OSSBA issued a trio of legislative alerts today on several key bills that are in committee next week. You can read more about each bill and find contact information for the respective committees in the emails below: Reading Sufficiency Act (third-grade reading bill/retention) and mandatory grading policies: Read the alert Proposed changes to ad […]

By Christy Watson My 9-year-old son spent the first day of his fall break getting braces. My husband and I considered whether we should wait until he’s a bit older but opted for what we agreed offers the best long-term outcome. Hopefully, this dental intervention will prevent some future issues that might be more painful […]

On Thursday, the state Board of Education will consider approving 107 emergency teaching certificates. If approved, Oklahoma will have more than 1,000 people teaching with emergency certificates for the second straight year. A few things to consider: Nearly half of the 926 emergency certificates approved to date are for early childhood and elementary education. The […]

OSSBA’s new website and member portal will launch Aug. 30 and is designed to provide school board members and administrative employees of member school districts easy access to information related to board member training events, board member credits and more. How do I access the portal? Visit www.ossba.org. On the upper right hand side, click […]

By Christy Watson School finance is complicated. Many outside the public education sector have only a general notion of how schools are funded. The mechanism is fuzzy even for many of those working in schools. So when educators and public education advocates start talking about the need for more money, the question almost always comes […]

By Mike Mullins President, OSSBA Board of Directors  When the Oklahoma State School Boards Association and the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration launched For the People: A Vision for Oklahoma Public Education more than three years ago, we really didn’t know where the project would lead. What we knew for sure is that a […]

By Shawn Hime I know that must seem like a pie-in-the-sky question. This has not been the year anyone in education hoped for or imagined a year ago. School district leaders went into the 2015-2016 school year with cautious optimism. By the time January rolled around, revenue failures began dominating the headlines and decimating school […]

By Christy Watson  Notoriously bad. Often unsafe. Those children. Those schools. Seeing those phrases on paper last week from a group tied to the State Chamber of Oklahoma to justify school vouchers left me wondering whether to be angry or cry. I opted for both. Can we have a conversation about OUR schools and OUR […]