Miss Oklahoma challenges Pioneer Park students

Students at Pioneer Park Elementary School accepted a challenge from the reigning Miss Oklahoma on Tuesday.

Lauren Frost, who won the crown in June 2024, brought her message of empowerment to the Lawton school on Tuesday before sharing it with other schools in Southwest Oklahoma. Frost said that every Miss Oklahoma has a different message; hers is that you can only control yourself. She shared how she related that message to the fact that she is adopted.

She told the students that she had always known she was adopted, but when she was in fourth grade, a fellow student told her he felt sorry for her.

“I had to decide how I felt about my story and how to choose my attitude toward my story to impact the world around me,” she said. “I made the decision to be really proud of my adoption.”

The 25-year-old Wagner native urged Pioneer Park students to do the same.

“I was born into it. I didn’t make the choice, but I got to choose how I told my story,” she said.

She told the students that they, too, are in charge of how they choose to tell their story and the attitude with which they tell it.

“When I think about how I can control myself and my dreams, it makes me feel really good,” she said. “It gives me power.”

To illustrate her point, she taught the students what she calls the power pose – putting their hands on their hips and sticking their chests out. Then she issued her challenge: to strike the pose every day for the next two weeks, look in the mirror and say, “The one thing I can control is myself.”

She told the students they have the power to control their attitude in school, the way they treat their teacher, the friends they choose and how they treat their families and siblings.

Frost describes her job as Miss Oklahoma as “basically Red Ribbon Week. I travel around the state (telling students) we can make good decisions in situations we don’t know how to handle. Each one of you has a decision to make. Your choices matter.”

When Frost is not visiting with Oklahoma students, she works for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. She recently received a promotion and will be in charge of media relations when she returns to her job full time after relinquishing her crown in June. She said she plans to use the scholarship money she received as Miss Oklahoma to pursue a law degree and eventually would like to become an adoption attorney.