Day: July 31, 2013

Sex, Sex, and More Sex at Lakota: Classroom romance by Robert Supinger

 

 

 

For the second time in a month allegations that a Lakota West High School teacher conducted improper contact with a student surfaced.  The Enquirer deserves credit for the story as they reviewed the personnel records of Lakota and discovered Robert E. Supinger, a former long-term substitute teacher at the Butler County high school had allegedly kissed a student and took her to meet his parents while he was employed by the Lakota school district.

Read more about this story at the link below:

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/07/31/another-lakota-teacher-punished-for-student-contact/

 

The important thing to understand about this case is the date of the offense.  Lakota did not reveal the details which were happening in parallel to the George Merk case.  The impropriety occurred during the 2011/2012 school year and was finally resolved in December of 2012 by the Ohio Department of Education.  The Merk offenses occurred during March of 2012 right after the much publicized cuts to the staff in February of 2012 because of the failed levy in 2011. 

 

It appears that the teaching culture at the Lakota school system is one of excessive sexual preoccupation.  The amount of sexually related offenses is not a coincidence, but comes from the day-to-day management of their occupational affairs.  As Robert E. Supinger was only 25 years old, he was still nearly a decade older than the girl he was parading around to his parents as an employee of the Lakota school system, which shows extremely bad judgment.  That begs the question of why Supinger was teaching high school level kids, and who made that decision.  Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for Supinger to learn the teaching profession as a substitute in the middle schools where the children are much younger?  Wouldn’t it make sense to have teachers who are “older” instructing high school aged children?

 

It can be speculated forever why so many public school teachers seem to be obsessed with sex involving their students.  Yet the worst part of this case is that Lakota has had two sexually related scandals which they attempted to conceal, and were only revealed because The Enquirer did some digging to discover the information.  It should be clear now why Lakota cut a deal with No Lakota Levy to delay a school levy attempt in 2012.  When Channel 19 called me to do a story in June of 2012 I thought the timing was odd and Lakota seemed awfully eager to make such a deal.  Now the timing makes more sense.  Robert Supinger had just gotten into trouble with inappropriate conduct with one of his students and the district wanted to put time and distance between them and their next levy attempt once the Ohio Department of Education had finished their investigations.  Lakota had two sex scandals happen close together and they wanted to suppress the story.  If The Enquirer had not dug through the public records, the tax paying public would have no knowledge of these offenses and parents would have absolutely no idea what kinds of employees Lakota was employing.  They’d be forced to take the school’s word for it, which is of course is misleading 100% of the time.

 

Parents assume when they send their children to school  that the teachers aren’t going to attempt to engage in sex with the children no matter what the age of the teachers.  Teachers are supposed to “teach” not “date” the students.  Lakota stated regarding Robert Supinger that they had terminated the employee immediately, yet they didn’t publish the results in the flowery newsletter that the school sends home with the kids advertising the need for more money for those same teachers.  When I went to Homearama this year and browsed through the booth that Lakota had set up at the home building show the school did not reveal how their human resources team had taken evasive action to discharge sexual predators from their classrooms in order to protect the children of the “community.”  If The Enquirer had not dug through the public records the public wouldn’t have any idea that Robert Supinger had even been disciplined for anything.  The case would have been swept under the rug like so many other stories that are related to public education.

 

The question is obvious—how many teachers at Lakota are engaged in sexual enterprises with the students of their classrooms?  And how many such stories are being suppressed by the public relations machine the Lakota administration spends so much tax money on?   The answer is becoming known little by little as diligent reporters discover what many disheartened parents have attempted to break open for years, that Lakota may be a good school with an excellent rating, it may have a good football team, and may actually prepare students for a life in college.  But that preparation may not be academic.  It would appear by the behavior of Lakota schools that their teachers are overly sexual in their focus and intent to prepare students for the next college party, instead of a competitive workplace that expects good conduct and at least the illusion of sexual restraint.  Lakota acts as though their management conduct is acceptable and maybe it is for the Zombies of Lakota who vote continuously for school levies to pay for teachers who simply want to seduce tax payer’s children with flights of fantasy in their classrooms.  But for me, and many other people who are voting NO on the upcoming fall school levy, these employees are not worth the money.  If we wanted this kind of behavior at Lakota we’d simply recruit the teachers from a whore house.  

