Oklahoma teachers receive $50K bonuses, now owe money back after state says they didn’t qualify

By Jason Burger

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    OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma (KOCO) — Imagine getting a huge bonus sent to your bank account, and then you’re told to pay it back. It’s a situation several Oklahoma teachers now face.

Oklahoma Watch and StateImpact Oklahoma report that at least nine teachers are being ordered to pay back tens of thousands of dollars after they got a bonus that the state says they didn’t qualify for.

The teachers received letters saying they owe $50,000 after they got deposits in their bank accounts. Now, they want to know how this happened if they didn’t qualify.

“If I wasn’t going to be approved for this amount of money, you’d think that they would have done the work to say I wasn’t approved if that was the circumstance,” special education teacher Kristina Stadelman said.

Stadelman told KOCO 5 that she applied for the state’s new teacher signing bonus program. It’s her fifth year as a teacher, and she thought she qualified for the $50,000 bonus.

“The fact that they want me to pay the $50,000 — and I didn’t even get the full $50,000, $20,000 of that went to tax — it’s a little ridiculous to me,” Stadelman said.

She said she applied for the bonus with her full employment history attached. Stadelman saw the money in her account in November, so she spent it on preparations for her new baby.

She received a letter on Jan. 12 demanding the money back, and she gave birth on Jan. 17.

“I put that I worked for a district last year, and I put all the information out there. I didn’t hold anything back,” Stadelman said.

Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters Ryan Walters was asked about the bonus clawback after Thursday’s Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting.

“If any individual lied throughout the process and did not agree to follow the stipulations in the contract they signed, we’ve been very clear and up-front, we will claw back those dollars. So, what you saw was the accountability system at work,” Walters said.

But another teacher who applied argues she put her entire employment history and certifications on her application and got the same letter from the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

“It was quite the process. There were W4 forms, bank routing information. All that stuff,” Kay Bojorquez, who teaches Pre-K through 12th grade, said.

Bojorquez told KOCO 5 that her mother recently died. Because of that, she’s taken on medical care for her sister, who is quadriplegic and in a wheelchair, and used the money to pay medical bills.

“That care has fallen to me and my daughters since my mom is gone, and I’ve had to pay all of my sister’s bills,” Bojorquez said.

She’s now wondering how to repay $50,000 to the state of Oklahoma.

“I had just got to a point where my credit score was looking good,” Bojorquez said. “I had very low debt-to-income ratio, and I was about to dig myself out of 16 years of living impoverished.”

An attorney in Oklahoma City told KOCO 5 that even if these teachers were truly honest on their applications, it doesn’t matter. The state can still make them pay it.

The Oklahoma Education Association said in a statement that “this state superintendent continues to have a history of misallocating taxpayer funds with a lack of oversight. Oklahomans expect their elected officials to not be negligent with their public taxpayer dollars and to ensure that money is maximized for the students in public schools and the professionals who serve them.”

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