The Public Ed & Parent Divide: A troubling conversation with Jena Nelson (D-State Superintendent candidate)
How to Steal a State: Midterm Minute - October 31, 2022
Within this Midterm Minute:
Who will replace Hofmeister as state superintendent?
A Jena Nelson townhall provides insight about a parent-teacher divide much wider than class sizes and funding.
Is public education mentally ill?
Nelson’s priorities omit parents and their concerns.
The cultural custody battle between public ed and parents.
Did Nelson break laws designed to protect children?
Transgenderism: Nelson’s policy positions based on false premises.
Nelson and Hofmeister: Feeding the medical transgender pipeline and the danger of marrying education with mental health.
As Oklahoma is learning the hard way, the lead administrative and elected role within the state’s public education system is pivotal to the balance of power and cultural direction of the state. In 2014, the education establishment’s use of illegally coordinated dark money for the purpose of installing Joy Hofmeister (now D) as state superintendent of public instruction began an era that finds public education in Oklahoma ranked 49th nationally. Just as concerning is the ever-growing ideological divide between parents and educators created by eight years of Hofmeister’s management.
Who Will Replace Hofmeister as State Superintendent?
The V1SUT Vantage has reported concerning Ryan Walters (R), current Secretary of Education and candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and his recent actions to both reactively and proactively enforce the tenants of HB 1775 (Oklahoma’s new law banning CRT-like teaching within the state’s public schools and publicly funded colleges and universities).
As reported by Tulsa Today, the alarming state of public education in Oklahoma makes this race of the utmost importance to Oklahoma families. Walters’ opponent Jena Nelson (D), not being a current office holder, is more difficult to assess, so The V1SUT Vantage recently attended one of her campaign’s townhall style gatherings to learn more about her policy positions.
A revealing and troubling conversation with Jena Nelson (D-State Superintendent candidate)
What was expected to be a typical campaign speech with few surprises about platform positions ended up being a long, slow, and disturbing glance into the mindset of public education in Oklahoma. While Nelson and those attending (primarily teachers) spoke openly as one might do in the comfort of a like-minded group, it became clear there is more than a simple difference of opinions between those leading public education and the growing number of parents concerned about the quality and content of their child’s education.
The strangest part was that it was all very polite, giving a hint as to how our schools have so drastically changed in both performance and culture without many noticing along the way.
Jena Nelson is a skilled actress and education insider and is, in many ways, the embodiment of failing public education, yet she appears to sincerely believe she’s doing the right thing for kids. Honestly, it took a while to process and untangle the lapses in logic, contradictory statements and policies, insertions of emotion wherever opposing views emerged, ability to ignore the needed other half of any conversation, aversion to accountability or offending anyone, and unjustified embracing of victimhood. It was all wrapped up in such a pleasant package and reinforced by unanimous affirmation from her small audience.
After much analysis of the event, only one of two conclusions fits. Public education, at least the politically engaged and loudest portion of public education, is either dangerously strategic or mentally ill, or perhaps both. In Nelson’s case, even breaking the state’s laws designed to protect children is simply a day at the parade, and she seems to have no idea why any parent would object. Given the unanimous support for positions that observably harm children expressed at this political event from a group trusted with their education and healthy development, public ed appears to suffer from a collective mental illness brought on by the echo chamber of academia and skillfully exploited by politicians seeking power. The question becomes, which role is Jena Nelson playing in this dangerous delusion.
Nelson’s Townhall Starts as Expected, Then Takes Some Concerning Turns
Jena (pronounced like Gina) Nelson’s recent townhall meeting, hosted at a public library within one of the state’s largest school districts, was primarily attended by teacher-supporters of Nelson and began as more of a teacher rally than a discussion on policy. Nelson, a former theater teacher, current Classen SAS (OKCPS) English teacher and the 2020 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year as designated by Joy Hofmeister’s OSDE, has a very theatrical public personality and credits her high school drama teacher with ‘saving her life’.
The first part of the session was a spirited monologue by Nelson in which she received regular applause from the room of 40-50 attendees. Nelson outlined her core platform initiatives, which closely paralleled the “top priorities” identified on her campaign website and then took several questions.
