10 more books recommended for removal in SC from K-12 libraries
COLUMBIA — Ten more books are slated for removal from South Carolina's K-12 public school libraries, despite protests from the books' authors and school librarians.
Librarians have already been required to remove 11 books from shelves since a regulation went into effect last June barring students from accessing books containing 'sexual conduct' while at school. Another six books have been allowed to stay, one with the stipulation that parents must give approval before their child can check it out.
The full State Board of Education will make the final decision on whether to keep or retain the books at its April 1 meeting. All are available in at least one high school in the state but not taught in classrooms.
Books recommended for removal Thursday
'Collateral' by Ellen Hopkins
'Empire of Storms' by Sarah J. Maas
'Half of a Yellow Sun' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
'Hopeless' by Colleen Hoover
'Identical' by Ellen Hopkins
'Kingdom of Ash' by Sarah J. Maas
'Last Night at the Telegraph Club' by Malinda Lo
'Living Dead Girl' by Elizabeth Scott
'Lucky' by Alice Sebold
'Tricks' by Ellen Hopkins
Source: Instructional Materials Review Committee
Many of the 10 books the five-member committee voted Thursday to recommend removing tell stories about abuse and persecution, speakers said in asking the committee to keep the books on shelves.
At least three of the books — 'Collateral,' 'Identical' and 'Tricks' — were written to reflect true stories of rape and human trafficking in an effort to encourage teenagers experiencing similar abuse to get help and raise attention for people who know little about it, Ellen Hopkins, the author of those three, told the committee.
'Identical,' for example, reflected the experiences of four of Hopkins' friends who were molested by male relatives, she said. Readers, many of them teenagers, have written Hopkins letters thanking her for writing a book so similar to their own experiences, she said.
'Not every kid's life is ideal,' Hopkins said. 'Who will speak for them? Somebody has to speak for them, including in school libraries.'
In November, the committee decided another book by Hopkins, 'Crank' — about a woman addicted to meth — can be checked out of school libraries only with parents' permission.
Ivie Szalai, who brought the challenges to the state level, said she has read and enjoyed several of Hopkins' books. But she doesn't believe they belong in school libraries, she told board members in the virtual meeting.
'I stand by my stance that I don't feel that they are appropriate for minor children,' said the Beaufort County parent.
Others, such as 'Half of a Yellow Sun' and 'Last Night at the Telegraph Club,' tell the stories of historical events. 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, tells the story of three people during the civil war in Nigeria in the 1960s. 'Last Night at the Telegraph Club,' by Malinda Lo, follows a 17-year-old Chinese American girl as she discovers her sexuality in 1950s San Francisco.
'I am a Chinese American lesbian myself, and when I was a teen growing up in the 1980s and '90s, I often felt alone and confused,' Lo wrote in a letter to the committee. 'I didn't have access to books like this that would have helped me to better understand who I was.
'That's why I write books about LGBTQ+ and Asian American characters,' Lo's letter continued. 'I'm writing the books I needed as a teen.'
Whether the books are important is not what the committee considers. Board members' decisions must be based solely on whether the books contain sexual content, said Robert Cathcart, attorney for the state Department of Education.
And in the case of the 10 books committee members considered Thursday, they did, he said.
'While this material likely does contain many important themes and considerations, what this board and the committee is charged with considering is whether or not it's age and developmentally appropriate,' Cathcart said.
Removing books from libraries takes away chances teenagers might have to find a book that interests them during a time when fewer children are reading for fun, two librarians and a teacher told the committee.
Students who enjoy stories by Sarah J. Maas or Colleen Hoover, two popular authors whose books the committee voted Thursday to remove from shelves, might discover a lifelong love of reading that helps them in other parts of their lives, librarians said.
'I want books in my library that people want to read,' said Laura Haverkamp, a former high school librarian of 24 years in Columbia.
Those students have plenty of other options, Szalai said.
'I hope that in the future that authors, if their target audience is children in high school, let's say 14 to 18, that they might consider removing that (sexual) material,' Szalai said.
The books heard Thursday all came from Szalai, who said she has children attending Beaufort County public schools. Szalai was also responsible for four previous challenges, which she brought after her local school board decided the books could stay on high school shelves.
Those decisions came before the regulation went into effect.
