Oklahoma Watch

Mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend have put gun deaths and firearm laws back in the spotlight.

Oklahoma’s last major mass shooting event was in 1986, when 14 people were killed at an Edmond post office. But the state’s death rate from guns used in both suicide and homicide has been rising and a major loosening of gun regulations is upon us when the state’s new “permitless carry” law goes into effect Nov. 1.

A $3 million taxpayer-funded program will soon give schools across the state access to a relatively untested “panic button” app that can alert authorities and staff if there is an active shooter, fire or emergency in the school.

Food intake doubled at Oklahoma’s food banks over the past year – the result of a short-term federal program designed to buy up products from farmers who faced disruption from other countries’ responding to the Trump administration’s tariffs.

A state investigator’s search warrant filed in court Tuesday seeks evidence of alleged embezzlement of state funds and obtaining money under false pretenses at Epic Charter Schools, including through the use of “ghost students” who receive no actual instruction at the school.

Nebert Adala had a tough decision to make in 2014 when he found out his work visa would not be renewed.

Adala, a Kenyan immigrant, had arrived in the country about five years earlier and just begun to settle down in Tulsa. He studied radiological technology at Tulsa Tech and Hillcrest Medical Center, getting married and finding a job in assisted-living care.

The meeting room is like so many others in Oklahoma, with a standard conference table, overhead projector and wall map. Attendees exchange small talk and grab coffee from the back of the room.

Oklahoma’s air may be getting worse.

The newest data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows air quality throughout much of the state was down during each of the past two years. That bucked a trend in which Oklahoma, like most of the country, had seen significant strides in making the air healthier during much of the past decade.

Administrators at Epic Charter Schools have been allowing, encouraging or pressuring teachers to manipulate students’ enrollment for years in order to improve employees’ bonus pay, according to at least seven former teachers.

Lobbyists seeking to influence elected officials in Oklahoma continue to spend some of the highest amounts ever in spite of rules intended to curb their practices.

Cheaper, stripped-down health plans could soon see a resurgence in Oklahoma, potentially reducing the number of uninsured while leaving policyholders with unexpected medical bills.

Vaccination has become a dirty word at the Oklahoma Capitol.

On a June night last year, an argument broke out at an Atoka County home.

A woman’s teenage daughter was playing loud music, and her husband asked her to tell the daughter to turn the music off. The argument escalated, and the woman said her husband “put both hands around her neck and choked her” so that “she felt her body being lifted off of the ground by her neck,” a court affidavit said.

It wasn’t publicized locally, but within the past few years teams of health officials at two Oklahoma health facilities took rapid actions to contain the spread of a fungal “superbug” that federal officials have declared a serious global health threat.

Gov. Kevin Stitt has abandoned a 2017 effort by the state to push schools to funnel more dollars into the classroom or risk consolidation.

Attorneys in the state’s sprawling opioid lawsuit have bragged that they slept on cots in their offices and went through millions of pages of evidence.

Election officials are gearing up to remove tens of thousands of Oklahomans from the state’s voter rolls – a controversial practice voting-rights advocates say can lead to disenfranchised voters.

A strategic plan laying out one-year and four-year goals for Gov. Kevin Stitt’s administration includes securing gubernatorial control of all state agencies and boards, changing the educational system and launching an initiative aimed at social issues.

In Oklahoma, 30,000 teachers have left the profession in the past six years. That’s the eye-popping statistic that stands out in the latest Oklahoma Teacher Supply and Demand report, and it represents a loss of an average of 10 percent of the state’s teaching workforce—compared to a national average of 7.7 percent attrition.

Thousands more Oklahoma students were held back in early grades than what the U.S. Department of Education reported, according to newly released state data.

Native American tribes across the country were left out of a major part of a new federal tax incentive for opportunity zones, with their governments unable to pool investments to support projects in some of the nation’s poorest areas.