She couldn’t wait to work for Ryan Walters’ administration. Now she’s worried public schools won’t survive the rest of his term
McALESTER, Okla. (KFOR) – For the first time, someone once chosen by State Superintendent Ryan Walters to be a leader in his administration – only to later resign — is speaking out, telling News 4 she’s greatly concerned for the future of public education in Oklahoma under Walters’ watch.
If there’s one thing to know about Pamela Smith-Gordon, it’s that she’s devoted most of her life to public schools.
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“Education is most definitely my passion,” Smith-Gordon told News 4 in an exclusive interview. “I taught and I coached and I became a principal. And then, of course, superintendent, assistant superintendent. I just rose through the ranks.”
She’s worked in public education for more than three decades. She was once the youngest woman to ever serve as a superintendent of a public school district in Oklahoma.
Most recently, Smith-Gordon served as superintendent for Caney Public Schools in Bryan County.
She spent most of her career as an educator working in rural, public schools, where she became intimately familiar with a unique role those schools play for their communities.
“That’s where people meet people,” Smith-Gordon said. “That’s where people get to know each other’s kids. That’s where community members get together to commune. Oftentimes in small communities, especially those little communities that don’t even have a stoplight, those communities, they keep each other in check because everyone knows everyone. It’s really unique. And we are blessed in Oklahoma to have those types of communities throughout the state.”
Raw excerpt from interview with Pamela Smith-Gordon
Smith-Gordon will tell you — being an administrator in a rural public school comes with its own unique challenges.
For her, every dollar the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) allocated to her district mattered immensely.
“There’s not a tax base,” she said. “When you don’t have a stoplight in your town, you might have one gas station. That doesn’t provide you a lot of tax money from your communities.”
If there’s a second thing to know about Pamela Smith-Gordon, it’s that — like many Oklahomans — she describes herself as a Christian, conservative Republican.
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“I am a God lover,” Smith-Gordon said. “I’m not crazy about liberal agendas.”
In fact, two years ago, she ran in the Republican primary to fill the congressional seat being vacated by now-Senator Markwayne Mullin.
She didn’t win. But she says she still wanted to serve her state.
Specifically, she wanted to serve the state’s public schools to which she’d devoted so much of her life. Public schools — she felt were in desperate need of a leadership overhaul.
“I wanted to be part of the change,” Smith-Gordon said. “Look, we are not in the top 10 by any means. We are not even in the top 45. So it’s evident that we are lacking.”
Around that same time, then-Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters was beginning his campaign to become state superintendent.
Smith-Gordon was all-in.
“[Walters] ran on conservative issues,” she said. “He said he wanted to get back to the foundations of education. I’ve been an educator for years and years and years. That is the key.”
Walters eventually won his primary election. Then in November 2022, he beat Democrat Jena Nelson in the general election. Walters was sworn in as State Superintendent in January 2023.
Smith-Gordon wanted to help enact the Walters agenda any way she could.
“I was excited to be part of this, to get things actually sorted out, to be part of the change,” she said.
Raw excerpt from interview with Pamela Smith-Gordon
So she was ecstatic when she learned Walters hired her to become OSDE’s Program Manager of Grant Development and Compliance – a critical department head.
“To be part of the change to create success for our kids and to get Oklahoma back on track—I was thrilled, I was thrilled to be part of it,” she said. “We have to make sure that our students, that our kids are getting those foundational skills in order to promote them on to the next level. So to get back to the foundation was something I was excited about. I was excited about, to get back to those conservative values of—when I say biblical worldview—I’m thinking honesty, integrity, accountability, all of those things that that make for a for good school and for a good administrator, transparency, all of those things. I was truly excited to be part of this administration.”
But it didn’t take long for the excitement to fade.
“One of the things that I asked was that I needed to meet with the State Superintendent within the first 10 days,” Smith-Gordon said. “It was very important to me to know his intent from his own mouth so I could be successful in my position to carry out that intent and to ensure that my office would be successful. The first 10 days came and went, and after almost every day saying, am ‘I going to get to meet with him today?’ And every day being told that he’s not there, I was kind of concerned because it was obvious there was chaos within the department there.”
Raw excerpt from interview with Pamela Smith-Gordon
After numerous attempts to schedule a meeting with Walters to no avail, she tried stopping by his office—four floors below her own in the Oliver Hodge Building at the Oklahoma State Capitol complex.
“His hall to his office is behind locked doors with an armed guard. You were not allowed to go down his hall, much less enter his office,” she said. “Now, there were a select few that were graced with his presence. But department heads were not.”
Later on, she’d learn exactly who those “select few” were.
“His Chief of Staff and, of course, his legal team,” Smith-Gordon said. “And Dan Isett.”
Walters’ Chief of Staff was Jenna Thomas, who has since resigned.
Dan Isett currently leads OSDE’s communications and media relations office.
“And then, of course, his campaign manager who now works for him, I can’t remember his name,” she said. “They all did have access. I did not.”