As a Democrat candidate, Nelson’s more public positions were predictable. More money for public education, fighting vouchers and district consolidation, retaining teachers and providing more services…there was nothing new. It was within her comments on each issue and her self-reported policies on websites far removed from her official campaign that her progressive, incomplete and emotionally charged positions were consistently revealed.
Keeping Public Dollars in our Public Schools -
Based on Nelson comments, her primary platform objective will be to oppose any voucher system or other legislation that would allow parents to take the public education funding allotted to their child and apply it to other educational options.
“You know, whether they want to call it a tax credit…or a scholarship, or whatever they want to call it, with 31 Baskin Robins flavors of the month of trying (not) to call it what it is, and that is defunding public education. And we don’t need a state superintendent that wants to defund public education, we need a state superintendent who wants to defend public education.” - Jena Nelson at townhall meeting
Nelson’s policies leave kids in failing schools - Unfortunately, Nelson provided no immediate options for students generationally trapped in the state’s many failing schools. Even when pressed on the issue, she asserted powers to send teams into failing schools that she would not hold as state superintendent within a system based on local control of education decisions.
Stopping and Reversing Teacher Flight -
During the session, Nelson identified a top priority, should she be elected, as teacher retention. After admitting the shortage of potential teachers in Oklahoma is over, with over 30,000 of the state’s certified educators currently opting out of employment within public education, Nelson cited a lack of respect for teachers as a primary driver of ‘teacher flight’:
“The state department and our data says the number one reason they are not coming back (to teaching) is a lack of respect.”
“The first part of that is we’ve got to pay our professionals a living wage.”
“The second part of that respect it means that we have got to tone down the rhetoric in the state. Right now, our educators are being called everything under the sun but professionals and that’s got to stop. We need to make sure we are lifting up our educators.”
Respect as a commodity - Nelson appears to view respect as something demanded and not earned. She displayed a resistance to practical solutions for retaining the highest performing teachers and a true fear of offending even grossly underperforming teachers. Tying pay to performance is a Nelson no-no.
When asked how she felt about merit-based pay for teachers:
Nelson - “Merit-based pay I think can get us into some real ugly situations when it comes to administrators because some of the problem we’re having right now is school culture. Where, depending on if someone has a certain personality, yeah, I’ll give you this one, I don’t really care for that person and they don’t want to pay for that. And I’ve seen that happen in for example Texas because I have friends who have won state teachers of the year there and we’ve talked about the merit-based pay sections that they have in some of their schools and that’s what they’re seeing.”
Constituent - “Why would it (merit-based pay) be subjective at all, why wouldn’t it be based on very objective data-driven points like kids’ test scores and grades and those kinds of things? I don’t understand why you’d get into those issues.”
Nelson - “The thing about test scores, because we are dealing with a test that is completely subjective and we don’t get to see their data until the following year and because we have a lot of students who understand that test data does not affect them and I’ve seen kids put their heads down after five minutes of taking the test. Then we’re not getting a real true snapshot of what their academic abilities really are. So it becomes very muddy and dangerous to tie a test score to a performance based or even toward a pay base.”
Teacher flight from public ed, not teaching - In addition, Nelson’s identification of “lack of respect” as being the primary cause of teachers quitting education fails to consider some other, rather obvious data points that might provide some additional insight about so-called “teacher flight”. With Oklahoma’s population growing significantly faster than the national average, why isn’t enrollment in public schools following the same trend?
After the pandemic shutdowns of 2020-21, public school enrollment made a small rebound during 2021-22 but never regained its total enrollment numbers from 2019-20. Parents are clearly choosing other educational options for their children, though the OSDE has neglecting to ask them why. Those families are increasingly enrolling their children in private and virtual schools, institutions that are hiring additional teachers to serve the increased numbers of students.
Perhaps Oklahoma’s teachers are not opting out of teaching, just public education. Could it be that the expressed “lack of respect” felt by teachers, particularly great teachers, was in reference to the education establishment and a growingly unacceptable cultural shift within public schools? How many have exited for a better working environment within private education?
