Oklahoma will consider a new measure to make the role of school district superintendent an elected position in response to a spate of controversial situations involving scholastic leaders, Fox News Digital has learned.

There have been allegations and news reports about several issues: the refusal to remove "pornographic books" from school libraries, the dismissal of a teacher for failure to comply with a COVID-19 face mask mandate, and media coverage of "nothing [being] done" in response to reports a school football coach was bragging about sexual conquests with parents.

In 2021, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt called firings of mask-averse teachers "preposterous" and said their talents are needed more than ever.

"This is about a school district not following state law — this isn’t a debate about masks," he said, after the Oklahoma City district reportedly fired multiple educators, adding the state previously banned such firings.

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In February, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters — who is an elected official himself — threatened to lower the accreditation of Edmond, Oklahoma, schools if it didn’t remove the books "The Glass Castle" and "Kite Runner" from its high school libraries.

Walters called the inaction "subversion of accountability," though Edmond’s superintendent said the state lacked authority to remove the books based on a 1997 district policy.

In another case, in Edmond, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz from neighboring Texas, among others, blasted videos showing a portion of a school fundraiser wherein students were licking each other's toes. 

In a public statement, school officials appeared to celebrate the event:

"This afternoon, Deer Creek High School announced a grand total of $152,830.38 raised for Not Your Average Joe Coffee, an organization created to 'inspire our community by including students and adults with intellectual, developmental and physical disabilities," school staff wrote. 

"All participants in the assembly were students who signed up for the game(s) they played ahead of time. No Deer Creek faculty or staff participated in any of the games during this Clash of Classes assembly," a portion of the latter part of the statement read.

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Walters called the fundraiser "filth," and Cruz said it was "child abuse."

In another district on the Arkansas line, now-former Muldrow Superintendent Leon Ashlock resigned after driving drunk and crashing a school vehicle on Creek Turnpike. Two 100-proof bottles of cinnamon schnapps were found in its console, according to KOCO.

Walters told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that a case involving a school’s response to an athletic director’s criminal exploits with a student also drew his attention.

"Even in a conservative state like Oklahoma, where voters have overwhelmingly made clear they want the radical progressive policies of the left out of public schools, we continually see superintendents defying their will, ignoring their concerns, and refusing to take action necessary to improve education outcomes while protecting Oklahoma children," Walters said.

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"This has to end."

"And, the best way to do that is by requiring superintendents to be elected by the voters."

Walters called the legislation a common-sense solution to efforts to improve education for Sooner State children.

Walters previously made headlines when he led his state in becoming the first to appropriate funding toward supplying a Bible to each school. The official said the move blunts "woke curricula" and provides students a "historical document" that the founders used to form their government.

A congressional subcommittee concluded its two-year investigation on the coronavirus pandemic on Monday, finding that COVID-19 likely originated from a lab in Wuhan, China, and that social distancing and masking were not backed with scientific data.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final 520-page report that stated "COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China." 

In support of the "lab leak" theory, the report said the subcommittee learned that the virus had a biological characteristic that is not found in nature and that data showed all COVID-19 cases stemming from a single introduction to humans.

"By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced," the report says.

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The report also noted that China’s foremost SARS research lab is in Wuhan, "which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels," and that researchers at the lab "were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market."

Initial rumors swirled at the beginning of the pandemic that China’s wet markets, which are known for selling meat, fish, produce and exotic animals in unsanitary conditions, were the origin of the virus.

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The report also found that social distancing "was not based on science."

"During closed door testimony, Dr. [Anthony] Fauci testified that the guidance, ‘sort of just appeared,’" the report states.

Fauci was the public face of the federal government's coronavirus pandemic response. He has faced intense criticism for his handling of the pandemic.

The subcommittee also found "no conclusive evidence" that wearing masks protected Americans from COVID-19. 

The measures led to long-term impacts on American adults and children. The report found that unemployment skyrocketed and children "lost decades worth of academic progress."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the federal government's coronavirus pandemic response, is facing criticism on social media over a manuscript published in a top journal where he maintains his position that the virus originated in nature and cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus.

Fauci, along with researcher Gregory Folkers, published a paper in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal this week with the title, "HIV/AIDS and COVID-19: Shared Lessons from Two Pandemics."