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That former campaign manager who now works for Walters is Matt Langston. The State of Oklahoma pays Langston a six-figure salary to serve as Walters’ chief advisor.
“I never met him,” Smith-Gordon said.
In fact, Smith-Gordon said she never saw Langston in the Hodge building at all during the four months she worked there.
Langston lists Austin, Texas as his home on his social media profiles.
As more days, then weeks, went by on the job Smith-Gordon still hadn’t met Superintendent Walters.
“I just kept continuing to try to do my job the best I could with what I had, and still asking to see him because I needed some questions answered,” she said.
One of her questions was about how to access a critical piece of software.
“Every federal department that offers grants, they have their own unique grant program where you apply for the grant, where you check for compliance for that grant, for you to do reports for that grant, where you look at funding for the grant and you draw funding down,” Smith-Gordon said. “And then of course you close out your grant through that unique program. It’s unique to each federal department. But in order to get access to those, it had to be requested by the State Superintendent. I did not have access to those. Therefore I could not do my job. And so they did agree to let me meet with the Chief of Staff who assured me that I would get access, but only was able to get access to one of those programs.”
She didn’t hear from Walters.
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“It affected my job greatly,” she said. “I couldn’t get a signature. And it wasn’t just my department. There were many departments that couldn’t get signatures on time. And that’s great angst when you are waiting ‘til—not even the 11th—but the 12th hour to get a signature, you’re going to lose some funding.”
She said that exact fear ended up coming to fruition. Weeks without access to the software, turned into months.
“We ended up losing a couple of million and that concerned me,” Smith-Gordon said.
Raw excerpt from interview with Pamela Smith-Gordon
She says she raised those concerns about the money, but they continued to fall on deaf ears.
“[Walters] wasn’t concerned,” she said. “I mean, that couple of million was safety programs for schools, mental health programs for schools. These students were not being served. And when I asked several times to speak with him and even started emailing him directly, I was called to an office of someone that had his ear and told that he would never see (me), to me stop contacting him, that he was too busy.”
She says the person who told her that information was OSDE Chief Academic Officer Todd Loftin.
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“I realized that we were not, we were not serving schools and we weren’t going to serve schools because there was no access to the man that, that had this the ability to provide those services,” she said. “So that’s when I, that’s when I left. When I realized that that we were losing money.”
She drafted up a letter, informing Walters she was resigning after four months on the job. Her last day was October 28.
“I said, you know, there were things that were being neglected,” said. “And we were not serving our kids. And it didn’t matter how often [Walters] got on TV to tell that the grant office is doing fine and we are getting money—no one ever spoke to me, and that was not the case. Because I could not even get into the programs to monitor.”
While that may have been her final straw, it was far from the only one.
“I can tell you that I was terribly embarrassed about the State Department with [Tulsa Public Schools],” Smith-Gordon said.
On numerous occasions since taking office, Walters publicly criticized now-former Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) Superintendent Deborah Gist. He called for her resignation on social media, at meetings, in press releases and at special press events he held specifically to criticize TPS’s performance.
At one of those events, Walters told reporters “Tulsa Public Schools is a bus being driven by Superintendent Dr. Deborah Gist. That bus not only has veered off the road, has gone into a ditch, and now that bus has crashed right into a tree.”
Raw excerpt from interview with Pamela Smith-Gordon
Walters publicly threatened to strip TPS of its accreditation as a district if Gist did not resign.
Gist resigned in August 2023 shortly before an Oklahoma State School Board meeting where the board and Walters were expected to decide whether to keep TPS accredited.
At the meeting, the board ultimately decided to table the decision on TPS’ accreditation until later.
Walters told TPS leaders present at the meeting he wanted the district to meet several improvement metrics in the following months, or once again face losing accreditation.
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“I would advise Tulsa Public Schools, their leadership: do not test me,” Walters said publicly at the state school board meeting. “I’m willing to do whatever it takes for these kids. There will be a real consequence within a few months if these measures aren’t made.”
Smith-Gordon says Walters’ rhetoric toward TPS during that time disturbed her.
“First of all, the State Department education is supposed to hold schools accountable, there is no doubt,” Smith-Gordon said. “But we’re supposed to serve as well. So our job should have been to say, ‘Look, Tulsa, we’re concerned about this and this and this. What can we do to help you? Because we are worried about you losing accreditation,’ and then work together. But instead we did not do that. Instead, we humiliated. But we didn’t just humiliate them in their own town. We humiliated them in their own state, and then we humiliated them nationally. And when we humiliated them, we didn’t just humiliate the administrators that weren’t liked by the State Department of Education. We humiliated teachers that had put years into these kids. We humiliated kids. We humiliated parents. That’s not what we do.”
She was also disturbed when Walters called teacher’s unions “terrorist organizations” during a hearing with Oklahoma state legislators.