Improving Student Mental Health -
Nelson devoted a great deal of her speech to detailing the need for mental health interventions for school children. Mental health pervaded all areas of Nelson’s platform:
“Our children in Oklahoma experience more trauma on a daily basis than any other students in the nation. And we’ve got to get them some help….and I know everything should not fall on our schools as I’ve said before but this does, because as teachers, I can tell you, I cannot reach them here (hand gesture to head) if I cannot reach them here (hand gesture to heart) first. There is a lot of healing that needs to happen with our children.”
When ‘trauma’ and mental health became political for the OSDE: This shift of focus from academic success to providing mental health supports within public schools began very publicly with Hofmeister’s first Trauma Summit in 2018, which has become an annual event and primary focus for Hofmeister’s OSDE.
Followers of the How to Steal a State series will remember the first Trauma Summit, when Oklahoma County DA David Prater (D) went from prosecuting Hofmeister to a very cozy and publicly paraded ‘great working relationship’, with no explanation to the public about how a mountain of evidence related to Hofmeister’s multiple felony indictments was swept away by Prater (see Season 3 of How to Steal a State).
Nelson seems to be grabbing the very political and lucrative mental health baton from Hofmeister with gusto, frequently stressing the need for more funding for the state’s failing public schools as they unrealistically take on responsibility for providing mental health services.
“I’m going across the state and talking to educators and superintendents. They’re telling me sometimes it takes between 6 to 60 days to get help for a child and that is not right. We already know what kind of things can happen between 6 and 60 days to a kid or a family or even to a professional educator. We’ve got to do better and we can do better. We just have to say that we’re going to make this investment, we’re going to make it happen.”
Protecting our Rural Schools and Communities -
Nelson is clearly opposed to any further consolidation of smaller districts in an effort to reduce administrative costs and push more support dollars to classrooms. Her position confuses the closing of schools with the consolidation of districts, but her statements clearly oppose both.
“I will tell you, when you close down a school, when you consolidate, okay, what happens is that you’re not only taking out the school, you’re taking out the heart and the very soul of that community. - Jena Nelson
As Hofmeister has for eight years, Nelson is carrying the school administration union’s (CCOSA’s) water on this subject. Her Chicken Little prediction of dire consequences to rural communities come under the false assumption that consolidating schools from two very small districts under one superintendent would close any schools. The only thing it would certainly do is eliminate one large, superintendent’s salary.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people in the last couple of weeks in western Oklahoma. They said they don’t want to hear the word consolidation. They have consolidated enough. They’re going to lose their families, they’re going to lose their way of life, they’re going to lose farming. We can’t lose agriculture in Oklahoma. We have to have schools that provide the services they need. We can’t lose small businesses in Oklahoma. We can’t lose real estate in Oklahoma. We’ve got to make sure that we fully invest in these public schools so that we’re fully invested in the economy.”
Notice she didn’t say “they can’t lose half a highly paid superintendent’s salary”. That’s really what’s on the line, and Nelson is protecting the status quo.
What Isn’t on Nelson’s Priority List? What Most Parents are Most Concerned About
Except for the occasional gratuitous mention, both academics and parents, or at least the majority of Oklahoma’s parents with intact and healthy protective instincts concerning their children, are excluded from Nelson’s platform. In fact, Nelson only indirectly mentions this group in framing herself and teachers as the victims of parents’ misguided concerns. From Nelson’s campaign website:
The Cultural Custody Battle Between Public Ed and Parents
“Despite what some want you to believe, Oklahoma’s educators are not indoctrinators, but professional educators who love our kids as they are. Whether they come in with scars on their arms or scars on their hearts, we have always been the constant for them.” - Jena Nelson from campaign website
This is quite an emotionally loaded statement. Nelson is an English teacher who understands the importance of language. This was not an off-the-cuff comment, but a carefully crafted piece on her website. Nelson seems to assert cultural custody of students on behalf of public education by saying educators “love our kids as they are”. Let that sink in. Nelson considers them “our” kids. Not their students, or just kids, but educators’ kids.
