The Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Vanessa Wells and Against Lakota Schools: Lawyers run these public enterprises and that has to end

I think the courts are a poor substitute for dueling.  We’ve tried to bring a civil discourse to conflict management, but it hasn’t worked, and that is undoubtedly the lesson at Lakota.  We tried to help that public school in Butler County, Ohio.  But they are infested with dangerous progressive policies and expensive legal advice, which they have been wasting money on for years.  And they got caught in a lot of mess over the last few years, which I think only goes in one direction.  Once President Trump is back in the White House, there will be significant reforms to how schools are funded and managed, starting with the Department of Education, and lots of things will change in the public school system and the lawyers who run them.  And to that point, a small window of that kind of change was seen when the Vanessa Wells case against Lakota schools was heard by the Supreme Court of Ohio and found that Lakota had been deceptive in their attempts to conceal information from the public and they awarded Vanessa her information request and legal fees reimbursed.  It’s a story many of us thought from the beginning Vanessa Wells would win.  She’s brilliant on legal matters and is more intelligent about attorney issues than most practicing lawyers.  So they weren’t prepared for her and a small army of diligent moms, one of which did get elected to the school board, which caused them all kinds of problems.  Because they weren’t prepared for opinions, they couldn’t control those opinions through their standard practice of restricted public disclosure.  The Supreme Court of Ohio found that Lakota had acted unlawfully in its desire to conceal public disclosure regarding the actions of their superintendent at the time, Matt Miller, who eventually resigned over his actions once his bizarre threats of lawsuits did not gain traction.

When it was learned through a police report the kind of life that the superintendent was living, many parents didn’t want to pay his salary.  This issue won’t go away; there will be a lot more of this in the future, especially now that the Supreme Court has ruled the way it has in this Wells case.  I happen to know Vanessa very well.  Interestingly, many of my personal friends are involved in Supreme Court cases, but this one was big, and the case law that spawns off it indicates the future of education.  Essentially, public entities do not get to conceal information important to managing their taxpayer-funded endeavors.  Lakota schools got caught trying to hide the bad behavior of its employees from the public, which was revealed clearly in the email correspondence that the superintendent’s lawyer tried to enforce on a community they didn’t respect.  There was a lot of talk at the time that Matt Miller was going to sue the Lakota school system as he was still employed as the superintendent over harassment by the school board led by Darbi Boddy.  To make a long story short, the school board is the management body represented by the community and is supposed to have control of all these radical lefty employees in these public schools.  But what was revealed through this process, and because Darbi Boddy pushed the issue in less than polite ways, was the level of manipulation that truly goes on in the background by lawyers who run the schools.  The school boards are only there, in all public school districts, to give the illusion of public disclosure, the issue of civilian oversight that I have been talking about recently a lot.  Because it is at the heart of the problem in just about everything we discuss regarding government.  Over the summer, I have been a foreman on a grand jury, and that is the same kind of case there.  All the lawyers involved play a game of respecting civilian oversight while they work in the background to completely rule as unelected bureaucrats at every level, with what they think are complicated legalisms that only they understand. 

Working with Vanessa and Darbi, along with many other people, many of them excellent legal minds, we learned a lot about where the actual costs at Lakota schools go and how they seek to protect a kind of Never Trumper political agenda with ruthless zeal. Significantly, what was done to Darbi Boddy to get her off the school board and defend themselves from what is an inevitable future of public disclosure.  But part of that process was this little game that was exploited by the letter Lakota tried to conceal from the public where the lawyers are showing they are really in charge of the school, and their defense of avoiding public scrutiny was to threaten to sue all of us involved, and ultimately the school itself by the sitting superintendent who mistakenly felt that he had a right to privacy as a public employee that he did not have.  Vanessa and I received a similar lawsuit letter, which played out over this period, as did several others who were involved in having an opinion about the lifestyle choices of the superintendent that we found objectionable and even dangerous to children.  Vanessa, Darbi, and many others have spent a lot of money on legal bills to defend themselves from this public school’s poor management practices.  I laughed off the threat as ridiculously stupid and handled my legal matters on my own.  I approach those kinds of things to treat it like I do when I fix my cars.  I wouldn’t say I like professional opinions; I want to do it myself when something breaks because nobody, in my opinion, can do it as well as I can.  I work with many lawyers; if I need to, I’ll use them as a bandwidth issue.  But this case was clear to me at the start, and the purposeful attack by the legal people involved in Lakota were obvious constitutional violations, and I knew any court challenge would fall apart at the first stages of review. 

We’ve also seen this same strategy play out in national politics. It is undoubtedly a progressive trend that has been floating around legal firms for decades, and it came unraveled at Lakota schools in ways that only confirmed my worst suspicions.  When the threat came to us, Vanessa and I talked about it while I was on vacation with my family in a really nice place as we bought everyone ice cream on a scenic waterfront.  I became furious because such a silly matter was disrupting my time with my family, so I made a point to ensure everyone was paid back for that incursion in my life.  But what was so audacious about the threats was their designs to keep the public out of their business, so bad things could happen without any civilian oversight.  And the Supreme Court saw it the way I knew it would that day, buying ice cream for my family.  But to the level that these lawyers have even hoodwinked the school board members, that was shocking, and I learned about all of them far more than I wanted to know in this process.  And that system won’t be allowed to continue, I can say that.  However, there is a process, and the Trump election is the next point of interest.  Electing more school board members only to have the legal people attack them and toss them off so they can avoid civilian oversight isn’t going to be tolerated.  And that is what this Supreme Court case of Ohio essentially means.  And the angry moms out there know it. 

Rich Hoffman

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