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Hamilton Spectator
31-07-2025
- Hamilton Spectator
‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland
TUAM, Ireland (AP) — This story begins with a forbidden fruit. It was the 1970s in this small town in the west of Ireland when an orchard owner chased off two boys stealing his apples. The youngsters avoided being caught by clambering over the stone wall of the derelict Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. When they landed, they discovered a dark secret that has grown to haunt Ireland . One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound as his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney pushed back some briars to reveal a concrete slab they pried open. 'There was just a jumble of bones,' Hopkins said. 'We didn't know if we'd found a treasure or a nightmare.' Hopkins didn't realize they'd found a mass unmarked baby grave in a former septic tank — in a town whose name is derived from the Irish word meaning burial place. It took four decades and a persistent local historian to unearth a more troubling truth that led this month to the start of an excavation that could exhume the remains of almost 800 infants and young children. The Tuam grave has compelled a broader reckoning that extends to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican. Ireland and the Catholic Church, once central to its identity, are grappling with the legacy of ostracizing unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system. An unlikely investigator Word of Hopkins' discovery may never have traveled beyond what is left of the home's walls if not for the work of Catherine Corless, a homemaker with an interest in history. Corless, who grew up in town and vividly remembers children from the home being shunned at school, set out to write an article about the site for the local historical society. But she soon found herself chasing ghosts of lost children. 'I thought I was doing a nice story about orphans and all that, and the more I dug, the worse it was getting,' she said. Mother and baby homes were not unique to Ireland, but the church's influence on social values magnified the stigma on women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. The homes were opened in the 1920s after Ireland won its independence from Britain. Most were run by Catholic nuns. In Tuam's case, the mother and baby home opened in a former workhouse built in the 1840s for poor Irish where many famine victims died. It had been taken over by British troops during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Six members of an Irish Republican Army faction that opposed the treaty ending the war were executed there in 1923. Two years later, the imposing three-story gray buildings on the outskirts of town reopened as a home for expectant and young mothers and orphans. It was run for County Galway by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns. The buildings were primitive, poorly heated with running water only in the kitchen and maternity ward. Large dormitories housed upward of 200 children and 100 mothers at a time. Corless found a dearth of information in her local library but was horrified to learn that women banished by their families were essentially incarcerated there. They worked for up to a year before being cast out — most of them forever separated from their children. So deep was the shame of being pregnant outside marriage that women were often brought there surreptitiously. Peter Mulryan, who grew up in the home, learned decades later that his mother was six months pregnant when she was taken by bicycle from her home under the cover of darkness. The local priest arranged it after telling her father she was 'causing a scandal in the parish.' Mothers and their children carried that stigma most of their lives. But there was no accountability for the men who got them pregnant, whether by romantic encounter, rape or incest. More shocking, though, was the high number of deaths Corless found. When she searched the local cemetery for a plot for the home's babies, she found nothing. Long-lost brothers Around the time Corless was unearthing the sad history, Anna Corrigan was in Dublin discovering a secret of her own. Corrigan, raised as an only child, vaguely remembered a time as a girl when her uncle was angry at her mother and blurted out that she had given birth to two sons. To this day, she's unsure if it's a memory or dream. While researching her late father's traumatic childhood confined in an industrial school for abandoned, orphaned or troubled children, she asked a woman helping her for any records about her deceased mom. Corrigan was devastated when she got the news: before she was born, her mother had two boys in the Tuam home. 