Oklahoma State Rep. Tom Gann of Inola, one of the most principled members of the Republican caucus, has issued a set of reforms designed to increase transparency and the power of individual members of the House (each of whom was elected to represent an equal-sized constituency) and to decrease the centralized control of an imperial speakership and the lobbyists who control him. To understand the unhealthy dynamics in the Oklahoma House of Representatives that developed principally under the imperial speakership of Charles McCall, I encourage you to read the Oklahoma State Capital, a Substack by former State Rep. Jason Murphey (R-Guthrie), who served in the House for a term-limited 12 years, from 2006 to 2018. During that time, his optimism about the initially reform-minded Republican majority gave way to despair about a toxic culture driven by lobbyists, laziness, and centralized control. One of Murphey's most recent pieces deals with the impact of the new Speaker's new committee structure and how it may undermine grassroots-driven efforts at stemming "the government-subsidized invasion of the fiberglass-shedding, forever-chemical dropping, eagle-killing, sunset-destroying, headache-inducing, light-polluting, unable-to-be-disposed-of, likely-non-economically-viable-sans-subsidization, massive wind turbine invasions." A month earlier, Murphey wrote about the process of assimilating freshman House members, many of whom had run against the system and defeated better-funded, PAC-backed opponents. Here is Gann's press release from today December 30, 2024:

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Gann Proposes Sweeping Reforms to Restore Transparency to House of Representatives OKLAHOMA CITY - In a far-reaching, and transformative effort to modernize the Oklahoma House of Representatives, Rep. Tom Gann, R-Inola, has sponsored a reform package - House Resolution 1001 - designed to distribute power, promote transparency and reinvigorate the legislative process. His reforms aim to end the culture of opacity and concentration of authority that he says has hindered the chamber's effectiveness for far too long. "The time has come to ensure the House of Representatives becomes an institution of laws, not of one man," Gann said. "For years, our legislative process has stagnated, with decisions made behind closed doors and power centralized into the hands of one individual, the House speaker, who is elected by a single House district and not the people of Oklahoma as a whole. In recent years, at best, the House has simply marked time, failing to embrace new transparency measures. At worst, it has regressed, relying on secretive processes controlled by a single person." "No one individual should hold the power to appoint committee members, designate chairs, assign legislation, block legislation approved by committees, control the multi-million-dollar House budget, withhold resources from other members, or introduce legislation outside the normal guidelines that apply to everyone else. This reform fundamentally changes that dynamic, redistributing authority to ensure fairness, transparency and member-driven governance." Gann's proposal is a comprehensive effort to decentralize authority, empower individual members, and ensure legislative operations are conducted openly and accountably. Key highlights include delegating certain speaker powers, creating new transparency safeguards and improving member-driven processes. The package's proposed reforms include:

• Delegating Speaker's Powers
• Many of the speaker's powers would be delegated to a newly proposed Governance Committee, which would operate transparently making its decisions by recorded vote and would be reflective of the composition of the House membership.
• Floor consideration powers would be transferred to a floor leader elected by the House and limited to a single term.
• Member-Driven Process

The proposal would establish an actual open general appropriations process through which the general appropriations document is built and debated in open committee by all House members, is advanced early in the session, and removed from the current, behind-closed-doors process. Members would be empowered to designate two priority bills annually. These bills must be heard in committee and, if passed, must also be considered on the House floor. This ensures the voice of all Oklahomans is heard and a vote is taken on these proposals. Members could enter motions without needing prior approval from the floor leader. The proposal would restore the authority of the House to consider issues, even those bottled up in committee, if the will of the committee is out of sync with the will of the full House. House Transparency Committee The proposal would establish a five-member Transparency Committee composed of the newest members of the House. This would ensure the newest House members are aware of the need for new transparencies and openness while providing the committee and the House with the services of those who are least likely to have been impacted by the current culture of opaqueness. The committee would be charged with auditing compliance with House rules, recommending transparency improvements, and promoting best practices to make the Oklahoma House the most transparent legislative body in the nation. Restoring Legislative Order The proposal would eliminate the ability of powerful House members to create new bills out of thin air and/or to bypass committees prior to House consideration of substantive legislation. It would restore the requirement for titles and enacting clauses to remain intact on House-approved bills. "This package represents a seismic shift in how the House operates," Gann said. "It would distribute power among the members, foster a culture of transparency, remove the influence of special-interest money and the few politicians who seek to broker their closed-door power to channel that money, and ensure the legislative process reflects the will of the people rather than the control of one person." Gann emphasized the importance of the House Transparency Committee, calling it "the most important contribution even the newest members of the House could make--ensuring that transparency is a permanent and evolving feature of this institution. We are setting a new standard for openness, accountability, and member-driven governance that will serve as a model for other states to follow." Gann is calling on House leaders to bring the proposal to the floor, for a recorded vote, during the upcoming legislative session. "Oklahoma deserves a legislature that is transparent, effective and accountable to the people it serves," Gann said. "This proposal delivers just that." -END-

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- December 30, 2024 at 06:10PM
Tom Gann proposes Oklahoma House transparency reforms
Click the headline to read the full story.

