Ryan Walters warns ‘do not test me’ after forcing out Tulsa superintendent

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's top schools official, forced out Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist — and he's still threatening to take over the struggling district.

Deborah Gist’s surprise announcement this week that she was resigning as superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools appeared to ward off a threat by Oklahoma’s top education official to take over the district — at least temporarily.

At an Oklahoma Board of Education meeting Thursday, Ryan Walters, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, stopped short of following through on his previous suggestions that the district should lose its accreditation — effectively shutting it down — or that the state should take control. 

Instead, the board, which Walters chairs, voted to require more reports and plans from the Tulsa district, the state’s largest, and to revisit its accreditation in four months.

“I would advise Tulsa Public Schools and their leadership: Do not test me,” Walters said. “I’m willing to do whatever it takes for these kids.”

Walters, a firebrand Republican official who has leaned heavily into the culture wars in his seven months in office, had spent weeks attacking Gist and arguing that the district she leads, where a majority of students are Black and Latino and more than three-quarters are economically disadvantaged, was “uniquely bad.” He pilloried the district for low academic achievement scores and accused it of financial mismanagement. One of his key demands was that it get rid of Gist.