Chicken Fried News

Illustrations by Jerry Bennett Is the heat keeping everyone home or is it the air conditioning?

Given, everyone is exhausted from the unrelenting heat and the scheduling chaos that comes as summer starts to wind down. Factoring in the extra costs associated with back-to-school season even in the most temperate of years makes it worse, but this year is especially taxing thanks to OG&E.

Walk into any of your favorite spots since the July electric bills rolled in and you can expect to immediately find a seat. Bet you can find at least one person there grumbling about how their electric bill is higher than it’s ever been, with many — most, even — complaining that it’s twice or more than the highest one they’ve ever paid.

But, as your family is wrung dry of every spare cent this season, you can rest easy knowing that OG&E’s shareholders are seeing returns on their investments that are approaching their pre-pandemic heights.

The top four owners of the “public utility” own more than $2 billion in stock, according to OGE Energy Corp’s profile on CNNBusiness.

And not one of those who own more than a percentage point of OG&E — BlackRock Fund Advisors, The Vanguard Group, State Street Global Advisors and Fidelity Management & Research — is based in Oklahoma.

In fact, individual shareholders represent 1.4 percent of ownership.

So the next time you turn up your air conditioner another couple of degrees in the hopes of saving another couple of bucks, know that mutual funds and other

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The party that wants to keep politics out of the classroom sure is funneling its politics into the state’s education board.

Tulsa Public Schools — the largest school district in the state — had its accreditation downgraded to “accredited with warning” after a “teacher from Memorial High School in Tulsa complained to the Oklahoma Department of Education in February that a staff training from August 2021 violated state law HB1775, which restricts conversations on race and racism. (HB1775 is sometimes known as the anticritical race theory law.) The law wasn’t in place at the time of the training,” Education Week reported. Their infraction, according to Education Week, was in part that training included unpleasant (but uncontested) facts like Black students were suspended two and three times more than white students “and that teachers hold lower expectations (explicitly or implicitly) for Black and Latino children as compared to White peers.”

Mustang Public Schools received the same treatment after it told on itself.

“The incident in question involved a middle school teacher conducting a Cross-the-Line activity, which allows students to see the ways they’re similar to and different from each other by taking a step back or forward depending on how they respond to questions. The larger the gap, the bigger the difference. The question that Mustang deemed unlawful was ‘If you have ever been called names regarding your race, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, or physical/learning disability and felt uncomfortable, take one step back,’” Education Week reported.

If there’s one thing that shouldn’t be taught in schools, it’s empathy, a quality that administrators ruling over school districts with an iron fist also seem to lack.

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