Earlier this month, Scott Pendleton, a long-time reader and friend of BatesLine, told me about an op-ed he had written, providing some historical perspective on the topic of special education, looking back to the passage in 1975 of the predecessor of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the growth in the proportion of students receiving special education, the growth of autism, and the implications of the legal requirement for mainstreaming of special-education students. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Pendleton's conclusions, I think you'll find his perspective thought-provoking, which is why I offered to publish it here at BatesLine. I have added links where possible to the news articles and editorials mentioned. In the Sunday, October 15, 1989, Tulsa World, the editorial board wrote on the increasing share of education dollars spent on special education and urged separate education for special ed students.

Without passing judgment on the wisdom of the programs, Tulsans must at least recognize that schools have inherited a tremendous social and financial burden that was unheard of only a few years ago. The problem is not confined to Tulsa, of course. It is one that legislators must recognize. A sensible course would be to set up a separate system of special education so that the public school system can concentrate on its larger mission of educating ordinary children.

As this is a sensitive subject, and as I serve as a board member of Tulsa Classical Academy, I feel compelled to say that my comments above are in an individual capacity and don't represent the views of the TCA board, administration, or faculty. Mr. Pendleton is not affiliated with TCA. I am pleased to say that TCA has recently made some significant improvements in the special education department as TCA works to ensure that the special needs of all its students are addressed in full compliance with Federal and Oklahoma laws while at the same time upholding the high academic standards of the Hillsdale K-12 American classical curriculum.