“I’m not a great big fan of teachers unions,” Smith-Gordon said. “They have their purpose with the teachers that they help. But they do seem to have a liberal agenda. And I’m not crazy about liberal agendas. I’m crazy about educating kids. And I don’t think education is a partisan issue. Education is education… it doesn’t matter what my politics are when it comes to educating Oklahoma’s youth. These kids don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat or independent. They don’t care. And we shouldn’t care. And it’s not our job to push our agendas on them. Our job is to educate. It’s not a partisan issue.”
Raw excerpt from interview with Pamela Smith-Gordon
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As News 4 has reported, Smith-Gordon’s resignation was far from the last high-level staff departure at OSDE.
Since March, all of OSDE’s lawyers, as well Chief of Staff Jenna Thomas and Executive Director of Accreditation Ryan Pieper have all resigned.
“Tell me who’s serving the schools? Who’s serving the school?” Smith-Gordon said. “The accreditation officer, the director, in that office—that is the office that is contacted when a school has a question or problem, if they need a law or a policy to be interpreted. Who’s serving the schools now? This gentleman knew accreditation hands down better than anyone I know readily available for schools.”
Smith-Gordon hasn’t heard from any of them since she left OSDE.
None of them have told the public why they resigned.
“Perhaps it was the lack of [Walters’] availability,” Smith-Gordon said. “It is really hard to carry out someone’s intent if you never get to speak with them or if you don’t have the ability to plan with them or to understand what they’re doing. So I would imagine that that meant that those people had departments who felt that they weren’t getting answers or they needed more availability.”
Since she resigned, Smith-Gordon has spent a lot of time reflecting on what she saw – and didn’t see – during her four months working in the Hodge building.
“I’ve never met [Walters]. I’ve never met him. I’ve never seen him there that I know of,” Smith-Gordon said. “But there were weeks on end that no one was available.”
Earlier this year, News 4 reported Walters and OSDE spent thousands in taxpayer dollars on travel expenses. That included expenses for attending a movie premiere and recording a podcast in Texas, attending a Moms for Liberty conference in Pennsylvania, and traveling to Washington D.C to meet with a guest-booker for Fox News.
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News 4 also reported Walters’ administration spent tens of thousands in taxpayer dollars to hire a Washington D.C.-based PR firm to book him on national talk shows.
“I do know that he was on TV often, many times when I needed to get in touch with him—he was traveling,” Smith-Gordon said. “It just wasn’t a good situation. I don’t know of any other person that can actually get paid for a job and never be there.”
In March, News 4 reported OSDE entered a contract to pay an out-of-state company tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to create social media videos.
“He was elected by Oklahomans to turn Oklahoma schools around, to get us out of that 48th percentile,” Smith-Gordon said. “Why in the world would we need a PR firm to get us national recognition? When we’re good enough in Oklahoma, other states will say, ‘What are you doing?’ They will give us recognition. They will seek us and give us recognition. We don’t have to pay somebody to get us out in the spotlight.”
From time to time, she thinks about what she would do if she could wave a magic wand and find herself calling the shots from the big office down that secured hallway on the first floor of the Hodge building.
“First of all, I would be there, definitely be there, but I would hire Oklahomans,” Smith-Gordon said. “I wouldn’t go out of state to hire people… I would utilize those people who have been in these schools, in these rural schools, the administrators that have been in these rural schools, teachers that have been in these schools that have faced these obstacles, that know what works and what doesn’t…they have a huge array of value to set initiatives and policy. I would hire Oklahomans to take care of Oklahoma. I also would offer help before humiliation.”
But magic wands don’t exist. And the fact is: Walters is only a little more than a year into his four-year term. That scares Smith-Gordon.
“Our schools did not receive allocations, some of them, not until January,” she said. “If we do this for the next three years, our schools will cave. Department heads have left and there are departments that are being closed down… all of those departments were utilized to answer questions for our schools. If we don’t have people in those departments that can answer questions, how are schools supposed to know?”
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The more she thinks and reflects, the more she wonders: maybe this was the plan all along?
“If it’s not any better than this year, I think our rural schools will cave,” she said. “I think that’s probably the purpose—that if we have less schools, then the monies can go to privates and charters.”
That may concern her more than anything else.
“Parents need to realize that when we fund the private and charter schools, they have a different set of rules that they go by,” she said. “Some of those schools don’t have to have accredited, (or have) accredited teachers in some of those areas. We need that. We need the subject matter expert to be trained in (and) to be able to address that subject. We don’t need to give some of those tough subjects to a layman, we just don’t.”
Raw excerpt from interview with Pamela Smith-Gordon
With everything she saw during her four short months at the State Department of Education, she’s worried about what Walters’ true intentions are when it comes to public education. But she can’t be certain.
After all, she’s never met the man.
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News 4 reached out to OSDE spokesperson Dan Isett several specific questions about each of the allegations made by Smith-Gordon.
Isett did not specifically answer any of the questions, but said he believes Smith-Gordon’s accusations, as a whole, are “vile and inaccurate”.
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