SUMMARY: Janice Barba was honored for 50 years of dedicated service with Oklahoma Home Community Education Group Number 15, a nearly century-old organization focused on community education and involvement in Cleveland County. Since joining, she has actively contributed to various programs such as bread making, canning, and arts and crafts, fostering fellowship and learning. Janice was recognized through Channel 4’s Pay It Forward program, receiving a $400 award, nominated by a friend for her selfless commitment. She values the friendships and learning experiences, considering the group like family. Janice embodies five decades of giving back and community spirit.
News 4 and First Fidelity bank are honoring a woman for 50 years of helping those around her.
SUMMARY: A county commissioner, Miles Davidson, is addressing a controversy after a resolution he proposed omitted Juneteenth from the county’s observed holidays. Davidson explained that the omission was a clerical error, not intentional. He supports adding Juneteenth back to the list, noting he originally proposed it as a holiday last year. Other officials, including Commissioner Jason Lowe and Oklahoma County Jail Trust Member Derrick Kobe, reacted to the omission on social media, initially criticizing it. Lowe has since acknowledged the mistake and plans to make a motion to reinstate Juneteenth at the upcoming commissioners’ board meeting, aiming to correct the error.
Commissioner says Juneteenth omission was a ‘clerical error’
Stay informed about Oklahoma news and weather! Follow KFOR News 4 on our website and social channels.
www.thecentersquare.com – By Esther Wickham | The Center Square – (The Center Square – ) 2025-07-30 17:30:00
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis unveiled the “Education Roadmap for Governors,” addressing a major gap in how student readiness is measured post-graduation. The roadmap, part of the National Governors Association’s bipartisan “Let’s Get Ready” initiative, calls for redefining student readiness beyond academics to include emotional, psychological, and character development necessary for lifelong success. With over 4 million youth aged 16-24 neither in school nor working and employer shortages rising, the report criticizes current education metrics for failing to capture comprehensive readiness. Governors are urged to align systems to better prepare students for future social and economic challenges.
The Center Square) — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis released an “Education Roadmap for Governors” this week, highlighting a measurement mismatch found within education, questioning student readiness post-graduation.
The road map outlines recommendations for governors. Among them is defining a vision for student readiness and assessing how their states are measuring it. According to the report, it was discovered that there is a measurement mismatch, a gap between what’s taught and the skills, knowledge and traits high school graduates need when they walk across the commencement stage.
The National Governors Association, in a cumulative effort, created a report: “Let’s Get Ready: Educating All Americans for Success” initiative to improve public education’s success rates, due to the ever increasing American education crisis, as many call it.
“To be truly ready for life after high school, students need more than academic skills or career pathways; they need the emotional and psychological grounding and character to thrive as whole people,” the report stated. “Governors can align systems and supports that help young people build this strong foundation for lifelong well-being.”
Polis, the chair of NGA, promoted the initiative that was launched by bipartisan governors in 2024.
“For too long, our definition of ‘readiness’ has been narrowly focused on basic academic indicators that only scratch the surface of what a student needs to be successful throughout their lives,” Polis said. “The Let’s Get Ready! Initiative is a call for governors to demand better.”
“Whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you want the best education for your kids,” said Gov. Kevin Stitt, R-Oklahoma who is the NGA vice chair. “So how do we get there? We have a saying in Oklahoma: classrooms to careers.”
More than 4 million young people ages 16 to 24 are not in school or working a job, with half of them failing to receive a high school diploma, the report added.
Employers are even struggling to fill positions and keep qualified employees.
“It’s 2025, and we don’t yet have a clear way to view how our states’ education systems … are really preparing students for their long-term futures while building resilience and competitiveness for the social and economic changes that are already underway,” the report added.
In many states, data doesn’t exist to show which students actually are prepared and fully understand what they are learning. Not only within education, the report highlights, but also life-long habits that will lead to a stable physical and mental well-being.
