Oklahoma Town Faces 75% Property Tax Hike To Cover Sexual Abuse Settlement

It’s very tough. We’re not the only school district in Oklahoma that has faced this, and certainly none of the Ninnekah residents affected this situation

Yeah, we can tell no one affected it. That's how dozens of victims stacked up over decades with no one doing anything about it. A predator doesn't rape that many children without people knowing. None of those people cared until it might cost them money

I'm not a fan of the US lawsuit culture, but it seems money is the only thing Americans truly care about

It's what we were bred, raised, taught, and enforced to care about. Even the church goers because those adapted to the culture as well.
Trying to break that mold is... full of resistance. There's a class of people that have become aware of this, prefer it, and act to maintain this system.
- If you argue it with any of these smalltown dinks, they'll tell you it's just the liberals molesting kids anyway, so the solution is to get rid of democrats. There is no amount of stats or math or logic that will sway this.
There's no seeming about it.

Paying for public schools from city-level budgets and local taxes is one of the many things that I don’t think most Americans realize is weird about America. Normal countries fund their public schools from a national or regional budget so that kids from poor neighbourhoods don't get even more shafted than they already are.

It's not weird at all. It's perfectly normal for a state based on hoarding privilege and attacking the poor.
Do other, big countries that have substates that insist upon slavery do it that way? Or is moneyflow also a massive political nightmare and fragmented because part of your country insists on doing it THEIR way? I wouldn't think most countries had majorities of areas that were only founded solely on slavery and so never really evolved efficient or moral or coherent government or people./s
you see its about producing cannon fodder for the military, prison labor,+ low wage workers its by DESIGN. Also it helps shore up conservative voters, since many of them are undereducated, plus are more prone to religious indoctrination.
Right after 08' crash, so many people tried to join the military as a result of the crisis(at the same time the military was drawing down once obama got in the WH, people with no directions/bad economy will try to join the military, even if they are in college. I was in a forum about people joining military(how they are denying people too).
Blue areas do fund schools better, but i dont think its that good either, i believe it still underfunded and people who are struggling often get shunted to classes that are practically useless teaching them anything(its where they shunt the kids so it doesnt affect the metrics for funding for the school).
math and english(essay writing)proficiency is very deficient in students from the 2000s, i read recently from the teacher subreddit its alot worst now.
- The local high school in my rural town opted to buy a new fancy score board for the football stadium over needed text books. There were enough for each classroom, not enough for each class so students had to leave them in the classroom for the next class.
The US has always hated education. That's why the Department of Education was one of the first ok the chopping block.
- it helps produce fodder for the military enlistees, prison numbers(used by red states to increase thier house seats), also low wage workers in dead end jobs, govt jobs are pretty much dead end jobs which is why people are reluctant to go for them, but you hear from parents nagging to thier children they should get them.

Small town in Oklahoma......they're probably blaming their misfortune on the people that sued.

"Would Jesus have litigated??"
- I'm guessing IRL Jesus would have started rage flipping tables and whipping people with his belt.
- jesus the litigator.

He did manage to fuck just about everyone in the end...

This headline is shit. It's just a masked type of victim blaming. What actually happened is that many town employees must have known about the SA, considering there were 14+ victims and SA doesn't happen overnight, and they did nothing for quite some time... So the real story is that the town faces a huge tax hike because its employees decided to cover up SA.

If they'd caught the shady bastard after the first or second assault, the legal bills would have been millions of dollars less. But they didn't, because it wasn't a priority.

As for who knew or should have known but did nothing, we don't know, but the town residents might want to dig into that.

might need to be even more reductive or more expansive, but remember: somebody will twist this for clicks

Elect Republicans, get pedos.

Embrace moderates, get Republicans.

14 claimants, town of 800.... This guy molested 1.75% of the population, or 3.5% of the women/girls in town if averages hold. Jesus.