'I cried for brothers I didn't know, because now I had siblings, but I never knew them,' she said. Her mother never spoke a word about it. A 1947 inspection record provided insights to a crowded and deadly environment. Twelve of 31 infants in a nursery were emaciated. Other children were described as 'delicate,' 'wasted,' or with 'wizened limbs.' Corrigan's brother, John Dolan, weighed almost 9 pounds when he was born but was described as 'a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over his bodily functions, probably mental defective.' He died two months later in a measles outbreak. Despite a high death rate, the report said infants were well cared for and diets were excellent. Corrigan's brother, William, was born in May 1950 and listed as dying about eight months later. There was no death certificate, though, and his date of birth was altered on the ledger, which was sometimes done to mask adoptions, Corrigan said. Ireland was very poor at the time and infant mortality rates were high. Some 9,000 babies — or 15% — died in 18 mother and baby homes that were open as late as 1998, a government commission found. In the 1930s and 1940s, more than 40% of children died some years in the homes before their first birthday. Tuam recorded the highest death percentage before closing in 1961. Nearly a third of the children died there. In a hunt for graves, the cemetery caretaker led Corless across the street to the neighborhood and playground where the home once stood. A well-tended garden with flowers, a grotto and Virgin Mary statue was walled off in the corner. It was created by a couple living next door to memorialize the place Hopkins found the bones. Some were thought to be famine remains. But that was before Corless discovered the garden sat atop the septic tank installed after the famine. She wondered if the nuns had used the tank as a convenient burial place after it went out of service in 1937, hidden behind the home's 10-foot-high walls. 'It saved them admitting that so, so many babies were dying,' she said. 'Nobody knew what they were doing.' A sensational story When she published her article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society in 2012, she braced for outrage. Instead, she heard almost nothing. That changed, though, after Corrigan, who had been busy pursuing records and contacting officials from the prime minister to the police, found Corless. Corrigan connected her with journalist Alison O'Reilly and the international media took notice after her May 25, 2014, article on the Sunday front page of the Irish Mail with the headline: 'A Mass Grave of 800 Babies.' The article caused a firestorm, followed by some blowback. Some news outlets, including The Associated Press , highlighted sensational reporting and questioned whether a septic tank could have been used as a grave. The Bon Secours sisters hired public relations consultant Terry Prone, who tried to steer journalists away. 'If you come here you'll find no mass grave,' she said in an email to a French TV company. 'No evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, 'Yeah a few bones were found — but this was an area where famine victims were buried. So?'' Despite the doubters, there was widespread outrage. Corless was inundated by people looking for relatives on the list of 796 deaths she compiled. Those reared with the stain of being 'illegitimate' found their voice. Mulryan, who lived in the home until he was 4 1/2, spoke about being abused as a foster child working on a farm, shoeless for much of the year, barely schooled, underfed and starved for kindness. 'We were afraid to open our mouths, you know, we were told to mind our own business,' Mulryan said. 'It's a disgrace. This church and the state had so much power, they could do what they liked and there was nobody to question them.' Then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny said the children were treated as an 'inferior subspecies' as he announced an investigation into mother and baby homes. When a test excavation confirmed in 2017 that skeletons of babies and toddlers were in the old septic tank, Kenny dubbed it a 'chamber of horrors.' Pope Francis acknowledged the scandal during his 2018 visit to Ireland when he apologized for church 'crimes' that included child abuse and forcing unmarried mothers to give up their children. It took five years before the government probe primarily blamed the children's fathers and women's families in its expansive 2021 report. The state and churches played a supporting role in the harsh treatment, but it noted the institutions, despite their failings, provided a refuge when families would not. Some survivors saw the report as a damning vindication while others branded it a whitewash. Prime Minister Micheál Martin apologized, saying mothers and children paid a terrible price for the nation's 'perverse religious morality.' 'The shame was not theirs — it was ours,' Martin said. The Bon Secours sisters offered a profound apology and acknowledged children were disrespectfully buried. 'We failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children,' Sister Eileen O'Connor said. 'We failed to offer them the compassion that they so badly needed.' The dig When a crew including forensic scientists and archaeologists began digging at the site two weeks ago, Corless was 'on a different planet,' amazed the work was underway after so many years. It is expected to take two years to collect bones, many of which are commingled, sort them and use DNA to try to identify them with relatives like Corrigan. Dig director Daniel MacSweeney, who previously worked for the International Committee of Red Cross to identify missing persons in conflict zones in Afghanistan and Lebanon, said it is a uniquely difficult undertaking. 'We cannot underestimate the complexity of the task before us, the challenging nature of the site as you will see, the age of the remains, the location of the burials, the dearth of information about these children and their lives,' MacSweeney said. Nearly 100 people, some from the U.S., Britain, Australia, and Canada, have either provided DNA or contacted them about doing so. Some people in town believe the remains should be left undisturbed. Patrick McDonagh, who grew up in the neighborhood, said a priest had blessed the ground after Hopkins' discovery and Masses were held there regularly. 'It should be left as it is,' McDonagh said. 