Rich Hoffman

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

‘Ender’s Game’ Book Review: Finally reading a book my nephew advocated for over a decade

Two of my earliest writing influences were Sol Stein whom I took a direct computer class with in the early days of the internet in the mid 1990s and the Science Fiction writer Linda Nagata.  Both writers helped me work on the craft of writing leading to The Symposium of Justice in 2004 and Tail of the Dragon in 2012.  During that time with Linda where she lived in Hawaii and I in Ohio I would mail her copies of my work in hard copy form back then—she’d mark them up and send them back with comments.  That went on for a while and at the end I had digested so much science fiction that I felt it had spilled over into my own writing interests.  I read all the books she recommended which tended to be Hugo and Nebula award winners and I read religiously the “Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy” so that I could take her advice and similar career path toward the realm of writing.  To learn science fiction and fantasy writing better I read a book she recommended called Hatrack River by Orson Scott Card and soon felt I was drowning in the genre.  As much as I enjoyed those types of works, my interest was in politics and philosophy to a much greater extent than I had imagined, and I found myself trying to go into a different direction than what Linda did.  I had to find my own path through the forest, and I wanted nothing to do with the paved road that she had taken which required winning Nebula and Hugo awards.  The more I thought about it, the less I was interested in appeasing a panel of judges who oversaw those award panels.

At the same time all this was going on one of my nephews whom spent a great deal of his childhood in my care was urging me heavily to read Orson Scott Card’s treasured Ender’s Game series starting of course with the first book, aptly named.  He declared to me that Ender’s Game was the best book he had ever read and that I would love it.  I had no doubt that he was correct, but I knew Orson  Scott Card from Hatrack River and wasn’t crazy about combining alternate history and fantasy together in that book.  But worse than that Orson Scott Card reminded me of Linda as he was a winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards which was a path I had decided not to take.  So I told my nephew that I would read the novel when I got around to it.

It took around 15 years but upon hearing that Harrison Ford was staring in the upcoming 2013 movie version of Ender’s Game I thought I should finally get around to reading the book before I saw the film.  I had written a few novels of my own and had picked a rather difficult path through the forest on a road of my own making that was well established, so I could easily now put behind me my reservations about letting those early writing influences contaminate my thoughts with their strong presence.  I bought the novel on my way to Florida to begin reading at the beach while on vacation, but more pressingly I wanted my nephew who lives near our vacation destination to know that I was physically reading the book after promising him I would for over a decade.

I started reading the book toward the end of my vacation and it took me a bit to get passed the much studied writing techniques that were so familiar to me from my writing instruction with Linda.  But after I let myself get into the story and drop away all the rules of plot, paragraph structure, and character development, I found myself enjoying the novel the way my nephew knew I would.  As many who follow me daily on my blog know I have put a major emphasis on the failures of societies that become philosophically committed to collectivism, especially lately.  The reason is that many of the modern political problems that defame the world currently have their root cause in social collectivism.  Once I learned that collectivism was the villain of our age I have been able to apply it to virtually every problem not because once learned the mind sees it everywhere by default, but because it is the cause of most human problems.  Ender’s Game is essentially about two societies that are colliding, an insect oriented species that uses collectivism as a military weapon to destroy their enemies and a society on earth that has attempted to duplicate the methods of the insect species to beat them.  Ironically, only one very promising student in world history figured out a strategy that would give earth a chance to destroy the alien threat and that is the young child Ender Wiggin trained from a 6-year-old boy to become a general of the International Fleet against their interstellar enemy.

The novel explored themes of sacrifice, honor, and individual integrity in ways that were more philosophy than science fiction.  Upon closing the book I felt I had read a remarkable story from Orson Scott Card which explains why there are 14 books in the series written from 1985 to 2013.  Now I understand why they are so popular.  If I had read them back when my nephew had first mentioned Ender’s Game I might have saved myself a lot of headache in working out my own explorations into the folly’s of collectivism.  Orson Scott Card certainly did a wonderful job of arriving at many very interesting conclusions that are without question deeply inspired from the Cold War of the Reagan years.

If the movie comes close to how excellent the novel was it should be quite a treat during the Holiday Season of 2013.  I’m glad that my nephew was so persistent in trying to get my attention with the novel because it was well worth my time.  My July has been an unusually busy month, so it took me a few weeks to get through it not because the pacing was slow, but rather I took my time to absorb it like a fine wine, which is exactly what I thought as I closed the book.  I had thought about many of the problems presented in Ender’s Game from much more terrestrial angles, so it was a real pleasure to read them in the context of a heavy science fiction story that has much more to offer any serious reader than just spontaneous entertainment.  Ender’s Game is an important work for our times that belongs right alongside Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.

Rich Hoffman

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!