Epic the Red Headed Step Child of Education

For all of my readers out there that are red headed and also step children, please know I aim not to offend you. This colloquialism is commonly used and means:

 With red hair being rare, a child born to non red headed parents was often assumed to be the child of an affair. Thus was treated badly. 

Many of you know I work for a charter, a virtual charter at that. I and all enrolled at or working for Epic must therefore be passed over, like the colloquialism suggests, when it comes to anything that matters to anyone. EXCEPT, hello! We matter too. Anyone that attends or works for this school matters like other teachers and students across the state. Just because we are different doesn't mean we are less.
Every teacher working for the state of Oklahoma this year just got a survey from the OK Dept of Ed...even Epic teachers. It is a survey that wants to know about teaching methods and all sorts of other things. The first question asks the teacher to choose a county. I chose Creek as that is where I reside and work. Except Epic Charter School is not in the drop down list for schools within Creek County.
Ok, so I back up and chose Oklahoma County as it obviously means county on file in which the charter must be written. But no, Epic isn't available to choose from there either.

Let's get this straight:
Epic is now the 14th largest school in the state of Oklahoma - Check
Epic has students in all 77 counties - Check
Epic has students of every single socioeconomic background found in Oklahoma - Check

So why is it that we are still not being taken seriously?

To be fair, several people from the SDE got ahold of me and let me know that going forward things would change. Everyone is so quick to bash us, but nobody is really tracking us or paying much positive attention to the school at all.  They still have us listed in the system with Graham-Dustin. This is the district that housed our charter 3 years ago, before the Oklahoma Virtual Board took over those duties. Many in #oklaed are really starting to open their minds to this school, but it's because I have had to have many one on one conversations. People are so quick to read and believe articles printed in the paper.

We are here. We have been here and are in our 6th school year. We have close to 10K students in our school. We are really working hard over here. Why must there be a hurdle at every single turn?