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Reading test scores at Tulsa Public Schools have not improved, attendees at the June 17, 2024, school board meeting were told. Now what? Round up the usual suspects? Those would be the hypothetical "bad teachers" or the tight-fisted state legislature. Although both teachers and legislators often blame each other, neither is willing to point to a third group, the gorilla in the room that the public does not see: students who are so brain-damaged as to be unteachable, uncontrollable, and downright dangerous. Why the reticence? Teachers don't want to publicize the magnitude of the problem for fear of stampeding capable students and their state funding into homeschool or private schools. Politicians pretend the problem doesn't exist so that no one will demand them to address it. Yet, thanks to the 50-year-old federal law that requires "mainstreaming" such students, public schools are fast on their way to becoming asylums for the growing percentage of students who require special education and for those who have no other education option. As overall enrollment drops, there are fewer state dollars to provide pricey special education to ever more students needing it. Fingerpointing about test scores, teacher quality, and adequacy of funding completely obscures the real question: Why, why is the number of special education students surging? What is happening to us, and to our children? To understand where we are today, let's back up to 1989. Thirty-five years ago, Oklahoma was faced with a public education crisis. Language, music, art, field trips, advanced math courses, and related teacher, librarian, and nurse positions were being eliminated. Classrooms had far fewer textbooks than students. Despite a $275 million state tax increase just two years earlier, money in 1989 was of course still the issue. Teacher pay ranked 48th in the nation. A starting teacher earned $15,000, while the Oklahoma average was $23,583. In 58 of 77 counties teachers could qualify for food stamps. Per-pupil expenditures of $3,000 also ranked 48th. In an editorial titled "Our Eroding Schools," the Tulsa World warned citizens to wake up or else schools would continue a downward "spin that might soon be irreversible." [Tulsa World, April 24, 1989, p. A-6] Contributing to the crunch was the trend of making schools the one-stop provider of everything a student needed: clothes, shoes, medicine, meals, as well as counseling about sex, HIV, drugs, and race relations. "If you want us to be social service agencies, we can do that" but only with adequate funding, Tulsa County Superintendent Kara Gae Wilson told the Tulsa World. [October 8, 1989, p. A-1] Meanwhile schools faced another costly trend - rising numbers of special education students. A 1975 federal law, today known by the acronym IDEA, required school districts to provide a "free appropriate public education" to all students from birth to age 21. That half-century-old bill had 29 co-sponsors in the Senate, of whom only one - Joe Biden - is still alive. Promised federal funding to support that effort was short billions of dollars year after year, further burdening Oklahoma schools. For example, in 1969, when enrollment at Tulsa Public Schools peaked at 80,000 students, a mere two percent were enrolled in special education. By 1989 TPS enrollment had halved, while the SPED share grew to 13 percent of students and to a quarter of the district's $124 million budget. Estimates of what educating a SPED student should cost ranged from $13,000 annually up to $33,000, depending on the severity of the disability. TPS was spending $6,500, of which the federal government provided just $266, and the state $3,000. Browsing the news coverage from 1989, a reader is struck by the unflinching reporting and frank conversations. Words like "handicapped" and "retarded" and "vagrant" had not yet been outlawed by advocacy groups self-deputized as vocabulary police. A particularly blunt editorial in the Tulsa Tribune railed against the US Supreme Court. In the fall of 1989, the high court ruled that a New Hampshire school must continue special education services for a child who was so disabled that school officials deemed the services a wasted effort. Deriding the ruling as "compassion gone wild," the editorial said, "What the court seems to have lost sight of is the difference between a school and a hospital." [November 29, 1989, p. A-14] The editorial could just as easily have been talking about Wes Franklin, an eight-year-old TPS student who could not walk, talk, see, nor control his bowel movements. He was fed through a tube in his stomach. Doctors had told his family that his rare, inherited condition would worsen until death in a matter of months. Nonetheless, Wes's parents insisted that he attend school. All through 1989 they fought TPS for services they believed were his right under IDEA. He was receiving a half-hour of physical therapy once a week. They wanted Wes to receive it daily, as well as up to an hour daily of occupational therapy, and the attention of a full-time aide. "I think everything points to the school dragging its feet," his mother said to reporters, "in hopes that Wes will die and it won't have to spend money on him." "The school district is providing an appropriate program," was the TPS lawyer's response. "The parents will always want more." The Franklins lost the case in 1990; Wes passed away the next year. Today Wes's sister, Elizabeth Franklin, is a family therapist in Broken Arrow. "My parents always felt very proud of how fiercely they advocated for Wes with Tulsa Public Schools," she recalls. [Wes Franklin's story and his family's formal complaint against TPS were covered by Tulsa Tribune reporters Diana Nelson Jones and Cece Todd and photographer David Crenshaw in the May 25, December 15, December 16, and December 22, 1989, and March 23 and May 30, 1990, editions.] As the 1989 education crisis dragged on, sometimes resentment was voiced against special education as detracting from educating non-SPED students. "We know who's paying for [special education] and it's the regular child in Oklahoma," a teachers union official complained to Task Force 2000, a committee appointed to present