OSDE Superintendent. Walters blames Biden after missing nearly $1 million grant

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (KFOR) – The superintendent of the Oklahoma State Department of Education said Thursday that it missed out on nearly $1 million in grants last year because of President Biden's administration.

“We will not accept federal dollars that do not align with Oklahoma values,” Superintendent Walters said when asked by KFOR why she had not requested the funds.

Last week, as first reported by The Frontier, the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed that the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) had not submitted a new request for a grant previously used to create a crisis response team.

With several tornadoes in just the last few months, a crisis response team would have been called upon to assist.

In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded OSDE a $996,855 grant, in part for school threat assessment teams.

Former OSDE Grant Development Director Terri Grissom spoke with KFOR and said this was a three-year grant, but due to the pandemic she was pushed back to four years.

“To my knowledge, it was only federally funded,” Grissom said when asked if the Crisis Response Team was a mix of state and federal funding.

“We are talking about a grant awarded more than a year ago, when we took power. We fired all these horrible employees who were here to undermine the agency. And we have continued to demonstrate an excellent record of ensuring that every dollar spent at the state of Oklahoma aligns with our values,” Walters said.

According to an October OSDE newsletter, the agency was nearing the end of funding for the Crisis Response Team.

When asked what exactly those values ​​were, Superintendent Walters did not answer but replied: “The federal government has different priorities. We continued to see that the Biden administration, very keen to promote its woke social agenda, continued to go online everywhere.”

“I don’t even know if they have a crisis team. If they do, who trains them? What programs do they use? » asked Grissom. “To my knowledge, everyone who was initially trained has left the agency.”

Walters was then asked if they planned to reapply this year or next.

“We have a process where we review every grant. We're making sure Joe Biden doesn't try to indoctrinate our children with this grant. We make sure we keep an eye on it. There are some grants where you have to hire four or five people to do reporting and you have to bear that cost as a state.

Superintendent Walters then started boasting and said his department was transparent.

However, there are still dozens of open requests for information from KFOR and other news agencies.

One request lasts 314 days without response with multiple emails asking when it could be responded to.