Referencing progress made by Mississippi in early childhood literacy, Oklahoma House Speaker Kyle Hilbert said Friday the Sooner State must make similar strides.

“For generations the state of Mississippi has been historically dead-last in the country in education outcomes,” Hilbert said at the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Legislative Briefing Breakfast at the Doubletree by Hilton Tulsa-Warren Place. “Now, when you look at early childhood, specifically, they are in the top 10, top 15, depending on how you score it, on early childhood literacy.

“So, if Mississippi did it after being generationally at the bottom, why can’t Oklahoma.”

Thirty percent of Oklahoma fourth graders are reading at a first-grade level or worse, Hilbert said.

“We as Oklahomans have to stop accepting failure in education outcomes,” the legislator said. “Forty-ninth is failure.

“Why do we have to stop accepting it – because we can. There is a clear path to stopping it.”

Hilbert was part of a panel discussion that included House Minority Leader Cyndi Munson, Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton and Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt.

Attended by about 250 people, the breakfast coincided with the opening week of the legislative session, and panelists addressed topics that included workforce, child care access for workers and medical marijuana.

In terms of workforce, Kirt said lawmakers need to examine the gaps between the lowest earners and others.

“We need to make sure that those who are making poverty wages can get upskilled and making living wages,” she said. “That is a huge difference for our economy.”

As is child care availability for the labor force, Munson said.

 “As a woman, though not a parent, at this point in my life, I know how important it is for women to have access to child care and to be in the workforce,” she said. “So, we’re losing out on billions of dollars in workforce productivity when someone cannot come to work because they can’t send their children to a high-quality child care facility.”

Munson shared an anecdote about her 7-year-old nephew, who is in the second grade.

“Before he was in K-12 schools, my sister left the workforce for five years until he was in kindergarten because it didn’t make sense,” she said. “The paycheck didn’t even stretch far enough to send him to daycare.”

Kirt described as “reckless” Kevin Stitt’s recent call for voter-approved amendments to curb Medicaid expansion.

“I think we’ve barely begun to see the possible benefits of Medicaid expansion to make sure that more people have access to preventative care,” she said.  “We know that during the first few years of Medicaid expansion that some folks hadn’t seen doctors in years… We have to turn the tide of preventative care and reduce those costs that way.”

Also discussed was Stitt’s talk of rolling back the legality of medical marijuana, a State Question approved by state voters six years ago.

“I go back and look at what the voters intended in 2018,” Paxton said. “I don’t think they meant for a bunch of foreign cartels to come into Oklahoma and start supplying the nation.

But Paxton added that the legislature should respect the will of the people.

“I’m actually convinced that in the hearings that we’ve had that there are people who can’t take pharmaceutical drugs and this (marijuana) actually makes them more comfortable in maybe some late stages of cancer,” he said. “I’m not going to take that away.”

The event concluded with updates from about 20 legislators in the audience