education and funding reform ideas to the Legislature after a special session in the summer adjourned without results. [Tulsa World, September 24, 1989, p. A1] To some, special education wasn't just underfunded, it was utterly unforeseen. "When many of those parents went to school, no one ever had heard of a learning disability," a SPED coordinator told the Tulsa Tribune. [May 29, 1989, p. 8A] Let that sink in for a moment: As recently as 1989, there existed parents who had never heard of a learning disability. These days it seems like there's at least one such child in every family. Public awareness changed thanks to Rain Man, which had debuted in movie theatres the previous December. "No gigantic public education or PR effort could have produced the sensational awareness [of autism] that Rain Man brought to the national and international radar screen," according to the late Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist who was a consultant on the Academy Award-winning film. The prevalence of autism was around one in 10,000 in 1980, but had been on the rise nationally. By 1989 prevalence was estimated as high as one in 276 eight-year-olds. Oklahoma was just starting to deal with the needs of such students. "We had a workshop last summer, and that was our biggest effort to date," a special education official with the Oklahoma Department of Education acknowledged to the Tulsa World. Since then, the rate of autism has soared while the cause remains vigorously disputed. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in 36 eight-year-olds is autistic. Oklahoma has experienced that dramatic increase. Between 2002 and 2019, according to OSDE data, the number of all students rose 12 percent; SPED students, 34 percent; autistic students, 788 percent. Sixty-two percent of school districts had no autistic students in 2002; by 2019, only 15 percent had none. On the road to today, a teacher walkout in 1990 forced a tax increase out of the Oklahoma Legislature. The resulting public displeasure resulted in ballot initiatives that created term limits for Legislators and a required vote of 75 percent in each house to raise taxes. Continued challenges for teachers led to another walkout in 2018, followed by a rare successful supermajority vote to raise taxes again. Last year's federal statistics for the 50 states rank Oklahoma 28th in population, 26th in K-12 students, 21st in SPED K-12 students, and 10th in percentage of K-12 students who are in special education. Almost one in five Oklahoma students now receives special education services. Yes, it does sound harsh and cruel to talk as if hapless SPED students are villains. They are not. They deserve compassion for a condition that is not their fault. But have you ever considered the psychological impact on a healthy child when an autistic child erupts in class and turns over all the desks? If you don't know, the teacher is only allowed to lead all the other students out ("clear the room") till the episode passes. And then pick up the shattered pieces of the classroom, to say nothing of the other students' shattered nerves. No wonder kind, caring, inspiring teachers are giving up and quitting in droves. They have an impossible job. Back to the big question: What is happening to us? What did this to us? (Since I first wrote this, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his cabinet with a mission to "make America healthy again.") Here's what a Tulsa doctor told me and others over lunch when asked what he thought of "the vaccine-autism controversy." Without a heartbeat's hesitation, the doctor said, "I had three or four young patients go autistic immediately after I gave them the MMR vaccine. And I knew that was the reason. So, I stopped giving that vaccine." I was dumbfounded. When a medical professional is so sure of something based on his training and repeated observation that he permanently alters his practice of medicine, that's pretty compelling. I e-mailed that to the Tulsa World the next day, urging them to interview the doctor. I thought I was handing our local newspaper a Pulitzer Prize on a platter. "Just his opinion," they scoffed. And later, the Tulsa World told me, "We don't publish anything that contradicts public health authorities so as not to confuse the public." Can you imagine any other medical topic about which mere journalists would presume to know more than a doctor who was a repeated eye-witness? Well, thanks to Covid we all have a better idea of just how far "public health authorities" and their shills in the media ought to be trusted. By the way, the doctor whom the Tulsa World declined to interview was Tom Coburn, who as a US Senator had earned nationwide respect for his integrity. Sadly, Dr. Coburn is no longer with us, but Tulsa has other doctors who assert that vaccines made their own child autistic. The pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, likes to cite "the Danish study" as proving that vaccines do not cause autism. In fact, that's not what was studied. Only the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine was considered. The most that can be concluded from the study is that a child was no more likely to get autism from the MMR vaccine than from some other cause - such as one of the many other vaccines given to toddlers? Meanwhile, more than a hundred other studies have suggested a link between vaccines and autism. Post-Covid, are we ready yet to consider that the hotly debated crisis of public education is but a manifestation of the discussion-suppressed crisis of child health, and that vaccines just might be doing far more harm than good? Are we ready to hit the brakes on "mainstreaming" so that those who can learn will not be traumatized by seeing their classrooms destroyed and their teachers attacked and harmed by students with neurological damage? Are there any legislators in Oklahoma willing to spend a few days observing classrooms and talking to teachers - most especially to those who've left the profession - to grasp the absurdity of mainstreaming brain-damaged, diaper-wearing teenage students with normal students? And to grasp just how much more money the Legislature must provide so that special education students get the services they need?

