Bomb threats against public schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma, continued to pour in on Tuesday as right-wing indignation over a satirical TikTok video posted earlier this month by a local educator enters its second week.
Large numbers of students have reportedly stayed home in the wake of the threats, which set the city of just over 400,000 on edge.
At the same time, the state’s 38-year-old Superintendent of Public Instruction—who helped stoke outrage over the supposed intentions of a “woke” school librarian—now stands accused of ignoring ongoing child abuse allegedly taking place right under his nose.
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“While Ryan Walters is fighting culture war issues, creating division, and basically creating problems for himself to seemingly try to fix, there’s been actual abuse taking place in schools that he knew about for months [but] did nothing to address,” Oklahoma State Rep. Mickey Dollens, a Democrat, told The Daily Beast.
Walters, a Republican, was sworn in as Oklahoma’s education superintendent in January 2023. Since taking office, he has likened teachers’ unions to terrorist organizations, claimed Tulsa public schools were being secretly infiltrated by the Chinese government, and cozied up to an entity labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, among other things However, while making a big show of his far-right bona fides, Walters has turned a blind eye to something far more damaging than any TikTok video, according to Dollens.
Dollens pointed The Daily Beast to a petition filed Aug. 28 in Oklahoma State Supreme Court, in which the parents of a public school student in Kingfisher, about two hours west of Tulsa, say their son suffered “horrible abuse” at the hands of a football coach who “maintained an athletic program that condones and encourages” bullying, hazing, and outright violence.
For some 20 years, members of the Kingfisher football team have been “sodomized, urinated on, tazed, whipped, beaten, humiliated, and verbally and mentally abused,” with the encouragement—and occasionally, participation—of coaching staff, according to the suit. It started well before Walters was in office, but he became aware of the allegations months ago, Dollens said.
When the Kingfisher school district didn’t do anything about it, Walters and the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) should have acted as a backstop, the petition states. The parents of the former student involved said they sent a letter to OSDE on Jan. 17, 2022, laying out details of the alleged abuse and “pleading that OSDE do something to protect the children in Kingfisher.” The couple heard back from OSDE later that spring, claiming state investigators were looking into it. Yet, more than a year later, and a full eight months since Walters took over, “[t]heir pleas have been met with silence and indifference,” according to the suit.
The parents say they are concerned for their younger son, who is still a student at Kingfisher, who, along with his classmates, “face an imminent, ongoing threat of harm and abuse each and every day that [local school authorities] and state administrations fail to act,” the petition says, noting, “As [the school district’s] own policies recognize, it is only a matter of time before one of the victims in Kingfisher turns to violence and brings tragedy to our community like what happened in Columbine, Uvalde, and Parkland.”
The petition seeks to have Kingfisher’s football coach fired immediately. In a brief filed along with Tuesday’s petition, the former student’s parents offer a grueling point-by-point history of stomach-turning locker room (and beyond) assaults.
“The words that define Kingfisher athletics are not words like teamwork, loyalty, and respect, but rather terms like: ‘tea-bagging,’ ‘butt-stamping,’ ‘corn-dogging,’ ‘dicking,’ ‘the Ring,’ ‘dirt-bag training,’ and ‘rape stick,’” the brief states.
A related lawsuit pending in federal court is scheduled to go to trial in December. The suit, which was initially filed in state court, contends the hazing at Kingfisher “rose to the level of torture.”
Walters, for his part, has spent his time trying to make political noise, according to Crystal LaGrone, chair of the Wagoner County Democratic Party and a former candidate for the Oklahoma statehouse. Although she may occupy the other side of the aisle, LaGrone never imagined someone in Walters’ position would intentionally wreak so much havoc on the system.
“Elections have consequences,” she told The Daily Beast. “And we get people like Ryan Walters, in positions of authority, where they really don’t have any expertise, and are attention-seeking. It feels like he wants to make a name for himself, not help the kids of Oklahoma.”
Walters did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
The bomb threats in Tulsa began a little over a week ago, when Walters boosted a post by far-right social media account Libs of TikTok in response to an Aug.18 TikTok video by a school librarian.
Kirby Mackenzie, a librarian at Tulsa’s Ellen Ochoa Elementary School, posted a short video in which she enthusiastically dances into frame with an armful of books as “Back Again” by Ludacris plays.
“POV: teachers in your state are dropping like flies but you are still just not quite finished pushing your woke agenda at the public school,” reads a block of text superimposed over the screen.
Underneath, Mackenzie offers a knowing nod to the joke: “My radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind, hbu??” using a modern abbreviation for “how about you?”
@kirbymacks My radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind 🫶🏼 hbu?? I think im going to make one of these every year until i die or end my teaching era #teachersoftiktok #schoollibrarian #liberalagenda #scandal #okpolitics ♬ original sound - Team Cucumber
Three days later, on Aug. 21, Libs of TikTok, infamous for generating fury over glimmers of “wokeness” in American life, shared a version of Mackenzie’s video on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, with its 2.4 million followers. The sentence about encouraging children to read and treat others with compassion was nowhere to be found.