'It was always a graveyard.' A week before ground was broken, a bus delivered a group of the home's aging survivors and relatives of mothers who toiled there to the neighborhood of rowhouses that ring the playground and memorial garden. A passageway between two homes led them through a gate in metal fencing erected to hide the site that has taken on an industrial look. Beyond grass where children once played — and beneath which children may be buried — were storage containers, a dumpster and an excavator poised for digging. It would be their last chance to see it before it's torn up and — maybe — the bones of their kin recovered so they can be properly buried. Corrigan, who likes to say that justice delayed Irish-style is 'delay, deny 'til we all go home and die,' hopes each child is found. 'They were denied dignity in life, and they were denied dignity and respect in death,' she said. 'So we're hoping that today maybe will be the start of hearing them because I think they've been crying for an awful long time to be heard.' ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
San Francisco Chronicle
31-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Just a jumble of bones.' How a baby grave discovery has grown to haunt Ireland
TUAM, Ireland (AP) — This story begins with a forbidden fruit. It was the 1970s in this small town in the west of Ireland when an orchard owner chased off two boys stealing his apples. The youngsters avoided being caught by clambering over the stone wall of the derelict Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home. When they landed, they discovered a dark secret that has grown to haunt Ireland. One of the boys, Franny Hopkins, remembers the hollow sound as his feet hit the ground. He and Barry Sweeney pushed back some briars to reveal a concrete slab they pried open. 'There was just a jumble of bones,' Hopkins said. 'We didn't know if we'd found a treasure or a nightmare.' Hopkins didn't realize they'd found a mass unmarked baby grave in a former septic tank — in a town whose name is derived from the Irish word meaning burial place. It took four decades and a persistent local historian to unearth a more troubling truth that led this month to the start of an excavation that could exhume the remains of almost 800 infants and young children. The Tuam grave has compelled a broader reckoning that extends to the highest levels of government in Dublin and the Vatican. Ireland and the Catholic Church, once central to its identity, are grappling with the legacy of ostracizing unmarried women who they believed committed a mortal sin and separating them from children left at the mercy of a cruel system. An unlikely investigator Word of Hopkins' discovery may never have traveled beyond what is left of the home's walls if not for the work of Catherine Corless, a homemaker with an interest in history. Corless, who grew up in town and vividly remembers children from the home being shunned at school, set out to write an article about the site for the local historical society. But she soon found herself chasing ghosts of lost children. 'I thought I was doing a nice story about orphans and all that, and the more I dug, the worse it was getting,' she said. Mother and baby homes were not unique to Ireland, but the church's influence on social values magnified the stigma on women and girls who became pregnant outside marriage. The homes were opened in the 1920s after Ireland won its independence from Britain. Most were run by Catholic nuns. In Tuam's case, the mother and baby home opened in a former workhouse built in the 1840s for poor Irish where many famine victims died. It had been taken over by British troops during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23. Six members of an Irish Republican Army faction that opposed the treaty ending the war were executed there in 1923. Two years later, the imposing three-story gray buildings on the outskirts of town reopened as a home for expectant and young mothers and orphans. It was run for County Galway by the Bon Secours Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns. The buildings were primitive, poorly heated with running water only in the kitchen and maternity ward. Large dormitories housed upward of 200 children and 100 mothers at a time. Corless found a dearth of information in her local library but was horrified to learn that women banished by their families were essentially incarcerated there. They worked for up to a year before being cast out — most of them forever separated from their children. So deep was the shame of being pregnant outside marriage that women were often brought there surreptitiously. Peter Mulryan, who grew up in the home, learned decades later that his mother was six months pregnant when she was taken by bicycle from her home under the cover of darkness. The local priest arranged it after telling her father she was 'causing a scandal in the parish.' Mothers and their children carried that stigma most of their lives. But there was no accountability for the men who got them pregnant, whether by romantic encounter, rape or incest. More shocking, though, was the high number of deaths Corless found. When she searched the local cemetery for a plot for the home's babies, she found nothing. Long-lost brothers Around the time Corless was unearthing the sad history, Anna Corrigan was in Dublin discovering a secret of her own. Corrigan, raised as an only child, vaguely remembered a time as a girl when her uncle was angry at her mother and blurted out that she had given birth to two sons. To this day, she's unsure if it's a memory or dream. While researching her late father's traumatic childhood confined in an industrial school for abandoned, orphaned or troubled children, she asked a woman helping her for any records about her deceased mom. Corrigan was devastated when she got the news: before she was born, her mother had two boys in the Tuam home. 