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HISTORICAL NOTES: I have added links to Newspapers.com and to NewsBank. NewsBank is an online service, available to Tulsa Library cardholders, which has text of Tulsa World articles from 1989 to the present and Tulsa Tribune articles from 1989 to the paper's demise on September 30, 1992. 1989 was when Newspaper Publishing Corp., which handled printing, circulation, and classifieds for the World and Tribune under their Joint Operating Agreement, began computerizing content. When the World refused to negotiate an extension to the JOA, the Tribune was sold to the World and was shut down. Consequently, the two papers' stories are mixed together in the same database, and all Tribune stories in the NewsBank database are labeled as Tulsa World. Using NewsBank and newspapers.com in combination, I was able to determine which stories mentioned by Scott Pendleton were in which newspaper. Unfortunately, there is still a 25-year gap in online access to the Tribune archive: Newspapers.com's Tribune holdings end in April 1964, and NewsBank's begin in January 1989. The court case mentioned above was Timothy W. v. Rochester. The US Supreme Court denied certiorari to the Rochester, N. H., school district's appeal of the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals decision in the case.
- December 29, 2024 at 05:28PM
Guest opinion by Scott Pendleton: The cost of special-education mainstreaming
Click the headline to read the full story.

Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012 Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today. My Christmas eve was spent shopping mostly, making runs to various grocery stores and then back to the house with the perishables. My daughter and my wife drove back together from our daughter's college, with two overnight stops along the way, and they arrived shortly after the Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols candlelight service at our church began. They were in time for some of the carols and to hear our pastor, Tanner Cline, dramatically and energetically recite his rhyming Christmas homily on why the angels sang. Afterwards they and I and our youngest son had dinner together at the Texas Roadhouse in Tulsa Hills, which closed at 8 p.m. With my wife and daughter exhausted from their drive and preparations for Christmas behind the curve, we are taking it easy Christmas morning and afternoon, will see some family later in the day, and will have our big celebration on St. Stephen's Day. At some point, we will listen to this year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, and as we drove through the rain looking at Christmas lights in midtown Tulsa, we listened to the solo chorister sing the opening verse of "Once in Royal David's City," the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, and the bidding prayer that opens the service. While Lessons and Carols is an Anglican tradition, it is encouraging to see how it has escaped its cradle and found a home in Bible-believing churches of many different denominations. As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. My 8th grade year was the first year I was required to attend, and I expected to be bored. Instead, I was entranced. My last two years in high school, I was a member of the Concert Chorus and was privileged to join in the singing of Tomas Luis de Victoria's setting of O Magnum Mysterium, an ancient poem about the wonder that "animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger." As a senior, I was one of the 12 Madrigal Singers. The six ladies sang the plainsong setting of Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today Christ Is Born), repeating it as the students processed into their places. Then all 12 of us sang Peter J. Wilhousky's arrangement of Carol of the Bells, with the 3 basses landing on the final satisfying "Bom!" on that low G. At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger. Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child. But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese. And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love. Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore. These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer." In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life? The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe. This year that number includes a young man named Josh Rodriguez, 32, a cellist and graduate of Edison High School and the University of Tulsa who passed away suddenly earlier this month. Josh came to love Anglican liturgy and in 2022 was ordained as a deacon in the Anglican Church of North America. Josh led online daily office (morning and evening prayer) for his parish during the pandemic, and I have no doubt that he loved the tradition of Lessons and Carols. Which brings us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old", which describes "another shore" as "the heavenly country bright":

Holy Jesus, every day Keep us in the narrow way; And, when earthly things are past, Bring our ransomed souls at last Where they need no star to guide, Where no clouds Thy glory hide. In the heavenly country bright, Need they no created light; Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown, Thou its Sun which goes not down; There forever may we sing Alleluias to our King!

The final verses of the processional hymn also speak to that blessed hope:

And our eyes at last shall see Him, Through His own redeeming love, For that Child so dear and gentle Is our Lord in Heaven above; And He leads His children on To the place where He is gone. Not in that poor lowly stable, With the oxen standing by, We shall see Him; but in Heaven, Set at God's right Hand on high ; When like stars His children crowned, All in white shall wait around.

MORE: "Once in Royal David's City," the processional hymn from King's College Lessons and Carols, was last Christmas's Hymn of the Week at Word and Song by Debra and Anthony Esolen. This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge marked its 106th anniversary. You can listen to the service for the next four weeks on the BBC Sounds website. A pre-recorded video of the service, called Carols from King's, is available internationally for download at a price of £8.33 (about $10 US). You can view the booklet for the service and an article on the history of the service here. (Direct link to service booklet PDF. Direct link to history booklet PDF.) The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." It was repeated this year, so you can listen online through January 16, 2025. It is also available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From the 2018 service booklet:

The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880. A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.

MORE: John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:

Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.

STILL MORE: At her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker has written a great many articles about the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the Christian year. This Twitter thread and this blog entry will lead you to a series of articles on the "O Antiphons," the Latin poems of praise to Christ that are read at vespers over the week prior to Christmas day, each one naming a title of Christ reflecting a different aspect of His glory -- Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring (Morning Star), King of Nations, and Emmanuel (God with us). Her essay from 1st Sunday in Advent 2020 reflects on Advent, Christmas, and time, on 2020's lack of holidays, the impossibility of "pressing pause" on life, the origins of Christmas and claims of cultural appropriation, the emotional impact of the season. A worthwhile ramble on a gray day. It's all worth reading, but this passage stood out to me, and it cites that wonderful phrase from the bidding prayer that undoes me every year:

The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.) It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'. You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful. It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.

Just remember: If you didn't fulfill every Christmas tradition you wanted to honor, give every gift you wanted to give, sing every carol on or before December 25, there are still eleven days of Christmas remaining! RELATED: Tom Holland writing in Unherd in December 2020 on The Myth of Pagan Christmas. Holland takes us back to the Christmas feast at the court of King Athelstan in Amesbury in 932, and looks back from there to the idea of measuring time from the birth of Christ:

Bede, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, had recognised that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier, he had fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, by Bede's reckoning, were properly measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The effect was to render the calendar itself as Christian. The great drama of Christ's incarnation and birth stood at the very centre of both the turning of the year and the passage of the millennia. The fact that pagans too had staged midwinter festivities presented no threat to this conceptualisation, but quite the opposite. Dimly, inadequately, gropingly, they had anticipated the supreme miracle: the coming into darkness of the true Light, by which every man who comes into the world is lit.

