The Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction today held a press conference to call us liars.
Oklahoma Watch and StateImpact Oklahoma, non-profit, non-partisan statewide news organizations, reported last week that the Oklahoma Department of Education notified at least nine teachers who received bonuses that they would have to return all or part of the money by the end of February.
We stand by our story and the month of research our reporters put into it. It is our policy to correct any factual errors in our work as soon as they are brought to our attention and verified. We have asked the Department of Education repeatedly to specify what erroneous information they believe our work contained. They have not identified any inaccuracies except to say there were four teachers involved rather than nine. That conflicts with the written information the department provided.
We believe in transparency and honesty. Below are links to the relevant documents our reporters received from the Department of Education in the course of reporting the story. As you can see on page 2, the department identified 10 teachers from whom they intended to claw back bonuses in part or in full. On another page of the email chain, the teachers are identified individually. The nine teachers our reporters based the story on are Kristi Azocar, Kharis Bojorquez, Ambre Jackson, Kristina Stadelman, Douglas Stratton, Jennifer Combs, Anita Hopson Malone, Siarah King, and Nicholas Pettit, who appear on pages 4 through 6. The 10th teacher had a different set of circumstances and was not included in our reporters’ count.
Five are identified in the documents as having been sent a claw-back letter (Bojorquez, Jackson, Stadelman and Stratton) or that recovery of the money was in process (Azocar). The other four indicate the bonuses were adjusted downward.
On Dec. 1, the Department of Education sent us an email that said, “Enclosed please find the record responsive to your request #23-490. Please note, no payments were made to the district, rather payments were made directly to individuals as you will see noted in the Sign-On Bonus Master List.”
We understand this to mean all the payments had been made at that time. We individually verified in an interview that Hopson Malone received her check in November.
On page seven of the linked documents, you can see that we asked for clarification regarding Combs’ bonus amount. Combs was awarded $50,000. Department spokesman Dan Isett replied, “The corrected bonus amount for Jennifer Combs is $20,000. As previously mentioned, as part of our procedures, we have requested that funds participants were not eligible to receive be returned.”
We understood that to include Hopson Malone, King and Pettit.
We appreciate the thorough, excellent reporting by our journalists, which you can verify independently.
Respectfully,
Ted Streuli
Executive Director, Oklahoma Watch
Logan Layden
Managing Editor, StateImpact Oklahoma
“Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.”
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