Editorial Roundup: Recent editorials in Oklahoma newspapers

Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Oklahoma newspapers:

Muskogee Phoenix. Dec. 16, 2017.

Warner Schools teachers, administrators and staff - but especially students - deserve congratulations on excellent test scores recently announced.

The school district ranked in the top tiers for each state standardized test administered last spring.

Many Oklahoma schools reported declines in the percentage of students who passed state tests.

Joy Hofmeister, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, said Warner was one of the unique districts to show test success at all levels.

Hofmeister visited Warner recently to see how the district managed such success.

“High academic outcomes are a reflection of a lot of work to support teachers, to have a plan for ensuring that kids have academic needs met,” Hofmeister said. “And so much of that has been thoughtfully woven throughout the K through 12 experience.”

Educators, staff and administrators have a five-year initiative to improve school performance, including a “bell to bell” attitude.

“It means what it sounds like - bell-to-bell teaching,” Superintendent David Vinson said. “You walk in our hallways and classrooms any given time, students are going to be engaged. You won’t find our students lined up waiting for the next class.”

The initiative is paying off. There is a lot of credit to go around.

But the first and foremost applause should go to students who worked to be able to perform during testing.

Congratulations to all. Keep up the good work.

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Tulsa World. Dec. 19, 2017.

At the worst possible moment, federal Medicaid bureaucrats are refusing to help fund physician training in Oklahoma, deepening the state’s budget crisis.

For years, Oklahoma has sent its appropriations for training doctors at OU and OSU through the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, thus magnifying the funding with federal Medicaid money.

But in 2015, federal officials found that the waiver authorizing that use of matching funds hadn’t been renewed since 2001, although they had never stopped making the payments.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services this month rejected state plans to continue the funding, meaning the state would have to come up with $31 million to pay for the program for the rest of this year and $115 million for every year thereafter.

The doctors trained by the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University are helping Medicaid patients. If the program ends or get smaller, Medicaid patients are the ones who will suffer first and most severely. The waiver program was a legitimate expenditure of the Medicaid funding, and CMS should reverse its decision and fund it.

U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, chairman of House Appropriations Subcommittee with responsibility for health and human services funding, and other members of the Oklahoma congressional delegation should do everything in their power to make that happen.

But the ways of federal bureaucrats are beyond the control of state lawmakers, who are the ones who have to deal with the crisis now, as if the federal money will never return.

Appropriately, Gov. Mary Fallin has made funding for the health care authority the first responsibility of the special legislative session, which began Monday.

Once again, our leaders in the state Capitol are faced with a crisis that can only be solved with a sustainable increase in state revenue. This time, the health of the state’s most delicate citizens is at risk.

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The Oklahoman. Dec. 19, 2017.

Oklahoma running back Rodney Anderson won’t be made to face charges of sexual assault, providing a reminder of why the legal system - not any university - is the proper venue to adjudicate such cases.

A former OU student accused Anderson, 21, of raping her at her apartment in November after they had met at a bar. She said she had been drinking and only remembered being assaulted after talking to a friend two weeks later. Anderson immediately denied the accusation, and later passed a lie-detector test administered by a retired FBI polygraph examiner.

In his recent announcement, Cleveland County District Attorney Greg Mashburn noted that Norman police had thoroughly investigated the woman’s allegations and turned the findings over to “a team of my best prosecutors - frankly, three of the finest sex crimes prosecutors in the state of Oklahoma.” They determined Anderson had done nothing wrong.

This is how the system should work - with law enforcement professionals determining a case’s merits. On too many college campuses the past several years, due process and civil rights have been tossed aside as universities have sought to comply with Title IX guidelines outlined in “Dear Colleague” letters sent by the Obama administration in 2010 and 2011.

The guidelines allowed for assault cases to be heard by university administrators or panels. Universities were told to use a preponderance of the evidence, instead of the much stricter “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as the threshold to determine whether someone had committed sexual assault.

Cross-examination was discouraged, the accused often faced the allegations without benefit of counsel, and campuses allowed complainants to appeal decisions. Those found guilty could be expelled, and often were.

As a result, you had cases such as one at the University of Colorado-Pueblo, where an athlete was accused of sexually assaulting a female trainer. The trainer said no rape occurred. University officials said Title IX rules allowed them to be the judge of that, and they found the accused guilty and expelled him.

At the University of Southern California, a football player was expelled following a complaint that he had abused his girlfriend. The girlfriend told officials repeatedly that what a witness saw was simply playful “roughhousing” in her front yard, and that she absolutely had not been assaulted. The school’s Title IX coordinator said otherwise.

At Amherst College, a male student was expelled for sexual assault, even though, as Reason.com reported, “he had credible evidence that his accuser had assaulted him.”

Women have been victimized, too. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos cites a case where a female student told her school she had been sexually assaulted. The university “told her she would have to prosecute the case herself. Without any legal training whatsoever, she had to prepare an opening statement, fix exhibits and find witnesses.”

DeVoss, to her credit, is revisiting the Title IX guidelines to provide more balance. Real crimes should always be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but legal protection on college campuses needs to exist for accuser and accused alike.