Oklahomans are turning to the legal system to fight back against Superintendent Ryan Walters’s Bible education mandate for public schools.
Dozens of parents, teachers, and religious leaders in the Sooner State collectively filed suit Thursday against Walters and the state’s Department of Education, calling on the Oklahoma Supreme Court to intervene in the mandate’s implementation. Walters announced in September that he intended to spend as much as $3 million on the purchase and intracurricular use of Bibles in Oklahoma public schools.
The plaintiffs in Thursday’s suit included 14 public school parents, four public school teachers, and three faith leaders, all of whom torched the effort for seeking to spend millions in taxpayer dollars on what they described as an unethical, unconstitutional, and an illegal reallocation of resources. According to the suit, Walters’s plan would “unlawfully support an invalid rule” since “no statutory or other legislative authority exists” for him to spend state funds on specific curricular materials. Instead, the Department of Education is restricted to providing state funds to individual school districts, which are then mandated to “spend on texts of their own choice.”
“Respondents intend to spend on the Bibles funds that were designated for other purposes and have not been lawfully reallocated,” the plaintiffs wrote.
Curiously, once Oklahoma’s Department of Education opened bids to fill a 55,000 unit order of Bibles for classrooms across the state, Walters’s parameters for the eligible Bibles became eyebrow-raisingly specific.
Bid documents indicated that the Bible suddenly needed to meet strict expectations, including that the text itself be the King James version, that the copies include core, historical elements of the U.S. educational system, including the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and that the text be bound in leather or a leather-like material. That narrowed the pool of applicants down to just one apparent choice: Donald Trump’s “ God Bless the U.S.A.” Bible .
That detail didn’t pass muster with the suing Oklahomans, either, who wrote in their suit that it seemed “highly unlikely that anyone could fulfill the requirements” of the bid other than Trump’s version. Further still, the group criticized the state for proposing to spend as much as $54.55 a pop on the Trumpian Bibles—just a couple dollars cheaper than the text’s resale price—when other Bibles can be purchased for as little as $3 a piece.
“As parents, my husband and I have sole responsibility to decide how and when our children learn about the Bible and religious teachings,” Erika Wright, the founder and leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “We are devout Christians, but different Christian denominations have different theological beliefs and practices. It is not the role of any politician or public school official to intervene in these personal matters.
“Oklahoma’s education system is already struggling, ranking nearly last in national standings,” Wright continued. “Mandating a Bible curriculum will not address our educational shortcomings.”
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