Not all things at the Lakota School System have been bad. I personally like the treasurer for Lakota, Jenni Logan. She is very competent and is more than able to manage a multimillion dollar budget. School board members Ben Dibble, Ray Murray, and Linda O’Conner I personally like, even though they are way to the political left of me. I think they mean well. And the current spokesman Randy Oppenheimer seems to be a pretty honest person with his heart in the right place. Even though I think spokesmen for public education should be illegal, Randy is not bad at his job. Recently in the Hamilton Journal Randy gave an honest assessment of Lakota’s financial situation that deserves recognition. He stated along with reports from many other local schools regarding Governor Kasich’s new education budget that Lakota had been planning for a reduction in state funding so the news that cuts would not be forthcoming was seen as a budget surplus. The quote from the paper can be seen below with a link to the article following.
“Lakota Local Schools — with enrollment around 16,625 — is set to receive $35.6 million in 2013; and would receive $4.1 million or 11.6 percent more the first year, and $849,318 or 2.1 percent the second year. “We had projected a cut in funding, and the governor made his comments (last week) and indicated we couldn’t be cut,” said Lakota spokesman Randy Oppenheimer. “Any increase in funding is good news.”
That statement says that at least some of the management team at Lakota is crunching the numbers properly. At this point I have my doubts but logic would dictate that Lakota shouldn’t ask for another school levy for more than a decade since their student enrollment is set to decline over that time span. When Lakota was asking for school levies every 6 months a couple of years ago and we were fighting like cats and dogs Lakota had a student population of over 18,000. By the time The United States elects another president Lakota’s enrollment should hover just over 10,000, and I would expect that the staff of over 2000 employees would have to be cut to reflect that loss in demand. There may even be a combination of schools where some of the buildings will sit empty for lack of need. This is good news for the tax payers of Lakota as they should be able to save millions upon millions in staff that costs a lot of money in salary and benefits. If Lakota is smart, like some of the people who have emerged within the last couple of years have shown themselves to be, they wouldn’t ask for another levy till well after 2020. Their tax base will stabilize, new businesses continue to move into the area which contributes money to that base consistently—which should flood the market with new money once the Liberty Way development takes off in 2014, and home sales from the Carriage Hill development where Homearoma is taking place in the summer of 2013 will contribute revenue per household well above the 250K per pupil tax base needed to maintain a funding model of 20 mills. CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CARRIAGE HILL.
http://www.carriagehillliving.com/homearama/
Those are all wonderful and exciting things. Carriage Hill and the Liberty Way shopping complex will naturally expand the tax base while student enrollment will be declining rapidly bringing down the cost demands at the Lakota School System, if management does not give away the kitchen sink to the employees with excessively high labor contracts. I would think that it would be worth a reasonable salary of between 50K per year to 60K per year for a 10 to 20 year veteran of education to teach at Lakota where the kids are nice, the parents care about their children, and the community is thriving versus going after 70K to 80K per year in salary teaching in a district like CPS which is a declining community because the taxes are too high and there are way too many parents on government assistance, which statistically leads to poverty and crime.
The people who aren’t happy at Lakota are those who push for more school levies that also happen to be real estate agents, people like Joan Powell who is the current president of the school board, and tax advocates like Pam Parrino who is also involved in real estate. CLICK HERE to review when she threatened radio station WLW for giving me airtime to discuss school salaries hoping to discourage that kind of activity in the future—which obviously didn’t work. When it became obvious to me that these types of people were using the Lakota School System to sell properties in their fields of endeavor by pushing for perpetual tax increases, exploding student enrollment by selling homes to families in the demographic age of 25 to 35 with 2.1 children per household, and covering the activity on the backs of children’s needs, the civil discussion we had been conducting erupted into an all out fight. When the levy supports couldn’t win a tax increase from the public on the merit of argument they turned to more deceitful peer pressure and personal destruction. I have never put up with that kind of thing, and I never will. My current thoughts about those school levy advocates is that I don’t want 2/3 of my property tax bill to find its way into any of their pockets even indirectly. And I will work my ass off to make sure that the more than 20,000 homes in Lakota who do not have children in the district learn of the motivations of those types of people because the only way to keep money safe is with a defeat at the ballot box. I’ve seen enough evidence from the other political side to know that none of the levy support had one ounce of anything regarding the well-being of children. It was for the well-being of the real estate agents who wanted an easy home sale and to make money off chaos in the Lakota community.
The home owners who purchase homes ranging from $700,000 to $1.2 million at the new Carriage Hill development are not the types of families who bring 2.1 children into a school district seeking to flood the market with a desire to for free babysitting while they work an average job at P & G, climbing up their personal career ladder. The people looking to purchase homes in Carriage Hill will be successful people in their own right and most likely will find instruction for their children in private schools or tutors and won’t use the services of Lakota anyway—even though like the rest of us without kids in the school, will have to pay for it.
I don’t like the idea of having to spend the next 40 years of my life paying for kids to attend Lakota through my property taxes. I don’t like the amount I pay now, so an increase is unfathomably ridiculous and I know that the people who invest in communities like Lakota won’t keep their money in the distinct if they find it continuously stolen from them by short term thinking levy supporters. The fight in the Lakota School District is not over children, it’s over whether or not Lakota becomes the next Fairfield—overrun with Section 8 housing and degraded property value or continues to increase in value like Indian Hill has over the years with managed development and growth. Chaos and reactive spending will not lead to perpetual prosperity. The growth of the Lakota district has more to do with residents fleeing high tax communities from around the country than the nice trees and school system that levy supporters believe. It is low taxes and prosperity that are the most attractive feature to the affluent property owner, and that must be protected if the district wishes to maintain its value in the future.
Lucky for people like Jenni Logan, Ben Dibble, Ray Murray, Linda O’Conner and Randy Oppenheimer the numbers work in their favor at Lakota to not just sustain themselves but survive well into the future maintaining an Excellent with Distinction rating that reflects the community it resides in, even if the most affluent send their kids to private instruction. I hope they accept the manageable challenge of allowing the enrollment rates to decrease as the tax base stabilizes without asking for further tax dollars. That would be the responsible thing to do in virtually every facet of community management. The worst thing they could do is listen to the short sided utterances of their levy hound real-estate agents who want a levy increase to lure in more panicky 30-year-old parents who cry over every drop of spilled milk and perceived threat to their children’s lives who are still children themselves and willing to spend infinite amounts of money on education to compensate for their own internal insecurities as parents. Those are not the kind of people who should shape the direction of our community for the future. So a lot rests on how the school management team above handles 2013 at the Lakota School District and the numbers that are now known before them.
We’ll see………………………………………………
Rich Hoffman
“If they attack first………..blast em’!”
The Overmanwarrior 