'A Lot Of Lies,' Ryan Walters Responds To Edmond Public Schools Challenge

After multiple Oklahoma school districts announced their support for Edmond Public Schools in their challenge to the state department of education, State Superintendent Ryan Walters responded to the district’s stance.

“There's a lot of lies that the Edmond superintendent has been pushing out,” Walters said. “For one, we have been investigating parents' complaints for months in this district. When we got the complaints, there were about two specific books.”

The books in question, The Kite Runner  and The Glass Castle, feature graphic depiction of sexual assault and other adult content, but contain no images.

“We reached out to the district,” Walters said. “We've had a committee look over these books, and we see two recommendations here. Number one, this type of material that's very sexual, should only be made available to a certain age group. The school agreed with us.”

Walters said he has not personally seen pornography in his school from his time teaching in McAlester, but that he has when touring other school districts in the state.

“I didn't see it in my school. I've seen it in schools all over the state,” Walters said. “We highlighted some of the districts across the state that were putting books like these on their shelves, Gender Queer and Flamer are two of the the worst offenders of this.”

The graphic novels Gender Queer: A Memoir and Flamer both discuss adolescence as someone who identifies as LGBTQ+. Gender Queer: A Memoir discusses the author's experience growing up and discovering their identity, and Flamer tells the story of a boy bullied for his appearance and sexuality while at summer camp.

“What you see here are districts that want no accountability,” Walters said. “They want to go back to a time when pornography was on the shelves in our schools. They want books like Gender Queer and Flamer made available to kids of all ages, and we're not going to stand for it, we have to have accountability.”

Oklahoma’s attorney general Gentner Drummond has previously said if there must be a rule on what content should be made available to children, it should go through the state legislature, not the department of education, a view Walters said he disagrees with.

“They [the attorney general’s office] don't have a point,” Walters said. “We have state law, which gives us the ability to make rules around specific instances like this. We have never had this challenge… but he {Attorney General Drummond] has not challenged any of our specific rules. He has not done that.”

In response to the death of Nex Benedict, a nonbinary Owasso High School student who died after an altercation with other students at the school, Walters said he would continue to fight against “left-wing indoctrination.”

“I believe every student is created in God's own image,” Walters said. “They're all precious individuals, and we need to be treating them that way. We're not going to allow left-wing indoctrination in the classroom, we're not going to allow any kind of gender ideology being pushed on kids.”