to students in our state. As I have repeatedly made clear, students deserve and need the right to an in-person education, and the state has a responsibility to ensure that right remains intact. The alternatives—closure of schools and/or virtual classrooms in lieu of in-person teaching—adversely impact our children’s futures, parents’ ability to work and provide for their families, and our economy that has thrived as Oklahoma has remained open for business. In light of these issues and having heard from concerned Oklahomans, I find it necessary to immediately implement a creative strategy to utilize our state agencies dedicated and talented workforce to fill a critical gap.
Oddly enough, the governor hasn’t found it necessary to support the measures health experts recommend to slow the spread of the coronavirus. While hospitalizations were tripling in the state last July, Stitt was fighting schools that wanted to implement mandates requiring students to wear masks. “Again, this is about personal responsibility. This is about freedoms,” he said.
Actually, this is about protecting teachers or requiring them to risk their lives to come to work. Erin Martinez Rhodes, a former pre-K teacher’s aide at Skyview Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, died two months after the governor's press conference. She contracted COVID-19 and was on a ventilator with a collapsed lung before her death on Sept. 12, 2021, according to a GoFundMe page for her family.
Even after Rhodes' death, Stitt worked to block a temporary injunction from halting the effects of a GOP law preventing school districts from implementing mask mandates. “The governor’s position has not changed,” Carly Atchison, Stitt’s spokeswoman, wrote in a statement Tulsa World obtained last October. “Parents have a fundamental right to make health care decisions for their child, and he supports the attorney general’s work to ensure parents’ rights and the laws of Oklahoma are upheld.” The governor criticized an Oklahoma city school district that fired six teachers who had refused to wear masks last November. “This is about a school district not following state law. This isn’t a debate about masks,” he claimed in a video statement.
Indirectly leaving students at risk apparently wasn’t enough for the governor, so he allowed unmasked police officers in uniform to man classrooms. The Moore Police Department actually bragged that its officers, shown in photographs without masks, were teaching students. “This week, several on-duty officers are serving in the classroom as schools continue to face teacher and staff shortages,” the department said in a tweet MIC media site found.
The photos really should be a caricature of the school-to-prison pipeline.
Black students in Tulsa Public Schools were two times more likely to be suspended than their white peers from 2017-2018, according to state data cited in The Black Wall Street Times. "While this school-to-prison-pipeline, a social phenomenon involving disproportionate school discipline rates among minorities, is even worse nationally, TPS and other public school districts in Oklahoma have a long way to go in closing the gap between white and black student suspension rates," journalist Deon Osborne wrote. "This comes as Oklahoma has surpassed Louisiana to become the incarceration capitol of the world earlier this year." Osborne desribed how "explosive classroom sizes, teacher shortages, and underfunded schools" impacted school discipline. The rate of suspension for Black students at Tulsa Public Schools was one in seven in 2017, while the rate for white students that year was one in 20.
This was before the pandemic. “The teacher pipeline and sub shortages were issues before the pandemic, and COVID has exacerbated these problems," Oklahoma Education Association President Katherine Bishop said in a statement on the governor's executive order. "Hopefully state employees and businesses can help in the short term, but we need to continue searching for long-term solutions.”
Those solutions, whether short- or long-term, can not come at the expense of the social and emotional health of Black and brown students. It’s important to remind everyone that their experiences with police may not trigger feelings of safety and protection.
Warning: This video contains profanity and shows a Florida deputy slamming a Black high school student on the concrete so hard she appears to lose consciousness. The footage may be triggering for some viewers.
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