What are the odds there is another victim, or two, who were too embarrassed, ashamed, or traumatized, to come forward?
- It could even be they were brave enough and there wasn't enough evidence. These are the ones that the prosecution could prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
  I mean, there are probably some who didn't come forward too.
- 0 or 100%

I'd bet many members of this community ignored, dismissed and even helped cover up these abuses because that's what little conservative communities do: ignore and enable sexual assault because they can't admit that it's happening, and they'll sacrifice their vulnerable community members to keep up appearances for as long as possible.

they definitely are, on reddit last decade i saw one , where they basically ignored the accuser confronting the pedophile of the church(pastor) in public.

The amount set a new record for abuse cases against school districts in Oklahoma, topping a $5-million settlement reached by Kingfisher Public Schools in 2023. [...] the district paid $500,000 from the school’s general fund toward the settlement, while their liability insurance paid $1 million.

Sounds like they were under-insured. The Catholic Church got away with it by having their insurance pay everything, and then declaring bankruptcy whenever someone went against the Church's actual assets.

Which is such bullshit because I remember reading in the early 2000s that the Catholic Church had over $4 trillion in assets, they could afford to settle all of their claims for a fraction of that, a very small fraction of that, less than 1% of that.
- The thing that pisses me off is that, back in the late 1970's / early 1980's, the Church became aware they had a sex abuse problem and could be held liable. And instead of mocking the priests to places where they couldn't commit harm, they:
  Increased their movement of assets away from individual churches and dioceses info separate ownership, so those assets wouldn't be forfeit in case of lawsuits;
  Purged a bunch of documentation about abusive priests, shredding, burning, or throwing it away;
  Moved the documentation that remained to secret local archives supposedly sealed by the confessional and clerical privilege, and then away from local churches and dioceses to the Papal Nunciature (Embassy) in DC where they're covered by diplomatic immunity;
  Went out and bought a massive amount of specific insurance to cover any sex abuse claims that might arise - and got a very cheap price for it, too.
  Continued their practice of moving abusive priests between dioceses and parishes, denying there was a problem to anyone who might ask and giving those priests the opportunity to give other victims.
  Probably other shitty stuff, but those are the points I remember offhand (and it's more than enough). They never cared about their victims, only preserving their money and power.
- You don't get $4T in assets by giving it away to every altar boy who tattles...
- We should take it all away from that pedophile ring. Why do they deserve to have tax free rape dens?
Ah yes the holy loophole.
Religion is bankrupt
Only $1,000,000 in coverage which isn't much.

The former coach and alleged abuser

… then goes on to document a guilty plea and some horrific detail, I think at this point “alleged” is a bit

He raped 14 girls and it states he was allowed to do this for years and is only receiving 15 years in prison.
- Soo... counts fingers about one per year?
Journalistic habit. You're supposed to say alleged until the sentence but afterwards you're just used to the phrasing.

Wonder how many complaints were ignored before he actually got charged. Probably would have been much cheaper to act the first time, before he had dozens of victims for them to compensate.

This 2021 article paints a damning picture.
Oklahoma coach preyed on players while school looked the other way, lawsuit alleges — The Oklahoman
Back in the bad old days of the 2009 recession, I got caught in the churn and wound up at a temp agency to make ends meet.
One of my assignments was driving about 6 hours a day, from gas station to gas station to “buy” cigarettes. I never actually bought anything. What I did do, however, was wait until they asked me for either my ID or money. If they asked me for ID, they got a green card. If they asked me for money with no sign of ID’ing me, they got a red card.
It was a voluntary program by Philip Morris to curtail underage smoking. I don’t know what actually happened to the cashiers. I was told no one got punished. (And folks reacted with disappointment, but not sadness or anger. Folks with green cards reacted happily, though. So I assume it was an Incentive-based program.) These interactions got logged, and I turned in the log sheet at the end of the day.
Because we’re victims of our own experience, that immediately came to mind. I feel like we need to start blindly testing if mandatory reporters are reporting things they witness. I mean - no idea how that gets worked out. Seems horrible.
- Sounds about right. How many more victims were abused between 2015 and the charges being filed? Everyone who refused to take the first victim seriously should go to jail for enabling him.