'I cried for brothers I didn't know, because now I had siblings, but I never knew them,' she said. Her mother never spoke a word about it. A 1947 inspection record provided insights to a crowded and deadly environment. Twelve of 31 infants in a nursery were emaciated. Other children were described as 'delicate,' 'wasted,' or with 'wizened limbs.' Corrigan's brother, John Dolan, weighed almost 9 pounds when he was born but was described as 'a miserable, emaciated child with voracious appetite and no control over his bodily functions, probably mental defective.' He died two months later in a measles outbreak. Despite a high death rate, the report said infants were well cared for and diets were excellent. Corrigan's brother, William, was born in May 1950 and listed as dying about eight months later. There was no death certificate, though, and his date of birth was altered on the ledger, which was sometimes done to mask adoptions, Corrigan said. Ireland was very poor at the time and infant mortality rates were high. Some 9,000 babies — or 15% — died in 18 mother and baby homes that were open as late as 1998, a government commission found. In the 1930s and 1940s, more than 40% of children died some years in the homes before their first birthday. Tuam recorded the highest death percentage before closing in 1961. Nearly a third of the children died there. In a hunt for graves, the cemetery caretaker led Corless across the street to the neighborhood and playground where the home once stood. A well-tended garden with flowers, a grotto and Virgin Mary statue was walled off in the corner. It was created by a couple living next door to memorialize the place Hopkins found the bones. Some were thought to be famine remains. But that was before Corless discovered the garden sat atop the septic tank installed after the famine. She wondered if the nuns had used the tank as a convenient burial place after it went out of service in 1937, hidden behind the home's 10-foot-high walls. 'It saved them admitting that so, so many babies were dying,' she said. 'Nobody knew what they were doing.' A sensational story When she published her article in the Journal of the Old Tuam Society in 2012, she braced for outrage. Instead, she heard almost nothing. That changed, though, after Corrigan, who had been busy pursuing records and contacting officials from the prime minister to the police, found Corless. Corrigan connected her with journalist Alison O'Reilly and the international media took notice after her May 25, 2014, article on the Sunday front page of the Irish Mail with the headline: 'A Mass Grave of 800 Babies.' The article caused a firestorm, followed by some blowback. Some news outlets, including The Associated Press, highlighted sensational reporting and questioned whether a septic tank could have been used as a grave. The Bon Secours sisters hired public relations consultant Terry Prone, who tried to steer journalists away. 'If you come here you'll find no mass grave,' she said in an email to a French TV company. 'No evidence that children were ever so buried and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying, 'Yeah a few bones were found — but this was an area where famine victims were buried. So?'' Despite the doubters, there was widespread outrage. Corless was inundated by people looking for relatives on the list of 796 deaths she compiled. Those reared with the stain of being 'illegitimate' found their voice. Mulryan, who lived in the home until he was 4½, spoke about being abused as a foster child working on a farm, shoeless for much of the year, barely schooled, underfed and starved for kindness. 'We were afraid to open our mouths, you know, we were told to mind our own business,' Mulryan said. 'It's a disgrace. This church and the state had so much power, they could do what they liked and there was nobody to question them.' Then-Prime Minister Enda Kenny said the children were treated as an 'inferior subspecies' as he announced an investigation into mother and baby homes. When a test excavation confirmed in 2017 that skeletons of babies and toddlers were in the old septic tank, Kenny dubbed it a 'chamber of horrors.' Pope Francis acknowledged the scandal during his 2018 visit to Ireland when he apologized for church 'crimes' that included child abuse and forcing unmarried mothers to give up their children. It took five years before the government probe primarily blamed the children's fathers and women's families in its expansive 2021 report. The state and churches played a supporting role in the harsh treatment, but it noted the institutions, despite their failings, provided a refuge when families would not. Some survivors saw the report as a damning vindication while others branded it a whitewash. Prime Minister Micheál Martin apologized, saying mothers and children paid a terrible price for the nation's 'perverse religious morality.' 'The shame was not theirs — it was ours,' Martin said. The Bon Secours sisters offered a profound apology and acknowledged children were disrespectfully buried. 'We failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children,' Sister Eileen O'Connor said. 