To answer the question that was asked at the March 12^th special meeting of the Lakota school board, why were they losing around 9 million dollars out of their quarter of a billion dollar budget to Ed Choice vouchers and could they sue the state for money they assumed was guaranteed to them, a little fog has to be removed from the subject.  I was in Columbus for Governor DeWine’s State of the State speech, and there were education protesters in the rotunda making a lot of noise and looking horrible doing it.  Legislators were working on the new budget, and the fear was that public schools would lose money, which is the trend across the country.  Now, I warned everyone this day was coming, that Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education would be dismantled, and education funding would be built in a more competitive direction.  What we have been doing has not been working.  People worried about the future should be happy that Vivek Ramaswamy, who will be the next governor of Ohio, wants to pay teachers more.  He is a lot nicer on the issue than I am.  And for that matter, my personal friend Senator George Lang is too.  They believe that public education can be saved in some way, whereas I do not.  I think institutional learning is beyond help, but that’s why there are debates in government and education. Employees should at least be happy that Vivek and Lang are of like mind and want to preserve public education somehow.  Yet the protesters at the Statehouse were not the kind of people that made you want to dig deep into your pockets and give them more money.  They all looked pretty ragged and as though they needed to skip a few meals.  They sounded like entitled losers demanding more money in the budget from Ohio taxpayers who have not been given a good product that makes society better. 

So I was outside the Representative’s Chamber talking to several of our area politicians of Butler County and they were asking me if I was going to the emergency Lakota meeting where the plan was for them to join the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit against the state because Lakota was losing funding due to parents choosing to use the voucher programs already in place to give education options to their children.  When they asked me, I was already thinking about it; my phone had been lighting up for the previous 24 hours from people asking me to go because it was an emergency.  Lakota was already trying to build the foundations for a tax increase to pay for a facility project they were planning to vote for soon, for many millions of dollars for what was turning out to be a pretty crappy product.  And the kind of people who plan to work against that tax increase wanted me to see for myself just how ridiculous Lakota schools had become.  I was reluctant; I have not paid much attention to Lakota schools since they ran off just the latest conservative school board member the previous year.  I have worked to give Lakota a school board of reasonable people to deal with the coming education challenges, and their reaction was more radicalism like the idiots I saw in the rotunda, so I wasn’t too keen on the idea.  I was talking to Representative Jennifer Gross and Thomas Hall, among other people who were equally concerned about the invite they had to join in this special meeting.  And as we discussed in Columbus, my comment was that it was a hit job by the school board to set up our representatives so they could have an excuse to blame them for why they had to join the lawsuit.  I will credit them: Senator George Lang, Representative Thomas Hall, and Representative Jennifer Gross all attended the meeting by phone because they were either still in Columbus or, in George’s case, out of the state.  But they lent their voices in surprisingly effective ways.  I decided to return from Columbus and attend the meeting in person because it seemed like a good chance to see the new school board and administrators.  After all the mess over the former superintendent, Matt Miller and a purge of personnel since then my attitude toward public funding of schools was that Trump was going to be re-elected, he was going to dismantled the Department of Education and all education issues were going back to the states where people like Vivek Ramaswamy was going to have to figure out how to compete against other states.  The teacher’s union-run public education system was a thing of the past.  I tried to warn everyone, but they didn’t listen. 

And I was right about the meeting.  Our area representatives did a nice job providing comments about whether or not school vouchers were here to stay in public education or whether it was a fad that would fade away.  After the remarks were given, the school board did what they went there to do: they voted to join the lawsuit to get money from taxpayers they had not earned.  It’s the case that will lose in court a few years down the road because people can’t be compelled to purchase a bad product, and public education has shown itself to be deficient in every way it is measured.  The school board’s plan was to blame the politicians who had not secured funding for their bottomless pit approach to school budgets.  However, the representatives did so well that it wasn’t easy to blame them for the existence of school vouchers such as the Ed Choice program. 