He concludes with this:

This year of all years [2020] -- with a clarity denied us in happier times -- it is possible to recognise in Christmas its fundamentally Christian character. The light shining in the darkness proclaimed by the festival is a very theological light, one that promises redemption from the miseries of a fallen world. In a time of pandemic, when the festive season is haunted by the shadows of sickness and bereavement, of loneliness and disappointment, of poverty and dread, the power of this theology, one that has fuelled the celebration of Christmas for century after century, becomes easier, perhaps, to recognise than in a time of prosperity. The similarities shared by the feast day of Christ's birth with other celebrations that, over the course of history, have been held in the dead of winter should not delude us into denying a truth so evident as to verge on the tautologous: Christmas is a thoroughly Christian festival.

- December 25, 2024
A bidding prayer for Christmas, A. D. 2024
Click the headline to read the full story.

You might hope to have all your Christmas dinners in someone's home around a big table surrounded by throngs of family, but that's not always possible for one reason or another. The Christmas after my father-in-law passed away was also our second Christmas as a married couple. My mother-in-law, normally the "hostess with the mostest," was not in the mood for a big production, so Christmas dinner was at the restaurant at the Rogers Holiday Inn, just me, my wife, and her mother and sister. Whatever your reasons for dining out on Christmas day, there aren't many options, but there are more than you might think. KOTV News on 6 published a list, but it wasn't thoroughly fact-checked. Whoever compiled the list didn't bother looking at the websites or social media pages of the restaurants on the list. Cracker Barrel locations and Roosevelt's have explicitly said they're closed; Logan's Roadhouse doesn't have anything on web or social media one way or the other. There's an India Palace in Springfield, Missouri, that will be open tomorrow, but the Tulsa India Palace doesn't mention Christmas hours on their website, and the Tulsa India Palace isn't on Facebook. Mr. Kim's doesn't say they're open Christmas day -- they were open Christmas eve, and their OpenTable doesn't show any availability on Christmas day. Here is KOTV's list, winnowed down to those that have explicitly said that they're open, plus a few more that I checked based on other sources. Best to call that number before you go.

• Black Bear Diner - 9026 E. 71st St. - (918) 459-8711: The chain has a tradition, going back to its earliest days, of being open for Christmas, but the linked video says that most locations honor the tradition. Nothing explicit one way or the other about the Tulsa Woodland Hills location.
• The Chalkboard - 1324 S. Main St. - (918) 582-1964: They have a Christmas lunch buffet, but OpenTable says they have no availability
• Hooters - 8108 East 61st - 918-250-4668: Open 4 pm to midnight
• Main Street Tavern - 200 S. Main St., Broken Arrow - (918) 872-1414: Open with a limited menu (burgers) from 4 pm
• Mandarin Taste - 9107 S. Sheridan Road - (918) 878-7998: Open normal hours -- 11:00 am to 9:30 pm, with a break from 3 pm to 4 pm
• Mizu Sushi & Bar - 8320 E 71st St. - (918) 449-8068: All you can eat sushi, opens at 11 a.m.
• Rabbit Hole Tulsa - 116 S Elgin Avenue - (539) 664-4232: Kitchen open 7 pm to 1 am.
• Red Lobster - 4525 E. 51st St. - (918) 496-3323 & 6728 S. Memorial Drive - (918) 250-5330: Open regular hours, 11:00 am to 9:00 pm
• Saltgrass Steakhouse - 4550 E. Skelly Drive - (918) 488-8794: Open from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm
• Scooters South 40 - 24100 East Hwy 51, Broken Arrow: 10th annual Christmas dinner at 4 pm. "Feel free to bring a side dish or just yourself."
• Texas de Brazil - 7021 S. Memorial Drive - 918-921-7994: Open 11:00 am to 9:00 pm, dinner menu and pricing all day ($54 per person, not including drinks, desserts, taxes, and tips)
• Waffle House, multiple locations: Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year

Restaurants listed by KOTV that don't explicitly mention being open on their own website or social media:

• Kirin Asian and Sushi Cuisine - 8041 S. Mingo Road - (918) 893-8006: They were open Christmas 2023 and on Thanksgiving, but there's no indication on their Facebook page or website that they will be open this Christmas.
• The New Royal Dragon - 6528 E. 101st St. - (918) 299-1888: Their order.online site allows you to order for pickup between 11 am and 4 pm on Christmas, but perhaps that's an oversight.

