An email threat sent to Oklahoma State Department of Education employees last week has already resulted in terminations and subsequent civil lawsuits claiming wrongful termination and violation of employees’ constitutional right to free speech.
Named in two lawsuits filed Tuesday are Superintendent Ryan Walters and his former campaign manager, Matt Langston, who now works as his chief policy adviser of administrative services at the State Department of Education.
On Thursday, Langston emailed employees of the state agency a “final warning” that immediate termination would be the consequence of “leaking” documents to unauthorized individuals, including members of the media.
Oklahoma City Attorney Mark Hammons filed federal lawsuits Tuesday on behalf of two employees who were terminated Thursday and Friday, respectively.
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Plaintiff Cheryl McGee claims she was fired from her job as executive director of school-based mental health on Thursday for “supposedly” leaking Langston’s email threat to the media.
In a separate case, plaintiff Matthew Colwell claims he was fired as program manager of school success on Friday for sharing information with the office of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond and with an Oklahoma state representative.
Specifically, the information Colwell claims to have shared was a memorandum explaining that a teacher pay plan that Walters has proposed “contravened the requirements of federal and state laws and could have the effect of costing the State of Oklahoma approximately $18 million.”
“He notified a member of the AG’s Office and notified a state representative who had been involved in adopting the law Walters’ plan was going to violate,” Hammons told the Tulsa World on Tuesday. “The next day he was fired. This is traditional whistleblowing.”
In late April, Walters had staged a press conference in front of local school students and educators in a high school gymnasium in the Muskogee County town of Warner to announce his plan to spend $16 million in federal funds for one-time signing bonuses of $15,000 to $50,000 for new teachers of special education or prekindergarten through third grade in rural or other districts with high rates of student poverty.
Apparently, Langston sent to employees on Thursday morning different versions of the final warning email with subtle variations in word choices and word spacing.
Matt Langston's tweet.
Langston himself tweeted later that day that by doing so he had succeeded in catching leakers and that the idea came from Tesla and Twitter owner Elon Musk.
On Twitter, Langston specifically cited a December 2022 article published by The Intercept titled “How Elon Musk Says He Catches Leakers at His Companies.”
“In 2008, the Silicon Valley-focused blog Valleywag published a letter from a ‘Tesla insider’ stating that the company only had about $9 million in cash on hand. Four days later, a Tesla employee apologized for writing the letter. When recently asked on Twitter how Tesla identified the leaker, Musk responded that ‘we sent what appeared to be identical emails to all, but each was actually coded with either one or two spaces between sentences, forming a binary signature that identified the leaker,’” reads The Intercept piece.
“The email (threat) I think is a wrongful act when you try to stifle the ability of state employees to speak. You’re denying the public the ability to receive information from the best, most reliable source,” said the plaintiffs’ attorney, Hammons, who himself served as an Oklahoma state representative from 1972 to 1978.
As for a confidentiality agreement to which Langston referred in the employee email, Hammons said: “My clients don’t know anything about a confidentiality agreement. They don’t recall signing anything like that, but there is a provision in the Oklahoma Constitution prohibiting a contract waiving constitutional rights.
“It amounts to a gag order. If it exists, I would like to know about it. There are so many problems, legal and ethical, and just good government. Democracy doesn’t work if there’s no transparency, and for an office holder to essentially say, ‘I’m going to conduct my public office business in secret, and nobody can know what is going on.’”
A spokesman for the State Department of Education did not respond to questions asking how many employees have been terminated as a result of the final warning email or to confirm the existence of an employee confidentiality agreement.
In response to a request for comment on the lawsuits, Walters’ spokesman Justin Holcomb said: “These legal claims are absurd, frivolous, and a waste of taxpayer time and money. It’s a political stunt with no legal merit.”
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Rep. John Waldron talks with Ginnie Graham about the consequences of a state superintendent focused on a morality crusade instead of the state department of education budget.