'We failed to offer them the compassion that they so badly needed.' The dig When a crew including forensic scientists and archaeologists began digging at the site two weeks ago, Corless was 'on a different planet,' amazed the work was underway after so many years. It is expected to take two years to collect bones, many of which are commingled, sort them and use DNA to try to identify them with relatives like Corrigan. Dig director Daniel MacSweeney, who previously worked for the International Committee of Red Cross to identify missing persons in conflict zones in Afghanistan and Lebanon, said it is a uniquely difficult undertaking. 'We cannot underestimate the complexity of the task before us, the challenging nature of the site as you will see, the age of the remains, the location of the burials, the dearth of information about these children and their lives,' MacSweeney said. Nearly 100 people, some from the U.S., Britain, Australia, and Canada, have either provided DNA or contacted them about doing so. Some people in town believe the remains should be left undisturbed. Patrick McDonagh, who grew up in the neighborhood, said a priest had blessed the ground after Hopkins' discovery and Masses were held there regularly. 'It should be left as it is,' McDonagh said. 'It was always a graveyard.' A week before ground was broken, a bus delivered a group of the home's aging survivors and relatives of mothers who toiled there to the neighborhood of rowhouses that ring the playground and memorial garden. A passageway between two homes led them through a gate in metal fencing erected to hide the site that has taken on an industrial look. Beyond grass where children once played — and beneath which children may be buried — were storage containers, a dumpster and an excavator poised for digging. It would be their last chance to see it before it's torn up and — maybe — the bones of their kin recovered so they can be properly buried. Corrigan, who likes to say that justice delayed Irish-style is 'delay, deny 'til we all go home and die,' hopes each child is found. 'They were denied dignity in life, and they were denied dignity and respect in death,' she said. 'So we're hoping that today maybe will be the start of hearing them because I think they've been crying for an awful long time to be heard.'
Yahoo
30-07-2025
- Yahoo
State superintendent suggests Oklahoma governor may be responsible for nude women allegations
Ryan Walters holds a press conference on Tuesday, July 29, 2025, to address reports that nude women were seen on a television in his office. (Photo by Janelle Stecklein/Oklahoma Voice) OKLAHOMA CITY – State Superintendent Ryan Walters on Tuesday suggested Oklahoma's governor was behind allegations that pictures of nude women were seen on his office television. He insisted that an investigation had cleared him of wrongdoing. Without citing any evidence, Walters implied that fellow Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt had encouraged state Board of Education members to fabricate claims that they saw nude women on his television during the closed door meeting last week. 'The governor needs to answer the questions,' Walters said during a brief, hastily called press conference at the Capitol in which he only took a few questions. 'Did he tell these board members to come in here and do this? Did you coordinate with them afterwards to set all this up after the fact when you couldn't disrupt the meeting?' He said he met Monday with the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office, and that they concluded none of his devices were connected to the television. The Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office said that the probe into what happened during an State Department of Education executive session was in its early stages. 'No, we have not cleared him,' said Aaron Brilbeck, a spokesman for the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office. 'Yes, our investigation is ongoing. This is in its infancy. We don't just do an investigation in an hour and a half.' Stitt's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Stitt appointed board members Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage, who last week told The Oklahoman and NonDoc that they had seen the women on the television screen, which was behind Walters' back. Carson told the media outlets that she asked Walters to turn it off, which he did. Stitt recently shook up the board, replacing three members after he said there was too much political drama. Some of the new board members have openly questioned Walters' policy ideas. Deatherage, when contacted Tuesday, declined to answer questions but said a statement would be put out soon. Carson could not be reached for comment. The Office of Management and Enterprise Services asked Oklahoma County Sheriff Tommie Johnson to investigate after Carson filed a complaint, records show. The Office of Management and Enterprise Services did not return a phone call seeking comment or respond to a request for a copy of Carson's complaint. Walters said his office television is hooked up to cable, not any of his electronic devices. 'These board members decided to construct a lie to destroy my character again,' Walters said. He said the board members are attempting to stop education reform. Walters also lashed out at the teacher's union and the news media. 'Those individuals that tried to assassinate my character and print and publish things that are demonstrably false and provably false will be hearing from us and all of Oklahomans very, very soon,' Walters said. Janelle Stecklein contributed to this report. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE Solve the daily Crossword