Bars listed by KOTV -- minimal or no food available:

• 473 - 2224 E Admiral Blvd. - (918) 202-8835: They're open 5 pm to midnight, but it's a bar and doesn't serve food.
• Grumpy's Tavern - 4775 S. Harvard Ave. - (918) 582-3637: Open from 5 pm, but it's a bar, and I don't see any reference to food. It's got a Facebook presence but is not on Google Maps.

EatThisNotThat has a list of 25 restaurant chains that are generally open on Christmas day, but with the caveat that hours may be limited and not all locations may be open, so check with the location you intend to visit. Chains with a Tulsa presence, in addition to those listed above, include IHOP, McDonald's, Denny's, Burger King, Dunkin', and Starbucks.
- December 24, 2024 at 09:45PM
Tulsa restaurants open for Christmas 2024
Click the headline to read the full story.

Well, it's filing time again; I know you're busy. I can see that far-away look in your eye. You've got Christmas gifts to buy, and weather's freezing, But there's just one day to go of filing time.

As many readers are no doubt aware, I am a board member of Tulsa Classical Academy, the first classical charter school and first Hillsdale K-12 member school in Oklahoma. TCA is in its second year of operation, and early next year will be the fifth anniversary of the initial meetings to organize the school, convened by founding board president Nathan Phelps in 2020 just before the pandemic. (What I'm about to say is my opinion only, well-grounded though it is, and does not represent TCA, the TCA board, administration, faculty, students, or parents.) One of the distinctive characteristics of TCA is that we are unapologetically patriotic, and inspiring a love of the United States of America is one of our educational goals and one of the goals of the Hillsdale curriculum. If you walk the halls of TCA, you will see a display of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (including the two articles that were not approved with the other ten). There is a collection of portraits of great Americans. At the main entrance there is a reproduction of the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River. The 1776 Curriculum, the American history and civics portion of the Hillsdale K-12 program, doesn't ignore or gloss over the tragic aspects of our history. The introduction to the 1776 Curriculum includes the following in the list of truths on which the curriculum is based:

• That civic knowledge, personal virtue, patriotism, respect for the rule of law, and civil free speech are absolutely necessary for young students to learn for a free and self-governing society to persevere.
• That the more important thing in American history is that which has endured rather than that which has passed, that is, America's founding principles which have outlasted and extinguished from law various forms of evil, such as slavery, racism, and other violations of the equal protection of natural rights.
• That although the United States of America is by no means perfect, it is unprecedented in the annals of human history for the extraordinary degrees of freedom, peace, and prosperity available to its people and to those who immigrate to her shores.
• That these unprecedented benefits are the result of its founding ideas and of those who have bravely sacrificed to prove these principles true--the principles that all men are created equal in their human dignity and possession of certain natural rights, that government exists solely to protect these rights and to promote the public good, and that people ought to govern themselves and respect the rights of one another.
• That for these reasons, America is an exceptionally good country.

These sentiments were still the majority view when I was in school and universally held during my parents' school days. Instilling a unifying national pride and affection in natives and the children of immigrants alike was one of the overt aims of the public education system. There's a perception out there that TCA is the only unapologetically patriotic, the only non-woke free public school in the Tulsa metro area. I doubt that's true. I hope that isn't true. But that perception may lead some parents to want their children to attend TCA, even if they don't particularly like Hillsdale K-12's strongly structured approach to learning, the uniforms, the memorization and recitation, the focus on desk work and listening quietly to the teacher. There may well be a market for a patriotic Montessori charter school, a proudly American Charlotte Mason-style classical charter school, or a flag-waving choose-your-own-adventure charter un-school, but none of those is what TCA aspires to be. The real question is why there are so few (or perceived to be so few) free public schools in the Tulsa metro area where conservative parents feel confident that what they are teaching their children at home about America, the Christian faith, Western Civilization, sex and sexuality, morals and manners, won't be undermined by educational missionaries seeking to convert Oklahoma's children away from the benighted views of their parents to the glories of progressive dogma. There was a time when local parents hired the school teacher directly and made very sure that he or she not only shared their values but lived in accordance with them. Now teachers are produced by progressive college departments of education, and the elected school board members who are supposed to represent the taxpayers and parents are supposed to shut up and just find money for whatever curriculum the progressive professionals deem appropriate. If elected board members and elected legislators and the elected State Superintendent try to direct and shape the curriculum, they're denounced as "politicizing" the schools. If you want your public schools to reflect your love of America, you need to elect school board members who not only share that love but will take office with the confidence that they have the right and the obligation to direct the curriculum of your school district. Plenty of school board members who are personally conservative have been convinced that they must not wield their authority in any way; they are merely to rubber-stamp the superintendent's agenda and make sure the money keeps flowing. The time to do something about that is right now.

