The Metropolis Sentinel, Employees Report
OKLAHOMA CITY – Rep. Rhonda Baker, R-Yukon, lately was elected vice chair of the Schooling Committee of the Southern Legislative Convention (SLC).
Baker, a former trainer, at the moment serves within the Oklahoma Legislature because the chair of the Home Frequent Schooling committee.
“What an honor to be elected by my nationwide friends to be vice chair of this vital committee,” Baker stated.
“Oklahoma has made huge strides in recent times in funding schooling and crafting reforms to assist enhance scholar outcomes. I sit up for sharing our work with different legislators and studying from their expertise as effectively.”
The mission of the Southern Management Convention is to advertise and strengthen intergovernmental cooperation amongst its 15 member states.
As vice chair of the Schooling Committee, which includes members from every of the 15 states represented by the SLC, Baker will help the committee’s chair, South Carolina Sen. Greg Hembree, R-Little River, in guiding the committee’s coverage focus and initiatives, together with programming for the 76th Annual Assembly to be held in Oklahoma Metropolis, in July 2023.
Current coverage points addressed by the committee embrace assessing studying loss throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, project-based studying, rising entry to school-based well being facilities, and an evaluation of college counselor laws in Southern states.
In 2017, Baker accomplished the SLC’s Middle for the Development of Management Expertise program, the South’s premier skilled growth program for elected and appointed Southern state officers.
Previous to being elected to the Oklahoma Home of Representatives in 2016 and re-elected for a second time period in 2018, Baker was a center college English trainer. She spent almost twenty years within the occupation on the center college, highschool and collegiate degree.
Baker was appointed to function chair of the Home Frequent Schooling Committee when she was a freshman lawmaker. Along with that place, she is also a member of the Home Appropriations & Price range Subcommitteefor Schooling. She is also a member of the Home full Appropriations & Price range Committee and serves as an assistant majority ground chief.
Baker was offered with the Rising Star Award by the State Chamber of Commerce for her position as a legislative chief within the enterprise neighborhood. She was honored with the Distinguished Service Award from the Regents for Increased Schooling for her work and assist within the 2019 session.
Moreover, she was one in all 11 choose legislators chosen from a pool of legislative candidates inside the Southern area to attend the Middle for the Development of Management Expertise (CALS), and was one in all two legislators chosen as an Early Studying Fellows from NCSL. She has been honored to function a Commissioner on the Fee of the Standing of Ladies (OCSW).
The ladies’s fee has, in accordance with its official web site, “30 members who serve staggered five-year phrases; 10 members are appointed by the Governor, 10 by the [Senate] President Professional Tempore and 10 by the [House] Speaker.”
In keeping with the fee web site, OCSW is a “non-partisan state Fee, and we assist allow ladies to make their most contribution to society. We don’t present direct companies; as a substitute, we inform and educate the Legislature, Government, and Oklahoma residents about ladies’s points. We associate with different organizations and businesses statewide to supply useful resource data, experience and enter on ladies’s points.”
Rep. Baker is a graduate of the College of Central Oklahoma with a bachelor’s diploma in Communications and a grasp’s diploma in Schooling.
She and her husband, Les, additionally an educator, are enterprise house owners. They’ve three kids and one grandson.
NOTE: Rhonda Baker serves District 60 within the Oklahoma Home of Representatives, which incorporates components of Caddo and Canadian counties, west of Oklahoma Metropolis. Pat McGuigan contributed to this report.
