A sheriff’s office in Oklahoma is investigating an incident during a state Board of Education meeting last week that reportedly involved images of naked women on the state school superintendent’s office television.
The images were seen during the board’s executive session, held in Superintendent Ryan Walters’ office, The Oklahoman newspaper of Oklahoma City reported, citing members Ryan Deatherage and Becky Carson, who attended the meeting.
NBC News has not confirmed the accounts of Deatherage and Carson, who were both nominated by Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican.
The Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office has launched a probe, spokesperson Aaron Brilbeck said, after a request from the agency that oversees human resources matters for the state government.
Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton and state Sen. Adam Pugh, both Republicans, said in a joint news release Friday that the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, which oversees HR matters, was leading an inquiry into the incident and was working through proper channels to initiate an investigation.
“This is a bizarre and troubling situation that raises serious questions about the events and what took place during yesterday’s executive session at the Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting,” Paxton said in a statement about the Board of Education’s meeting, held Thursday.
Board members’ accounts, he added, “paint a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency.”
The Office of Management and Enterprise Services didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Follow live politics coverage here
A legislative assistant to House Common Education Committee Chairman Dick Lowe, Caitlin Kilpatrick, pointed NBC News to reporting by the news outlet NonDoc that said Lowe attended the meeting. Lowe told the publication that while he didn’t see the video of the naked women, he discussed the matter with the two board members who did view the images.
“Shocked would be maybe an understatement a little bit. In the position that that person is in, that’s absolutely without a question not appropriate by any means for any state official, much less that state official,” Lowe told NonDoc.
Walters, a conservative Republican, has pushed for proposals to further integrate religion in schools, such as placing Bibles in them. He has also advocated for requiring students enrolled in state public schools to provide proof of U.S. citizenship.
In a statement Sunday on X after the allegations surrounding the meeting arose, Walters denied any wrongdoing.
“Any suggestion that a device of mine was used to stream inappropriate content on the television set is categorically false. I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing,” Walters said. “These falsehoods are the desperate tactics of a broken establishment afraid of real change. They aren’t just attacking me, they’re attacking the values of the Oklahomans who elected me to challenge the status quo.”
Walters and his spokesman, as well as Deatherage, Carson and the four other members of the Board of Education, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
State House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson, a Democrat, said in a statement Monday that the Democratic Caucus has made six calls over the last two years requesting a special bipartisan committee to investigate Walters about other matters.
“Before these recent allegations came out, he has shown multiple times throughout his leadership that he has no interest in bettering the public education system for students and teachers. He is mainly concerned with advancing his own political and religious agendas,” she said.
“These new allegations are serious and troubling, and while we wait for the investigation to be finished, I think it’s prudent to acknowledge that there has been a dire need for change in leadership at the Oklahoma State Department of Education for a long time.”
Source link