Public schools are meant to serve the public interest, But the lefties say that "All your kids are mine!" They use public schools to push their own agenda, And our only remedy is filing time.

Tomorrow, December 4, 2024, is the final day of the three-day filing period for public school board seats in Oklahoma, including regular public school districts and technology center districts. This year once again, the filing period falls right after Thanksgiving weekend and at the beginning of Advent and the Christmas rush, as our thoughts and energies are focused on faith and family. (By the way, it's also filing period for bills for next year's legislative session. If you don't like having school board filing in December right after Thanksgiving and the elections at a time when few are paying attention, tell your state representative and state senator to file a bill moving school board elections to November -- when people expect to go to the polls -- in odd-numbered years -- when school board races won't get lost in the noise of federal and state races.) This year only one seat, Office No. 5, is up for election in the vast majority of independent school districts, which have five school board members. (Dependent K-8 districts have 3 seats, and Office No. 2 is on the ballot this year.) Tulsa Public Schools has a seven-member board and has two seats, No. 2 and No. 3 on the ballot. Oklahoma City has a district-wide elected school board chairman up for election as well as two seats, Offices No. 1 and 2. The primary election in all districts will be February 11, 2025, with a general election on April 1, 2025. If only two candidates file for a seat, the election will be on April 1. If more than two file, an election will be held on February 11 with a runoff on April 1 if no candidate receives a majority of the vote. In Tulsa County, after two days of filing, only one candidate, typically the incumbent, has filed in the vast majority of school board seats. No candidates at all have filed for seats in Collinsville and Owasso. On the Tulsa Public Schools board, Calvin Moniz, who won a special election this past spring to fill the unexpired Office No. 2 term, is on the ballot for a full term and is opposed by Khadija Goz, a Democrat Party activist. Rick Kibbe, the incumbent in Tulsa Technology Center Office No. 2, is opposed for re-election by Todd Blackburn; Kibbe retired as Superintendent of Catoosa Public Schools in 2017. Blackburn, CEO of Techsico, serves on the board of the Tulsa Tech Educational Foundation. Incumbent Tulsa Office No. 3 board member Dr. Jennettie Marshall has not yet filed for re-election; Dorie Simmons, a real estate agent, is the only candidate to file for the seat so far. It's also filing period for City Council in Owasso and Sand Springs. Here's the full list of Tulsa County school board filings through the end of Tuesday:

• Berryhill Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Dusty Hutchison, 39, Tulsa

• Bixby Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Pablo Aguirre, 40, Bixby

• Broken Arrow Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Jerry Denton (i), 59, Broken Arrow

• Collinsville Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • NO CANDIDATES

• Glenpool Public Schools, Office No. 2
• • Michael Rhine (i), 36, Glenpool

• Glenpool Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Amber Leiser (i), 36, Glenpool

• Jenks Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Chuck Forbes (i), 53, Tulsa

• Keystone Public Schools, Office No. 2
• • Clay Biggerstaff (i), 43, Sand Springs

• Liberty Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Brent W. Hickerson, 43, Mounds

• Owasso Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • NO CANDIDATES

• Sand Springs Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Alesha Spoon, 38, Sand Springs

• Skiatook Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Aleen Joy McLain (i), 54, Skiatook

• Sperry Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Johnny Holmes (i), 45, Sperry

• Tulsa Public Schools, Office No. 2
• • Khadija Goz, 39, Tulsa
  • Calvin Moniz (i), 39, Tulsa

• Tulsa Public Schools, Office No. 3
• • Dorie Simmons, 50, Tulsa

• Tulsa Tech Center Office No. 2
• • Todd Blackburn, 51, Tulsa
  • Rick Kibbe (i), 66, Catoosa

• Union Public Schools, Office No. 5
• • Steve Nguyen (i), 45, Tulsa

Tulsa County candidates should file for office at the Tulsa County Election Board, 555 N. Denver Ave., Tulsa. Filing for the 2025 school board election ends at 5 p.m., Wednesday, December 4, 2024. You'll find a packet of forms and instructions on the Tulsa County Election Board website.
- December 03, 2024 at 07:54PM
Oklahoma School Board filing 2024: It's filing time again
Click the headline to read the full story.