“The discrete metrics we currently use to assess education in our states don’t add up to a clear picture that can inform Governors, policymakers, and educators of how well their education systems are driving toward a clear vision for student readiness and success,” the report states. “Put simply, our measurement systems do not consider the more complete definitions of readiness that we heard from experts throughout the Let’s Get Ready! convenings.”
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Centrist
This article presents a factual report on Colorado Gov. Jared Polis’s “Education Roadmap for Governors” and the National Governors Association’s bipartisan initiative to redefine student readiness. It neutrally conveys viewpoints from both Democratic and Republican governors without promoting a particular ideology. The language is straightforward, focusing on education metrics and workforce challenges, avoiding partisan framing. The inclusion of quotes from leaders of both parties further supports balanced reporting. Overall, it reports on policy proposals and the current education situation without exhibiting ideological bias, adhering to neutral, informative coverage.
In 2016, Ken Donley showed signs of Alzheimer’s after years of service in the Air Force and a telecom career. Despite having durable power of attorney assigned to his family, Donley was involuntarily transferred to a psychiatric facility at St. Francis Hospital, where he was isolated and restrained, leading to a stroke and declining health. His family struggled to access records due to HIPAA-related barriers, reflecting widespread guardianship and eldercare abuse issues in Oklahoma and nationwide. Staff shortages and poor conditions plague the hospital, raising concerns over vulnerable seniors’ treatment and the misuse of mental health holds and guardianship authority.
by JC Hallman, Oklahoma Watch July 28, 2025
In 2016, Ken Donley, then 73, set out for the Claremore Walmart to pick up some oil for his lawn tractor. Sometime later, Donley’s family — wife and two daughters — found him wandering confused in the Walmart parking lot not far from his truck, which he believed had been stolen.
He’d been gone for four hours.
Donley was a classic middle-American man. He met his future wife when they were 14 years old, and served four years in the Air Force as a communications specialist during the Vietnam War. He worked 30 years in the telecom industry, lost sight in one eye to an ocular stroke in 1981 and had a triple bypass in 2001, his daughter, Donna Donley, said.
Ken Donley retired a couple years later; that’s when he started to change.
“He wasn’t Dad,” Donna Donley, 54, said. “He used to joke around, but you just couldn’t joke with him anymore.”
The family brushed it aside for a long time, convinced themselves it was stress or that he was having hypoglycemic episodes because he was also diabetic. Even Ken Donley’s doctor — no spring chicken himself — missed the signs of Alzheimer’s, which was officially diagnosed in 2017.
Before then, the scene at Walmart was the final straw of a series of episodes that have become common for families across the country: misplaced belongings, confused directions on familiar roads. In the parking lot, Ken Donley was reduced to tears of frustration, and that made no sense at all.
“He was a guy who kicked butt and took names,” Donna Donley said.
The following year, the family took action, assigning durable power of attorney to Ken Donley’s wife, Ollie, and his two daughters.
“The powers granted by this document are broad and sweeping,” the document reads, specifying that Donley’s family could make health and medical care decisions for him, choose health providers and where he lived, and share his medical records as they saw fit.
Several years later, when Ken Donley needed to go to the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital, Donna Donley believed the durable power of attorney would protect him from whatever the hospital might try to do.
She was wrong.
An All-Too-Familiar Story
Donna Donley reached out to Oklahoma Watch after it told the story of Leroy Theodore, who became the subject of a still-ongoing guardianship battle when he was admitted to St. Francis in April. Theodore’s predicament in the eldercare system hints at the potential in Oklahoma for the sorts of guardianship abuses — hospitals and nursing homes seizing legal control of vulnerable adults, for financial gain — that have become a plague across the country and may worsen as the population ages.
Oklahoma’s elderly population is expected to increase by 21.3% by 2034, when for the first time, Oklahomans 65 and over will outnumber children.
Leroy Theodore’s story was all too familiar to Donna Donley.
