Ryan Walters On State Supreme Court Ruling In Edmond Public Schools' Lawsuit Against OSDE

The State Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Edmond Public Schools, concluding a months-long legal battle with the State Department of Education.

Edmond Public Schools took a stand, filing a lawsuit against the state's demand to remove the books 'The Kite Runner' and 'The Glass Castle'.

The court ruled that the state has no jurisdiction to remove books off library shelves.

State Superintendent Ryan Walters fought hard to remove these books from Edmond library shelves.

He said the final ruling was unfortunate and has angered his agency as well as parents in the district.

"I am not going to stop fighting for you to get this filth out of our schools. We are exploring every possible solution moving forward," Walters said. "My agency will not rest until we've got our school safe."

He said he is not giving up on his mission to "remove pornography from school."

He said he will be looking into more legal options and plans to work directly with parents to force schools to remove the books.

"Parents have been very clear. They want their kids to focus on math, reading science; they want age-appropriate materials in the classroom," Walters said.

Walters said that moving forward, he is open to working with local school boards, which the judge ruled have ultimate control over the schools.

He said before he can do that, the school board election process needs to change.

"We've got to get left-wing activists out of school boards," Walters said.

He said school board elections should be moved to the general cycle because he sees school boards all over the state that do not represent the values of their community. He attributes this to low voter turnout.

"We've got to get that move; we've continued to see very low participation in school board elections," Walters said.

On Monday, a judge temporarily injuncted House Bill 1775. The bill, which was signed into law in 2021, prohibits teachers from teaching certain concepts on race and gender in the state’s public schools.

Walters said he is proud that Oklahoma has worked to become one of the first states to ban critical race theory, and even with this ruling, he said the state will continue to make sure the law is enforceable.

"You can not indoctrinate kids in the state of Oklahoma," Walters said. "That is going to be what we continue to fight for, for our parents to make sure that their kids aren't being indoctrinated, they're being educated."

In the injunction ruling, a judge said the wording was confusing, but Walters said he disagreed.

"We have the eight criteria for what would violate a critical race theory ban; you can't tell somebody that their skin color is inferior to somebody else's skin color; that sounds pretty clear to me," Walters said.