Consolidating County School Districts Saves Millions Yearly

An updated article from January 2015. 

A Tale Of Two Counties: Carter & Tulsa

It is often somewhat hard to conceptualize the effect of restructuring Oklahoma's 531 public school districts. to that end, Sooner Politics' researchers  sampled two very stark contrasts in educational administration.
Owasso is a growing city in the far outreaches of Tulsa County. Their 11 schools are a part of one district with 9600 students and a very good superintendent who makes a very good salary. His teachers perform well in the classroom and state testing demonstrates  it through standardized testing.

  Carter County, on the other hand; has 9 school districts ranging from the 3000+ in Ardmore Public Schools, to districts as small as 200 students total. The 9300 students are spread throughout the county. Nine superintendents share the load and earn a combined $730K per year. The students score a very average result in standardized tests.

Tulsa Markets A Tax Increase With Sailboats, Lighthouses, and Resorts

Get ready for Tulsa's Next marketing blitz for bigger government and crony capitalism. Vision2025 needs more money

  Within weeks, Tulsa's city council and the mayor will be making a visionary pitch for an expanded and oppressive tax to benefit the chosen few. And this time they will bring the sailboats back.
  In the early 1980s, The notion of a massive special tax was promoted in the Tulsa newspapers using make-believe ideas that the Arkansas River would become a massive urban lake adjacent to the downtown and Brookside neighborhoods. And the sailboats were suggested as a virtual reality, if Tulsa dug deep and gave over 1% more of all their disposable income.

17 Oklahoma earthquakes of 2.6 magnitude or greater recorded since Thursday's 4.7

View a live interactive quake map, here: goo.gl/nWZCGd

 The Tulsa World compiled a chart of the quakes within the past 48 hours. You can follow their updated coverage here.    Oklahoma's Corporation Commission is now stepping up their powers of shutting down or restricting injection well activity. (a process of forcing waste water back into dormant wells so as to push oil to adjacent production wells)  http://goo.gl/bEN2vG

Editorial: Quarantined Students In Columbine

Traumatized children fleeing Columbine High School, are quickly scanned for weapons, by SWAT teams

  Given the opposition from congress, regarding Kurdish and Christian refugees; how smart is it to allow students evacuate a school campus while terrorists are actively massacring them?  I mean, we might accidentally let loose a terrorist?

  Congress just voted to bar any persecuted Syrian Christians and Kurdish allies from entering the USA because we might let a terrorist loose, accidentally!  And that makes as much sense as chaining the school doors shut and locking the students and faculty inside until all the violence ends.

Strong Earthquake Rocks Oklahoma In the Overnight

M4.7 - 8 miles SW of Cherokee, Oklahoma

In the early morning hours of Nov. 18th, Oklahomans were shaken by a 4.7 magnitude quake centered near the Great Salt Plains Lake, in North Central Oklahoma.
The USGS released the following info:

Earthquakes in the Stable Continental Region

 Induced Seismicity

As is the case elsewhere in the world, there is evidence that some central and eastern North America earthquakes have been triggered or caused by human activities that have altered the stress conditions in earth's crust sufficiently to induce faulting. Activities that have induced felt earthquakes in some geologic environments have included impoundment of water behind dams, injection of fluid into the earth's crust, extraction of fluid or gas, and removal of rock in mining or quarrying operations.