Walters subsequently reposted the Libs of TikTok tweet on Aug. 22 with his own commentary, reading, “Democrats say it doesn’t exist. The liberal media denies the issue. Even some Republicans hide from it. Woke ideology is real and I am here to stop it.” Once Walters waded into the fray, the bomb threats seemingly intensified.
That same day, someone using the name “Made John” emailed Tulsa-area media outlets with a terrifying warning about blowing up the Ellen Ochoa Elementary School.
“I’m not going to stand by as you bastards continue to indoctrinate and prey upon our children,” the note read. “This is why we placed a bomb in the school. You will evacuate the building so nobody dies… Kirby Mackenzie, we know where you live. You don’t escape this either, your house will be blown up.”
Then, on Aug. 23, an email from “Yesyy” also claimed to have hidden a bomb at Ochoa Elementary, as well as inside Mackenzie’s home. “You will stop pushing this woke ideology or we will bomb every school in the… district,” it said.
The threats continued into Wednesday, and followed into Thursday. On Friday, the school district in Tulsa announced on Facebook that three other schools in addition to Ochoa, as well as “other non-district businesses and locations,” had been threatened, including, reportedly, area Target stores.
On Sunday, the district provided another update, telling parents, “As anticipated, we have received additional bomb threats with additional locations identified but NO Union schools listed. The latest threat is made towards every Oklahoma school, airport, university, store, mall, bus station, highway, police station, courthouse, and city halls.”
On Monday, Ochoa and another area school were threatened, along with additional locations around Tulsa. Tuesday brought yet more distressing news, with school district officials informing the community that they had fielded further bomb threats, “naming multiple school sites—some by name and other non-specific.”
To date, no actual explosive devices have been found.
A former teacher, Walters has been viewed as a divisive figure in Tulsa for some time, well before the bomb threats of the past seven days. Even many of Walters’ fellow GOPers seem to have had enough.
“He’s chosen a path of rhetoric and not actual legitimate education policy,” according to State Rep. Mark McBride, a Republican. “It’s just not right to have somebody in this position that has these kinds of ideas.”
Another Republican, State Sen. Dewayne Pemberton, has described Walters as “the most divisive [politician in Oklahoma] because it seems like everything he comes out with is divisive.”
To Lisa Shotts, an educator in Tulsa who together with Mackenzie in 2017 co-founded Gaining Ground, a nonprofit literacy program, the ongoing bomb threats are a symptom of a larger problem plaguing the state’s educational programs under Walters’ tutelage.
“We have to have accountability from our public officials to denounce these threats,” Shotts told The Daily Beast. “We’re working to provide safe environments, and it’s just really stressful for everyone. It’s very disappointing, and the impact is great. It’s a lifelong trauma for all of our kids that are having to go through this.”
Mackenzie did not respond to an interview request sent via Shotts, who said the school district has asked faculty and staff not to speak to the media.
“Kirby is just the poster child for this—they just picked her, and this has blown up,” she said. “But the real issue is the attack on public education, and on teachers themselves… It’s so unprofessional, what he’s doing. He’s just highlighting disinformation, fearmongering with our educators. It’s just unfortunate that our state superintendent is perpetuating this.”
Accordingly, Shotts wants Oklahoma’s legislators, particularly Republicans, to stand up and denounce the threats publicly. Walters, Shotts continued, “has had a laser target on Tulsa public schools,” which make up the largest school district in the state.
Walters has not addressed the issue in Kingfisher since getting elected, according to the petition filed Tuesday. Last Friday, however, Walters issued a statement in response to the bomb threats, saying there is “an ongoing investigation into the nature of these threats, and I know the full weight of our law enforcement agencies will be brought to bear against those who would threaten our kids.”
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) launched an investigation into the threats, Walters claimed. However, OSBI told Tulsa ABC affiliate KTUL that it wasn’t investigating the threats, because no request for assistance had been made. (OSDE officials subsequently said that Walters had begun receiving threats, as well.)
To Dollens, the state representative, the only path forward now is to remove Walters from office.
Dollens told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that he was preparing to initiate articles of impeachment in the statehouse “before [Walters] does irreparable harm.”
“It boils down to extreme incompetence and dereliction of duty,” he said. “... At the end of the day, this is about protecting kids so that they feel safe… And the more people that can know about these issues happening in Oklahoma, maybe they can prepare themselves for what’s coming down the road in their own states.”
The FBI and the Tulsa Police have cautioned residents to take the bomb threats seriously, but say there is no credible threat at this time. Meanwhile in Kingfisher, public school kids remain in danger as long as the football coach remains employed there, according to the former student’s parents. They are due back in court Sept. 23.