Fauci, who faced intense criticism for his handling of the pandemic, was critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic in the paper.

"With COVID-19, the role of political leadership at the highest level – or the lack thereof – was again shown to be critical," the authors wrote. "As COVID-19 exploded globally and in the United States, President Donald Trump frequently minimized the seriousness of the pandemic, repeatedly claiming that COVID-19 would just ‘go away’ In the first full year of the pandemic (2020, the last year of his presidency) he failed to use his bully pulpit to encourage people to use available ‘low-tech’ tools such as masks/respirators, better ventilation, and physical distancing to reduce the risk of infection."

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"Trump also gave credence to unproven and potentially dangerous substances for COVID-19 prevention and treatment such as bleach injections, the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. Many of his hundreds of communications during the COVID-19 pandemic were missed opportunities for political leadership in promoting policies and practices to mitigate the impact of a raging pandemic."

The paper also says that "abundant evidence from top evolutionary virologists and leading scientists in other fields strongly suggests that the virus jumped species from an animal reservoir to humans in the Huanan market in Wuhan, China, and then spread throughout China and the rest of the world." 

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Several media outlets have fact-checked and debunked the claim that Trump instructed people to inject themselves with bleach including Politifact, which called President Biden’s accusation "mostly false."

"Fauci is an embarrassment," conservative communicator Steve Guest posted on X.

"Oy vey," National Review contributor Pradeep Shanker posted on X.

"Fauci is out with a new scientific paper on HIV/AIDS & COVID-19 where he falsely claims Trump told people to inject bleach & where he argues COVID-19 has a natural origin (Wuhan lab leak not even mentioned) by citing the same authors who wrote the infamous Proximal Origins paper," author and journalist Jerry Dunleavy posted on X. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the NIH for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Outgoing Independent West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin slammed some of the advice President Biden received during his time in office, arguing that the guidance created blindspots for the president on inflation, immigration and Afghanistan.

Appearing on CBS’s "The Takeout" podcast on Friday, Manchin recounted how he tried to convince Biden to work across the aisle on the American Rescue Plan and how he warned about the dangers of inflation if Democrats went through with plans to extend unemployment benefits through October 2021, but was ignored thanks to the advice of 17 Nobel laureates.

"I warned of that, and I got criticized, as you recall, they told me they had 17 Nobel laureates," Manchin said, later arguing that they were "17 educated idiots" that were telling Biden "what you want to hear because you paid them."

Manchin, who in the early days of Biden’s administration was still part of the Democratic Party, played a critical role in determining how much of the new president’s agenda would make its way through the Senate. 

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Democrats held a slim majority in the upper chamber throughout Biden’s term and depended on the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris to pass the administration’s agenda, meaning the moderate West Virginia senator’s cooperation was key in getting many items passed.

Manchin would eventually decide not to run for re-election and leave the Democratic Party altogether after a decades-long political career in the party, arguing that he had to be "true" to himself.

"To stay true to myself and remain committed to put country before party, I have decided to register as an independent with no party affiliation and continue to fight for America’s sensible majority," Manchin said in a May 2024 announcement.

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During his interview with CBS, Manchin noted that Congress had worked in a bipartisan manner with the Trump administration to send out stimulus checks in the early days of pandemic shutdowns, arguing that lawmakers had "erred" on the side of action but later came to realize that pumping so much money into the economy "was a mistake."

Nevertheless, Manchin recalled that Biden went immediately to the budget reconciliation process to attempt to pass the American Rescue Plan through the Senate, something the then-Democratic senator resisted.

"Remember when I stopped and it shut down for about eight or 10 hours? That’s because they were extending unemployment benefits and we had a vaccine that worked. And I told him then, I said, ‘You’ve got a vaccine that’s working, you’ve got people that have got money because we sent a check to everybody,’" Manchin said, adding that he warned that after months of lockdowns and several rounds of stimulus, American spending was likely to inflate the economy.

"You’ve got inflation coming at you hard when you do this, and now you’re still keeping people out of the workforce because you’re going to give them an extension clear up until October 2021 of unemployment benefits, and they can’t go back and can’t be threatened to lose their unemployment benefits," Manchin said. "You’ve got a perfect storm hitting you."