Gavin Sawchuk’s hard work is paying off — both on the field and off.

Oklahoma’s talented running back was among a record 111 college football players included Thursday on the watch list for the 2024 Danny Wuerffel Trophy,  billed as the premier award for community service.

Sawchuk, a 5-foot-11, 200-pound sophomore from Littleton, CO, ran for 744 yards and nine touchdowns on 120 rushing attempts as a redshirt freshman for the Sooners last season. He averaged 6.2 yards per carry and broke the 100-yard barrier in each of the Sooners’ final five games.

Sawchuk also caught 14 passes for 94 yards.

His emergence as the feature back midway through the season included 111 yards against Oklahoma State, 135 against West Virginia, 107 at BYU, 130 and three touchdowns against TCU and 134 in the Alamo Bowl against Arizona.

That production came after a preseason leg injury hampered him through the first two months of the season, when he ran the football just 34 times for 127 yards — 10 for 63 in his big breakout against UCF, which included the game-clinching touchdown in the fourth quarter.

But Sawchuk has always been about more than just yards and touchdowns.

At Valor Christian High School in Colorado, Sawchuk served a poor community in Alabama by working at a school teaching basic education skills. He also got to visit various civil rights historical venues. 

He was also nominated as one of three “Above the Standard” athletes at OU, recognizing excellence in the classroom and on the football field.

Sawchuk also serves at a local church as well as throughout the football program. This summer he served a micro-intership in Colorado with Good Living Ventures, a private real-estate investment firm that focuses on thoughtfully designed and affordable housing solutions. 

One suspect is in custody after a police pursuit ended in a crash in northwest Oklahoma City.

Thursday, August 1st 2024, 10:39 am

By:

News 9

One suspect is in custody after a police pursuit ended in a crash in northwest Oklahoma City.

According to police, the suspect vehicle wrecked near Northwest 63rd and Grand Boulevard after a short pursuit.

Two people are being extricated from the other vehicle involved in the wreck.

There is no word on their condition.

This is a developing story. Refresh this page for updates.

For people who supposedly revere the Founding Fathers, some Christian conservatives seem to have no problem ignoring one of their most abiding principles: the separation of church and state. Now the chief of schools in Oklahoma is demanding that all public schools teach the Bible from grades 5 through 12, saying it is necessary for an understanding of the country’s history. It is more of an attempt to ignore much of that history.

The Bible can have a valid place in public school classrooms. In a 1968 case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that although the daily Bible reading in Pennsylvania schools was an unconstitutional effort to inculcate religious teachings, the Bible can be a part of the lesson plan “when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education.”

Literature, for example, is full of biblical references. How could students understand John Steinbeck’s classic, “East of Eden,” if they aren’t familiar with Eden or the story of Abel and Cain? Shakespeare’s plays are filled with biblical references. Comparative religion classes are another appropriate place to visit the Bible in public school; the AP World History course includes a unit on world religions.

But that’s not what’s happening in Oklahoma — where, by the way, teachers already were free to use the Bible if it was relevant to an objective or secular lesson. In a memo, state Supt. of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said that the Bible and Ten Commandments must be taught in the classroom because of “their substantial influence on our nation’s founders and the foundational principles of our Constitution.”

While he didn’t say it explicitly, Walters’ language strongly implies the very thing that the 1st Amendment sought to prevent: that the United States be governed as a Christian nation. It is certainly the predominant faith in the country, but the Constitution prohibits religion from being imposed on others by popular vote or political mandate.

In his new guidelines for teachers, Walters goes out of his way to repeat wording about using the Bible only in the context of literature, history, art and so forth. But his guidelines call for teachers to use it for close literary analysis of writing. It certainly makes for an unusual choice over the genius of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou and the like. Because teachers have limited teaching time, the mandate pushes out great works of literature and the consideration of great cultures that are not Western.

The careful wording can’t mask what is clearly an effort by Christian conservatives to blur the line between church and state in the classroom, especially in a country that is growing in religious diversity. It goes alongside the Louisiana governor’s recent order to place the Ten Commandments in public schools and a recent decision by Oklahoma’s state board to approve a Catholic charter school. Charter schools are privately operated but publicly funded, and the state Supreme Court rejected the use of taxpayer money for a religious school.

Expect more moves to bring Judeo-Christian religion into schools. It is unclear, given recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings, whether today’s court majority will honor the wise precedents that preserved Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state intact. The current wave of Christian nationalism should, if anything, prod the justices to keep that wall as strong and clearly delineated as their predecessors did.