Ken Donley outlived his wife, who died of congestive heart failure in October 2020; not long after, his personality took a darker turn.
“He was angry,” Donna Donley said. “I don’t think he knew what he was angry about.”
Donna and her sister, Dianna, continued to care for their father, even as he began to call them hurtful names and it became a struggle to get him into bed.
Ken Donley with his wife and daughters, circa 1999. (Courtesy Photo/Donley Family)
Then Ken Donley began to pull his daughters’ hair.
Another doctor recommended taking him to the emergency room at St. Francis because they had psychiatrists who could evaluate him.
Donna Donley checked him in at approximately 8 a.m. on May 1, 2021. At 2 p.m., after Donna almost fell out of her chair from exhaustion, the hospital told her to go home and wait for a call. They said they might check her father into Laureate, St. Francis’s adjacent psychiatric facility.
Donna Donley agreed, but her suspicions were raised.
“I knew it,” she said. “I had an inkling when they said psychiatric that I had better watch them. I knew!”
By 6 p.m., Ken Donley had been transferred to Laureate.
Source: A Harrowing Work Environment
“I thought this was a fluke,” Donna Donley said, reflecting on her father’s ultimate fate. “I thought it just happened to us.”
When she read Leroy Theodore’s story, she knew it wasn’t a fluke.
For its original story, Oklahoma Watch spoke to a source inside the hospital, an individual whose identity is known but who prefers to remain anonymous, fearing retaliation.
At that time, the source said court proceedings had been launched in as many as 15 cases.
Patients were sent to Laureate to make them easier to hide, the source said.
Now, the source says that seizures may be accelerating, including one as recent as July 10.
Furthermore, the source described a harrowing work atmosphere, amid rumors of mysterious changes afoot at St. Francis.
Employees are afraid to talk to one another because they’re not sure who they can trust, the source said. Patient meal portions are being cut by a third, and employee retirement account contributions have been trimmed and raises linked to performance evaluations.
Doctors and staff are leaving — as many as 10 at a time — because they have been asked to do things they don’t want to do, the source said.
As to St. Francis’s adjacent psychiatric facility — which recently announced an expansion from 45 to 60 beds — the source did not hesitate.
“You don’t want to go to Laureate, because you’ll be disappeared,” the source said.
As with Oklahoma Watch’s original story, St. Francis Health System Corporate Communications facilitator Lynn Casey, who in 2020 left a career as a news anchor at KOKI-TV, did not respond to a request for comment on the case of Ken Donley or recent changes at the hospital.
A Growing Issue Nationwide
Alzheimer’s is not a psychiatric condition. Nevertheless, Ken Donley was sent to Laureate, and while he was there, it was as though he had vanished.
Donna Donley wouldn’t see her father for five days; visits were prohibited, and even phone calls required leaps through extra bureaucratic hoops, she said.
Eventually, Ken Donley was expelled back to St. Francis with mysterious marks on his ankles and wrists.
Donna Donley’s fears that something was amiss were affirmed on her father’s first night in Laureate, when she received a call saying that her durable power of attorney wasn’t enough. The hospital would file a mental health petition.
Oklahoma Watch’s St. Francis source said that mental health petitions — which can be used to pursue involuntary commitment — are arguably even worse than guardianship.
“It’s effectively the same thing, but it seems like the mental part trumps it because it overrules the family and everything,” the source said.
Center for Estate Administration Reform founder Rick Black — CERA’s work on fraudulent guardianships resulted in criminal charges against at least 10 attorneys and inspired significant changes to Nevada law — said that mental health holds are a growing issue nationwide and are known by a variety of names: 5150 in California, Legal2000 in Nevada, Baker Act in Florida, and others.
“Holds are easily obtained by motivating a medical professional or law enforcement officer to take the vulnerable adult to a hospital,” Black said in an email. “Once admitted, qualified doctors have every ability, with good intentions or not, to draft paperwork that easily justifies a guardianship, whether one is needed or not.”