Parents, apparently you are, at best, in a bizarre, joint custody arrangement with teachers and the education establishment. And apparently, they believe to be the half of this arrangement that “have always been the constant” for your children. And be mindful of Nelson’s proud assertion that teachers “love our kids as they are”. This loaded statement surreptitiously chastises healthy parents for not accepting and affirming gender identities and sexual preferences in their children, who should know nothing about those mind-bending, age-inappropriate and harmful topics.
“Right now, our educators are being called everything under the sun but professionals and that’s got to stop.” - Jena Nelson at townhall meeting
Notice that Nelson not only failed to listen to or attempt to understand the concerns of parents in her comments but shamed them and ordered them to cease complaining with “that’s got to stop”. This tactic alone should cause concern for parents. Thinking parents have seen far too much evidence of the existence of both inappropriate and activist teachers in Oklahoma’s classrooms to fall for this one-applause-fits-all assertion about teachers.
Rarely does a month go by without another public outing of a sexual predator in Oklahoma’s classrooms. Yet Nelson has no problem shushing concerned parents, as if all teachers are amazing. It has moved beyond tone-deafness to insanity.
And of course, Nelson’s false presumption that none of Oklahoma’s educators are bringing their activism to the classroom is wrapped in heart-rending verbal visualizations of suffering children “with scars on their arms or scars on their hearts”. Who could possibly argue against teachers helping abused and traumatized children? This use of highly emotional language to squash discussion was a consistent part of Nelson’s monologue, and always with teachers as the co-victim:
“And as we come back from the pandemic… We saw a lot of trauma, we saw a lot of behavior issues, we saw a lot of destruction of property and it’s because our kids are hurting. And so we have got to make sure that we provide the mental health, the supports that they desperately need on top of helping our teachers who are also going through post-secondary trauma right now (clapping from crowd). So, to let you understand a little more about teaching and I know that a lot of you are educators and former educators but the thing about post-secondary trauma is that for example when we leave at the end of the day we don’t just walk out of our classroom and go that’s a great day, I can leave all that behind, time to go home and have dinner. We worry. We know every single kid’s story that comes in our classroom. We know their homelife. We know what’s happening.”
This narrative serves multiple purposes by evoking emotion, which deflects accountability, and justifying the shift in public education’s responsibility from successfully educating students, which it is largely failing to do at this time, to providing mental health supports.
A Public Ed Favorite Strategy: Deny The Problem Exists
On all of parents’ pressing issues, Nelson employs the education establishment’s favorite hush tactic: deny the problem exists. When a self-described school board member from the district asked Nelson for guidance related to real parent concerns the board member has been fielding from both sides of the ‘transgender’ bathroom issue, Nelson responded by denying the problem exists:
Nelson - “And a lot of districts, honestly, they’re saying, we don’t have this issue. It somehow has become an issue, and its focused on kids and its making their kids feel more bullied and everything.”
School board member response - “I’m not talking rhetorically. These are going on… I am receiving questions from both sides of the aisle.”
Why would Nelson and the education establishment be attempting to sell such an inaccurate and condescending narrative of denial? Because she and they are part of the problem.
Nelson is Part of the Problem and Has Likely Broken the State’s Laws Protecting Children
When pressed by a constituent about her participation as a candidate in both the OKC Pridefest and 39th Pride parades, which celebrate and showcase alternative lifestyles, sexualities and gender identities, Nelson’s response perfectly illustrates the fundamental conflict.
Constituent - “Both of those events had some pretty graphic sexuality in the presence of minor children. That’s a huge concern to parents and I want to know what you think that had to do with education.”
Jena Nelson - “I was actually invited by parents to attend. Their children. They told me their story (Nelson gets choked up). That’s okay (motions to audience). They told me their story and introduced me to their children who had been bullied. And they just wanted to have that conversation with me and they invited me there. And as I’m talking to these kids, they said you know I just want to go to school. And I feel personally as a mom that whoever walks through our doors as a kid that they should be loved and accepted and get the best education possible (applause). And as I was talking to this family who know the kids showed me that they had scars up and down their arms. And so for me, when I say that I want to be able to meet with everyone and listen to everyone just like I listen to you and you and you. It’s important because all of these kids have families. It’s the reason I went go to Juneteenth, it’s the reason I went to the Fiesta de las Americas, it’s the reason I went to all of the Native American ceremonies, it’s the reason I went to Western Days in Mustang as well, and so I try to go out and meet people when they want to talk to me.”
