In partnership with NonDoc, The Frontier fact-checked some claims Republican candidates for state superintendent John Cox, Robert Franklin, Toni Hasenbeck, Debra Herlihy, Adam Pugh and James Taylor made during the June 2 debate in Norman.
The Frontier used interviews, public records and news archives to verify information.
Claim: A bill to put chaplains to provide mental health services in every school across the state has been stalled in the Senate for three years.
Cox said: “The National School Chaplain’s Association has tried to pass a bill the last three years … that’s been stalled in the Senate education committee, that could put chaplains across the state in our schools. They’re not pushing faith, but (they’re) there as an extra set of trained mental health professionals.”
Fact check: Mostly true.
There have been several bills introduced since the 2024 legislative session that would allow schools to bring in school chaplains, though only one of those bills never made it out of the Senate education committee.
Senate Bill 36 in 2024 passed both the Senate and the House, but the final version stripped out references to the school chaplain program and dealt with law enforcement records under the state’s Open Records Act. Out of several similar bills over the past two years, SB 36 was the only one that contained minimum education requirements for chaplains and banned proselytizing to students during school.
-Clifton Adcock
Claim: During their time in the Legislature, Adam Pugh and Toni Hasenbeck both voted to “put Ryan Walters in a box.”
Taylor said: “(former Rep. Mark) McBride said what this bill does is it puts Ryan Walters in a box to control him … when you guys voted for this bill, you voted to put a limit on Ryan Walters … The people’s will was thwarted because you put him in a box to control him.”
Fact check: Mixed
It’s true that both Pugh and Hasenbeck voted to approve Senate Bill 36X, which was a budgeting bill for the State Department of Education in 2023. Lawmakers sometimes create guidelines on how they want large state agencies like the Education Department to spend a portion of their state funding. Senate Bill 36x, for example, required that OSDE spend $250,000 of its nearly $4 billion total appropriation on buying inhalers to keep in schools.
But the bill also required the agency not to refuse any federal grants without the approval of both House and Senate leadership. Former State Superintendent Ryan Walters threatened to pull out of federal funding programs that Walters said didn’t align with “Oklahoma values.” Some lawmakers were concerned that the bill was an overreach.
-Kayla Branch
Claim: Hasenbeck once wrote a bill to create a school counselor pipeline.
Hasenbeck said: “I created a piece of legislation eight years ago — the price tag was $68 million — to create a school counselor pipeline. I wanted to find people who wanted to be counselors and do that.”
Fact check: Mostlytrue
Hasenbeck told The Frontier that in 2019, she discussed legislation creating a school counselor pipeline with the Oklahoma Legislature’s bill-writing staff but didn’t ultimately file a bill. She said the legislation would have required every school to have its own dedicated counselor. School counselors in Oklahoma are typically required to have at least a master’s degree in school counseling, but participants in the pipeline program could have worked as counselors while pursuing their master’s degree with a waiver that exempts them from some state regulations. Hasenbeck said she felt the $68 million cost to the state would have become a permanent part of the education budget and it was too expensive to get approved by legislators.
“Once something becomes a part of the funding formula, it just stays part of the funding formula so it would be an ongoing expense to the state, if you look at it that way,” Hasenbeck said.
-Ari Fife
Claim: Haskell County has seven public schools and superintendents with a total of 1,860 students. By consolidating down to one superintendent, the county could save more than $1 million that could go toward classrooms.
Taylor said: “The average superintendent is making about $150,000. Now, you can take that money and you can put it into classrooms, or you can put it to raise teachers’ salaries, or you can hire additional teachers, … In fact, in Haskell County, that makes over a million dollars, so that they can go back into the schools.”
Fact check: False
According to the Oklahoma State Department of Education, there were five school districts in Haskell County, each with its own superintendent: Stigler, Keota, Kinta, McCurtain, and Whitefield. There were 2,053 students enrolled in those districts during the 2025-2026 school year. Haskell County’s five superintendents made a combined total compensation of $457,945 during the 2026 budget year, according to state data. Only two of the Haskell County superintendents representing the two largest schools in the district, Stigler’s Thomas Kettles and Keota’s Candice Dominguez, earned more than $100,000. Taylor said he got the county school district and student numbers from residents while visiting the county and it may have been inaccurate.
-Clifton Adcock
Claim: Franklin was one of only two Statewide Virtual Charter School Board members to vote against the St. Isidore charter school’s application, and refused to sign the contract creating the school.
Franklin said: “ Our Constitution did not allow that. … I voted no. I refused to sign the contract.”
Fact check: True
Franklin voted against St. Isidore’s establishment multiple times. The board first cast a 5-0 vote against the school’s application in April 2023. He again voted no in October that year, along with fellow board member Bill Pearson. Franklin declined to sign a contract with the school, saying it would “violate the law and his oath of office.”
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond later sued to block the school, and last year, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to side with St. Isidore, the school’s leaders decided to scrap their plans.
-Dylan Goforth
Claim: An education package proposed by Pugh this session to provide $254 million for a teacher pay increase came from other tax revenue sources, not the Oklahoma Teachers Retirement System.
Pugh said: “No. I actually wasn’t using teacher retirement funds. I was using income tax, sales tax, gross production tax.”
Fact check: Mostly true
Senate leaders’ initial education investment proposal planned to divert some of the tax revenue that goes into the Teachers’ Retirement System each year into other educational priorities, according to a February press release. In addition to the annual contributions that teachers and school districts put into TRS, Oklahoma has strengthened the teacher retirement fund through the apportionment of $7 billion of “off the top” revenue from income, sales, use and gross production taxes. Pugh said in a press release announcing his proposal in February that he wanted to cap those additional tax revenue contributions to the teacher retirement fund at $200 million a year, allowing the Legislature to redirect $254 million for the 2027 budget year to other educational priorities, including $117 million for teacher pay raises. Initially, Pugh told The Frontier there wasn’t funding in the general revenue budget, so he came up with the plan to divert some annual tax revenue from the TRS. As numbers changed, the general revenue budget provided a funding source for the education investments the Legislature ultimately made.
-Ashlynd Baecht
Claim: Oklahoma schools have high absenteeism rates.
Herlihy said: “I think the next top priority for State Superintendent is actually our students. We need to make sure our students are actually in the classrooms. Absenteeism is very high.”
Fact check: True but misleading
Oklahoma schools earned a D for chronic student absenteeism on the State Department of Education’s 2024-25 schools report card.
A little over 19% of students were chronically absent that school year, an increase from the 2018-19 school year, when 14% of students were chronically absent across the state. Students are defined as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of school days in a year.
A recent report from Johns Hopkins University and the national nonprofit Attendance Works classifies absenteeism as “high” if it’s between 20% and 29.9% and extreme if it’s over 30% of students who are chronically absent.
Chronic absenteeism was lower in Oklahoma schools than the national average of 28% for the 2022-23 school year, according to the most recent federal data. In Oklahoma, 24% of students were chronically absent that year.
-Maddy Keyes
Rating system:
True: A claim that is backed up by factual evidence
Mostly true: A claim that is mostly true but also contains some inaccurate details
Mixed: A claim that contains a combination of accurate and inaccurate or unproven information
True but misleading: A claim that is factually true but omits critical details or context
Mostly false: A claim that is mostly false but also contains some accurate details
False: A claim that has no basis in fact
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