Ask legislators what the 2026 session produced and two answers come back: a cost-of-living adjustment for retired public employees, and a literacy overhaul aimed at the early grades.

The COLA is overdue by any reading. Retired teachers, state workers, and other public retirees have gone long stretches without one, and a fixed pension in an inflationary period loses purchasing power every year it stays fixed. This is not a bonus; it is partial restoration of value that was already earned.

The literacy piece is the longer bet. Early-grade reading is one of the few interventions with a well-established relationship to later outcomes — a student who is not reading proficiently by the end of third grade is measurably more likely to struggle across every subject afterward, because from that point on nearly all instruction assumes reading. Money spent there tends to pay back more reliably than money spent almost anywhere else in a school system.

Both share a budget characteristic that deserves saying plainly: they are recurring costs, not one-time appropriations. A COLA becomes part of the pension obligation going forward. A literacy program requires trained teachers, materials, and assessment every year it operates. Neither is a check that gets written once, and both will be in every future budget regardless of what revenue does.

That is not an argument against either. It is the reason to be careful about what a strong revenue year is used to fund. Recurring commitments made in a good year have to be honored in a bad one, and Oklahoma's revenue moves with energy prices, which move on their own.

The implementation question for literacy is capacity, not policy. Structured literacy instruction requires trained teachers, and training takes time. A district that cannot staff it will implement a program in name while the students it was written for get the same instruction they were already getting.

For retirees the question is simpler: whether this becomes a regular adjustment or another one-off followed by another long gap. That is a decision for the next legislature, and it will be made by whoever is sitting there in 2027.

<p><strong>Sources:</strong> <a href="https://www.kosu.org/2026-legislative-session" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">KOSU: 2026 legislative session</a> · <a href="https://www.aol.com/articles/oklahoma-laws-starting-july-1-101524000.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">New Oklahoma laws effective July 1, 2026</a></p>