Jena Nelson wants to lead public education in Oklahoma, yet she sees no difference in the appropriateness of exposing children to Western Days and a gay pride parade.
Nelson’s campaign documents show that she not only attended the pride events but also paid to be a candidate sponsor. Nelson’s campaign did not contribute monetarily to Western Days or the other cultural events she reported attending.
This fundamental detachment from reality and responsibility completely ignores the blatantly sexualized activity and performances at so-called pride parades that endanger the innocence of children, hinder healthy child development and contribute to ongoing mental health issues.
Oklahoma Laws Protecting Children
According to Oklahoma law, the disturbing picture above from the OKC Pride Alliance’s Pridefest depicts an act of child neglect that any adult in attendance (or with knowledge of) is mandated by law to immediately report to the Oklahoma Department of Human Services (DHS) Abuse and Neglect Hotline. Neglect is defined, in part, within the law as:
“The failure or omission to protect a child from exposure to any of the following: The use, possession, sale, or manufacture of illegal drugs; Illegal activities; Sexual acts or materials that are not age-appropriate.” - Citation: Ann. Stat. Tit. 10A, § 1-1-105
Nelson chooses to participate in and financially support things that endanger the mental health of her students while strongly advocating for more mental health funding to be funneled through schools. Nelson is playing only to the parents of the students she considers to be the “bullied” and marginalized…or perhaps she’s playing them in a harmful, political game of funding pipeline.
Transgenderism: Nelson’s Policy Positions Based on False Premises
Par for the progressive course, Nelson jumped over the conversation about whether a human can actually change their physical gender, which they cannot, and landed on a policy position that allows minors to access “gender affirming care”. Who said a human can’t change their gender? The 23rd pair of chromosomes in nearly every cell of every human’s body. The premise is preposterous, but Nelson and Hofmeister stand for “transgender rights” and transition surgeries for kids, despite evidence of growing regret, crippling depression and increased suicide risk following transgender treatments. But why?
Nelson and Hofmeister: Feeding the Medical Transgender Pipeline and the Danger of Marrying Education with Mental Health
The Unwokable Podcast, an independent Oklahoma outlet, has providing a significant amount of the information and pressure aimed at stopping the shortsighted and barbaric transgender treatments and surgeries from continuing at OU Children’s Hospital and across Oklahoma.
Unwokable (also on Substack), in the episode below, specifically identifies the role of Joy Hofmeister in arranging funding streams through the American Rescue Plan to push children into the behavioral health industrial complex that profits from these treatments and procedures. Make no mistake, this is about money, institutional backscratching, and ultimately, political power over a damaged generation.
Jena Nelson is Hofmeister’s handpicked puppet-successor and education mouthpiece within this insane and dangerous pipeline, which explains her obsession with mental health funding and services in schools.
What are “mental health services in schools”? - Beginning around minute 28 within the above podcast, through footage from the American School Counselors Association (ASCA) 2022 conference, Unwokable shows how school counselors, often the biggest activists in the school building, are intentionally positioned as “master manipulators” to ignite the social contagion of transgenderism among school children under the guise of mental health services.
Parents rights are less than an afterthought. They represent a barrier to what Hofmeister, Nelson and the ASCA have in mind, and this group trains school counselors in circumventing the legal authority of parents over their children. According to the ASCA, “Know the rules so you know how to break them.”
“We don’t need a state superintendent that wants to defund public education, we need a state superintendent who wants to defend public education.” - Jena Nelson at townhall meeting
No, Jena. Parents need a state superintendent that wants to protect and educate their children. Vote wisely, Oklahoma.
Coming soon: Look for Part 2 of our reporting about Jena Nelson, a look behind her campaign to the funders and strategists writing her cue cards. Subscribe to have Part 2 sent directly to your email box upon release.