We here in Kansas City are voting today to potentially recall our county executive over massively inflated property taxes.

This seems to be happening all over the place.

This specifically is literally a town of 800 still owing 6 million dollars after they spent their little coffers and their insurance paid out what it was going to pay. They are literally taxing the home owners exactly what it cost to pay the settlement I doubt that is happening all over the place.
- Theirs a case for some form of malpractice on the part of that town
  their liability insurance paid $1 million
  wtf, for an entire town, including schools? This is no longer the nineteenth century. It’s not all that unusual for individuals to have that much liability insurance. It’s not even that expensive
- This particular situation is a little more extreme, but you'd be wrong. Homeowners are seeing their property taxes raised by criminal percentages nationwide. Thankfully most are fighting back.
I don’t think Frank White was raising taxes for sex abuse tho right? Probably just all those police lawsuits. -_-
- Probably, but the bigger point here is that it's a tactic being used across the country for various reasons.

How much longer can the people be robbed by the 1% before we take a stand? We're already at a tipping point and I believe things are only going to get more violent and deadly. This is trumps America and his administration is gutting the working class. While this isn't directly related to him, the town is taking a play out of his sex scandal playbook

I think this is more of a sexism thing than a class struggle. It's 2025 and people still think it's OK to cover for rapists. Trump isn't the first, he's just shining a light to what we've tolerated.
Our culture has been completely fine with the occasional rape for centuries, and its enablers are angry and surprised that we don't respect their communities more.
- It's both my friend

This is why comprehensive, single payer public health (and education, infrastructure, police de-escalation and oversight, jobs, transportation, food, and and and) are an investment with incalculable ROI. This is why "render to Caesar."

also just gonna write this one down, but it's only a mild killing

That's a really good way to put the victims in danger

I'm shocked that it wasn't a cop.

Some coach diddles kids and the families and kids have to pay for it through insane tax hikes and less school funding? In what world does that make sense?

They already put the coach in prison for 15 years and probation for 25 years after that. Why punish the local community too? Yes, the families should be made whole, but not at the expense of objectively innocent tax payers and schoolchildren.

That's the way the System supposed to work though. The local school district is supposed to be run by those citizens. They elect the school boards that set the policies and appoint the administrators. It's supposed to be representative government. The citizens are supposed to monitor what this board is doing and if they don't like it vote them out. Make their voices heard. Show up at school board meetings. That's their responsibility. If they don't want to do it then they have to live with the consequences.
In a community that's small, there is no way many of these same families and homeowners weren't aware of that predator.
The community enabled him and now the community has to pay for that choice.
What's your alternative solution?
- That’s a very judgmental take… you have insider knowledge or are talking you arse out? Man I wish that kind of shit never happen in my village because I’d be bundled with other peasants I might have seen at the baker for a brief 30 seconds while fetching bread once over 8 years and suddenly I would be enabling someone…
- The families that sued him and settled for $7.5M were from the community. Did they enable him? What about the children that attend the same school and will now have less funding for their education? Did they enable him? Do they deserve to partake in the punishment?
  Make the people that did the offense pay for it.
The school was likely complicit in ignoring warnings. This is why board members should be held personally liable if they are negligent in their duties.
- Wouldn't that increase the financial barrier of running for office?
In what world does that make sense?
OK logic. I have to admit: school districts in the state would more likely ignore other potential problems without this kind of example being set. God knows that sending one offender to jail doesn't deter future offenders, it only heightens the thrill...

At this point I’d move across county lines to somewhere nearby that won’t have double the property tax rate.

You'd have to find someone to buy your house, which will probably be difficult, seeing as there's a massive property tax increase heading that way.
- Burn it down then.
- Great point