Following an exodus of several senior employees from state Superintendent Ryan Walters’ administration, the Oklahoma State Department of Education is now refusing to release records explaining the departures.
The agency denied open records requests from Oklahoma Voice for resignation letters, widely considered to be public documents, of seven top-level administrators who have left over the past nine months. It then refused a subsequent request for all resignation letters submitted to the agency since Jan. 1.
The response is a heel-turn from the department’s practices only months ago. Like most state agencies, the Education Department provided resignation letters in response to open records requests, doing so for Oklahoma Voice as recently as February.
On Feb. 24, the agency provided the resignation letter of its former communications director, Dan Isett, who had left two weeks earlier.
However, as more members of Walters’ inner circle departed over the following months, the department abruptly stopped turning over these documents — a move that prompted a lawsuit from another news outlet and raised questions among some of the very employees whose resignation letters are being withheld.
When Oklahoma Voice requested Isett’s resignation letter again on June 17, the agency denied the request.
Isett declined to comment. His departing letter, which Oklahoma Voice obtained through its first request, was brief.
“Please accept this letter as my formal resignation as Director of Communications at OSDE, effective February 10, 2025,” Isett wrote in a message addressed to Walters.
A key basis for all of the denials, the agency said, is a section of the Open Records Act relating to employee privacy.
The state law gives public bodies sole discretion to keep personnel documents confidential if “disclosure would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
In court, the agency has contended a resignation letter would violate an employee’s privacy and would only satisfy the requester’s curiosity, rather than serving the public interest.
The Education Department also cited a provision in the open records law stating a public agency doesn’t have to release resignation records if they pertain to an internal personnel investigation.
However, agency spokesperson Quinton Hitchcock declined to confirm whether such an investigation exists.
“I am unable to comment on personnel matters,” Hitchcock said.
Former agency employees say privacy, investigation concerns shouldn’t apply
Former Chief Operations Officer Andrea Fielding said none of the employees who left recently, including herself in February, were under investigation. Several resigned for personal or family reasons, not because of personnel issues, she said.
Another former agency employee whose resignation letter is being withheld said he was not under investigation during his tenure, nor has he been informed he’s being investigated now. Former director of research and policy Tucker Cross said releasing the document would not violate his privacy.
“As far as my resignation letter is concerned, I would have no concerns with my letter being made public,” Cross said. “There’s nothing in there that needs to be hidden or protected for my sake.”
Hitchcock declined to explain how an internal investigation statute would apply to Cross, who hasn’t worked at the agency since Oct. 30.
Cross said he wrote a short resignation letter communicating that he needed to be home more to care for his family. Since leaving the agency, he said he’s done exactly that, focusing on his wife and children and their family business.
Former Director of External Relations Matt Oberdick also said neither an internal investigation nor privacy concerns would apply to him or his letter. The document didn’t contain private details like his home address or contact information, he said.
Oberdick, whose tenure at the agency lasted from February 2023 until June 2025, said his resignation letter “sings the praises” of his experience working at the Education Department.
He said he wrote that God had opened doors for him to work with Walters, someone he aligned with on many issues. Oberdick said he had no disgruntlement nor anger toward Walters when he left the agency.
Rather, God had opened another door to work at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank where Oberdick now directs the Center for Culture and the Family.
“There was nothing insidious,” Oberdick said of his letter. “There was no defamation of the agency. There was nothing negative said about my time or experience there, so I’m not sure why they wouldn’t want it released.”
A lawsuit challenges withholding of resignation documents
The news outlet Oklahoma Watch and reporter Jennifer Palmer are now suing the state Education Department after receiving an identical response to a request for another employee’s resignation records.
They contend withholding these documents violates the state Open Records Act. The agency rejected that argument, contending it has sole discretion over the release of resignation records, and urged an Oklahoma County district judge to throw out the lawsuit.
Palmer had requested the resignation records of former Chief Compliance Officer Kourtney Heard. Oklahoma Voice also requested Heard’s resignation letter and was denied access to it.
Heard declined to comment for this story. David Martin, a former senior director whose resignation letter the agency also withheld from Oklahoma Voice, did not return a request for comment.
It’s in the public interest, not merely curiosity, to disclose a state employee’s resignation letter, said Joey Senat, an Open Records Act expert and associate professor at Oklahoma State University.
That document could reveal whether an employee resigned because of corruption, incompetence or issues that could be embarrassing to a state agency if they come to light.
He said it’s common that government agencies use delay tactics or make “ludicrous” arguments to avoid releasing a record. Until recent changes to state law, members of the public often had few options left but the expensive and time-consuming choice to take the agency to court.
Meanwhile, government officials are “playing with house money,” Senat said. The costs of an open records lawsuit don’t come out of officials’ pockets but rather from the agency’s taxpayer funds.
“It’s just more smokescreen to hide things the government doesn’t want us to know, things that would show it’s being corrupt, it’s being incompetent, it’s not doing its job the way it’s supposed to do it, not doing the job we pay them to do,” Senat said.
State lawmakers added new language to the Open Records Act in recent years giving public bodies “sole discretion” over the release of certain personnel records, which could make it more difficult for courts to hold government agencies accountable, he said.
The state Legislature, though, passed a law this year that empowered the Attorney General’s Office to investigate and prosecute potential Open Records Act violations. That investigative power previously was limited to district attorneys, who Senat said rarely conducted such investigations.
Legislators also encoded a new public access counselor at the Attorney General’s Office to give the public another outlet to report complaints. The attorney general already had created the position within his staff, but it didn’t exist in state statute until the new law.
The Attorney General’s Office and its public access counselor declined to comment or address Oklahoma Voice’s open records complaint over the withholding of resignation letters because a lawsuit from another media outlet is pending over a similar matter.
Last year, Attorney General Gentner Drummond admonished Walters after receiving an “alarming number of complaints” of poor compliance at the Education Department with open records laws.
Education Department refused to confirm general counsel’s status
The first resignation letter the agency withheld from Oklahoma Voice was that of its recently departed general counsel, Michael Beason. Like with all the subsequent denials, the agency cited the employee privacy and internal investigation sections of the Open Records Act.
Beason said it’s not accurate to interpret the agency’s response as a suggestion there has been an internal investigation. He said it was “insulting in the extreme” when Oklahoma Voice asked whether he was the subject of such an investigation.
“I was not and am not under investigation by the agency or anyone else,” Beason said. “I have not done anything wrong, illegal or unethical.”
Oklahoma Voice requested Beason’s resignation letter on June 17 during the final weeks he was employed at the agency. The request was denied, and Hitchcock did not respond to questions asking whether Beason still worked at the department.
Hitchcock declined to answer similar questions from The Oklahoman, the newspaper reported. Instead, he told The Oklahoman he isn’t at liberty to discuss personnel matters with the news media, a response he gave to Oklahoma Voice multiple times during the reporting of this story.
This is another U-turn from the Education Department’s previous practice of willingly acknowledging whether an individual staff member is employed at the agency. In February, it confirmed the employment of Walters’ new chief of staff, Matt Mohler.
Refusing to acknowledge whether an individual works at a state agency would amount to another Open Records Act violation, Senat said. The law specifically requires that government agencies disclose an employee’s title and dates of employment.
“We don’t have secret employees in this state,” Senat said.
Beason confirmed he submitted his resignation letter June 10 and had his last day of work June 30.
He said he’s been in good standing with the Oklahoma Bar Association for 25 years and chose to return to private legal practice.
He declined to share his resignation letter with Oklahoma Voice.
Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence.
