Lawmakers move to reject immigration status tracking at Oklahoma schools
The Oklahoma Senate has advanced a resolution that would block the Oklahoma State Department of Education from requiring schools to seek information about the immigration status of students and their parents during enrollment.
Senate Joint Resolution 22 also rejects a proposal to require teachers to take the U.S. Naturalization Test to renew their teaching license.
Both of those proposals have been supported by state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, who leads the state agency, while his fellow Republican, Gov. Kevin Stitt has been a fierce critic of the immigration-check proposal, accusing Walters of using children as political pawns.
Ultimately, the Senate approved the resolution rejecting those rules proposals 43-0 on Tuesday, May 13. But plenty of legislative drama occurred on the Senate floor in the hour before that vote.
The resolution now heads to the House Administrative Rules Committee, chaired by Rep. Gerrid Kendrix, R-Altus. If approved by that committee, and then the full House, without changes, the resolution would then go to Stitt for his signature. The Republican-controlled Legislature has until May 30 to act on administrative rules proposals.
On Tuesday, a maneuver by state Sen. Shane Jett, R-Shawnee, resulted in one change in the resolution, to approve a proposed rule requiring school districts to report to the state agency donations to the district of more than $17,000 from non-government sources. Jett's amendment passed by a 26-18 vote after more than 45 minutes of questions and debate — and after the resolution's author, Sen. Micheal Bergstrom, R-Adair, urged a 'no' vote.
Bergstrom said the proposed rule had been poorly written by the state agency and that the agency hadn't been given legislative authority to create the rule.
Jett claimed that, among others, the Chinese Communist Party and other bad actors were 'pouring money' in Oklahoma school districts. He cited one example, one used by Walters nearly two years ago.
In September 2023, Walters told a U.S. House education subcommittee he believed the Chinese Communist Party has tried to influence Oklahoma schools through Mandarin language programs. He specifically alleged that the state's largest school district, Tulsa Public Schools, had taken money from the Chinese government.
The Tulsa district said Walters was wrong. In July 2023, the district's board of education renewed an agreement for the Confucius Classroom Coordination Offices through the International Leadership of Texas, a nonprofit described in an agenda item as an international partnership dedicated to building the field of Chinese language teachers and Chinese language learning in American schools for the 2023-24 school year.
According to a Congressional Research Office report from May 2023, the parent organization of the Confucius Classroom and its collegiate counterpart, the Confucius Institutes, is the Chinese Language Council International, which is affiliated with China's Ministry of Education.
Some senators — even Republicans, including Bergstrom, Sen. Brent Howard of Altus, Sen. Brenda Stanley of Midwest City and Sen. Dave Rader of Tulsa — seemed skeptical of Jett's idea, but the amendment still passed.
Two other amendments proposed by Jett — either of which would have changed the resolution to say the Senate approved the agency's immigration rule — both were tabled, after motions to do so by Howard, by votes of 27-16 and 27-17, respectively.
Jett initially had proposed the amendments before the resolution was introduced in the Senate Administrative Rules Committee, chaired by Bergstrom, but he and another far-right legislator, Sen. Dusty Deevers, R-Elgin — both members of the committee — were not in the room on May 7 when the committee voted 6-1 to approve the resolution. They then entered the room for a vote on another resolution.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Senate advances resolution rejecting Ryan Walters' immigration rule
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