Easy steps toward a better education plan

hildren’s Hospital is a gem for Oklahoma City and the state. Each year, more than 230,000 children are treated here, many of whom have life-threatening or chronic medical conditions. Heartbroken but hopeful parents seek out the high-quality care and specialized treatments at Children’s. Importantly, these families don’t have to travel out of state to receive this care.

Love’s Travel Stops has been a supporter of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, including Children’s Hospital, for more than 18 years. Through this partnership, I have traveled the country visiting kids and families at nationally recognized CMN hospitals. I’ve seen incredible facilities built to meet the unique needs of kids. I’ve seen worldclass technology and equipment used to keep children alive. I’ve met with grateful families who develop deep bonds with their child’s care teams, and I’ve spoken with hundreds of talented doctors, all of them unsung heroes.

Children’s Hospital has all of these, but it’s the money allocated to research and attracting top pediatric specialists to treat rare conditions that makes our hospital not only a gem to our state, but also a potential standout in the United States.

Recently, nonprofit SSM Health and the University Hospitals Authority and Trust were unable to arrive at a management agreement. An agreement would have helped Children’s Hospital pursue the next level of specialized research and care by providing additional investment to attract and retain the best pediatric specialists to Oklahoma.

Decisions made now as to the operating future of Children’s Hospital will affect the care and treatment options for Oklahoma families going forward. Through the years, I have seen too many families caught completely off guard by a child’s diagnosis. It can happen to anyone, and if it does, we all need the strongest care option locally.

We need state leaders and the University Hospitals Authority and Trust to unite and develop a comprehensive plan to keep the only dedicated children’s hospital in our state at the highest level of operation and care. Oklahoma’s kids deserve the best. he U.S. Department of Education has given states flexibility in their application for Title I funds in the Every Student Succeeds Act so they can make choices that best suit the needs of their citizens. However, few states seem to be taking advantage of this flexibility to address the expressed concerns of its parents and teachers.

Gov. Mary Fallin could take the actions listed below to ensure that the concerns of Oklahoma parents, teachers and legislators are fully and satisfactorily addressed in the state plan for K-12 education that its Department of Education has developed and intends to submit to the federal government. These recommended actions are similar in intent to what Ohio’s superintendent of public instruction is doing with stakeholder groups; last month, he announced that he has already postponed submission of its state plan until September, as allowed by the U.S. Department of Education.

Fallin could convene a large group of current classroom teachers and parents of current school children from across the state to make recommendations on a range of education issues such as the length and timing during the school year of federal- and state-required tests; whether social-emotional learning should be assessed on these required tests (and how); how information on test scores should be reported to parents and teachers; parents’ right to refuse federal- and state-mandated tests, and what data should be collected on students without parental permission. Such a planning process, like Ohio’s, would not be limited by the narrow focus of federal regulations.

To provide the basis for this work, Fallin should:

• Postpone, if possible, submission of the state plan until September.

• Ask the state Department of Education to post online its proposed state plan for public comment and provide an accessible online response site for comments by individual reviewers.

• Ask the agency to make available all the signed individual reviewer comments online and/or in writing so the public can see how many parents replied and who replied. Indicate that only individually signed comments would be tallied.

• Distribute the draft state plan to members of the Legislature for consideration of the fiscal implications of the plan.

• Make an announcement of the public posting of the state plan, asking parents to send in their comments online or mail them to the governor.

These actions would enable Oklahoma’s Department of Education to demonstrate that it sought and obtained “meaningful consultations” with Oklahoma’s teachers and parents, even though, surprisingly, the new federal law and application (using the revised “guidance” it sent out March 13) did not require evidence of such consultations to be submitted with a state’s application for Title I money.