He Had a Stroke
Donna Donley protested the mental health petition filed by St. Francis for her father, Ken Donley.
She rushed to the hospital with evidence of her durable power of attorney; after she presented it, the mental health petition seemed to evaporate. Over the phone, the Tulsa County court clerk said it had been either dismissed or withdrawn, Donna Donley said.
It appeared that the effort to seize Ken Donley had been aborted.
He was promptly kicked back from Laureate to St. Francis; no one told his daughter, and for more than a day she didn’t know where her father was.
Ken Donley (Courtesy Photo/Donley Family)
Donna Donley recalled a panicked phone call with someone at St. Francis, a good soul who was as distressed as Donna was at not being able to locate her father.
Hospital documents show that Ken Donley was returned to the St. Francis ER, and was then checked into a hospital room.
There, he had a stroke.
Ken Donley’s new nurses knew almost nothing about him — they hadn’t even been told he had family members who cared for him, Donna Donley said.
When she finally saw her father, Donna found scabs and abrasions on his wrists and ankles, with clear patterns of some kind of coarse strap having been used to restrain him.
The remainder of Ken Donley’s life played out sadly: he was sent to Rolling Hills Care Center in Catoosa, which was suggested by St. Francis, Donna Donley said, even though St. Francis boasts of being a world-class stroke recovery center.
In the weeks to come, as a result of an Oklahoma State Department of Health investigation initiated by Donna Donley, allegations of deficient practice for failing to provide adequate care to dependent residents at Rolling Hills were substantiated.
Ken Donley came home and died a short time later.
A Journey Into the Absurd
Although Donna Donley appears to have saved her father from a long stay at Laureate, she said she was left feeling that St. Francis had killed her father.
For the five days Ken Donley was held in Laureate, the psychiatric hospital charged $12,198, of which $10,714 was paid for by Medicare — that is, taxpayers.
After reading Leroy Theodore’s story, Donna Donley was inspired to find out more about what happened to her father, but her efforts to examine documents related to Laureate’s aborted medical health petition were stymied.
Tulsa records clerks permitted Donna to submit a request for documentation from Tulsa Judge Wilma Palmer, who presides over the mental health docket, adding the caveat that provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 — known as HIPAA — might prevent access to documents even though Donna was an adult child invested with durable power of attorney over her father’s estate.
On July 18, the clerks indicated that Judge Palmer would see the request within a day; to date, no ruling or order on Donna’s request has been forthcoming.
Equally frustrating, the clerks could not cite the specific portion of HIPAA that would deny document access to a legal representative.
Efforts to pinpoint the relevant portion of HIPAA proved to be a futile journey into the absurd; neither the records clerks, nor Judge Palmer’s clerks, nor the communications director of the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office were able to reference the relevant portion of HIPAA.
CERA’s Rick Black was not surprised that the law was invoked by those who could not cite it.
“HIPAA is routinely violated in these proceedings as the evidence of a ‘claimed’ mental health concern is given to third parties who have no legitimate right to be provided these patients’ health records,” Black said. “The problem is that the system is managed within the civil court system. These courts can easily be perverted by the attorneys and professionals working there for self-serving reasons versus being in the best interest of the client.”
An exasperated Donna Donley, still grieving her father, expressed a similar sentiment more simply.
“It chaps my hide — DOGE can use Medicare and Medicaid information to deport people, but I can’t even get forms about my father,” Donna Donley said.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article focuses on systemic issues in eldercare and guardianship abuses, highlighting failures in healthcare and legal protections for vulnerable adults. The tone is critical of institutional practices, emphasizing the human and familial impact of bureaucratic and medical mismanagement. It leans toward advocating for accountability and reform, which aligns more with center-left concerns about social justice and protections for marginalized groups. However, the piece largely reports specific incidents and expert opinions without partisan language or ideological framing, maintaining a factual and empathetic approach rather than overt political advocacy.