George Lang told them that the cause of parents wanting to leave Lakota schools through a voucher was the fault of the school itself for accepting woke politics that those parents didn’t want their kids exposed to.  It was a blunt statement, but it was given with as much love as could be provided in that circumstance.  And the large audience attending, representing the teacher’s union mentality, the same kind of people protesting at the Statehouse rotunda earlier that day laughed and heckled George with boisterous sentiment.  As Doug Horton wanted to put on a show to fight George, as did another school board member and the new superintendent, the comment was the truth behind the matter.  Increasingly, Lakota schools would have to compete for every kid enrolled there, and their funding approach was dependent on their ability to be an education destination instead of funding attached to the zip code.  And the bottom line was that people who wanted to take their kids out of Lakota schools and drive them across town to another school was because more and more parents didn’t want to share space or time with the kind of people who were giggling at George Lang.  We just watched that same school board run off Darbi Bobby, the previous school board member representing a percentage of the Lakota population.  And she was just the recent.  This has been the practice of Lakota’s school board, to control the message by eliminating dissenting opinions because the system isn’t designed to deal with actual management.  And if only 4 to 12% of the total Lakota population found they didn’t want to deal with transgender politics, or essentially the Democrat party platform which comes with just about all public education enterprises, then given a choice, which is only going to expand under President Trump and future governor Vivek Ramaswamy, parents would take their kids out of Lakota so not to deal with people like Doug Horton and the rest of the school board.  Their desire to fight George Lang over the truth that he tried to give them, bluntly, was the same thing driving away the dollars they thought they were entitled to have in the form of a budget.  Just a preview of that court case: the courts will not favor these collective schools joined under the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding lawsuit because you can’t compel people, such as taxpayers, to buy a bad product.  And public education has become a lousy product over time with gross mismanagement everywhere.  We also saw examples of bad management at that Lakota school board meeting with clueless people and their very liberal politics.  Parents don’t want to share space with people who don’t share their values, and they are picking up and moving to other options because of woke politics.  The blame for that falls on the people who dug in and retained that system, which never worked—and instead insisted on throwing more money at a failed approach.  Rather than looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for the issue, they tried to blame everyone else for why they were being rejected under a competitive approach.  And that of course, won’t solve the school funding problem.  You can’t pave over the problem with more money.  You have to actually solve the problem, which are the people in public education themselves.  Parents want to reject having to deal with people who don’t share their values.  And if Lakota wants to survive into the future, it is going to have to make itself more competitive in attracting dollars, like everyone else in the world has to.

If you listen to the school board meeting from March 12, 2025, included here, you will hear the audience get into an uproar whenever George Lang spoke, as he became the target of the teacher union types due to his opening statements about wokeness in Lakota schools.  George was speaking his opinion on the matter, and those people in the audience, and some of the school board members themselves, fed into that communication.  So for Doug Horton and the rest of the mystified cast of characters at Lakota schools, that is your answer as to why parents are looking for School Choice options.  Think of the soccer mom who voted for Trump at a Friday night football game. Or a Republican is at an art show for their child at school, and they are interacting with these liberal radicals advocating for transgender bathrooms. Do you think they want to be made fun of like that audience did to George Lang?  Senator Lang is a professional who is used to that kind of thing and likes it. But does the average family attending schools at Lakota want to deal with people like this?  Of course not.  Do they want to fight with people like that?  They saw what they did, including that school board, to Darbi Boddy and other conservative school board members from the past.  Rather than fight those people, they look for a school voucher and take their kid to a school they think is nicer and better for them and their children.  That is why people are fleeing the Lakota district, and George was trying very nicely to tell the Lakota school board that to survive in the future, they need to make it so people want to attend Lakota.  But not that people who have different ideas about things are going to be beat over the head with Democrat politics and that they have to take it because there are no other education options.  Parents want options and don’t want to deal with political radicals who do not share their fundamental social values.  That’s why Lakota lost that 9 million dollars out of their budget and why they are projected to lose a lot more than that.  It’s because they have mismanaged the district with the assumption that the children were theirs and not managed by the parents who want the best opportunity for their children.  And by choice, parents have reasoned that Lakota is not it for them.  It’s Lakota’s job to convince them otherwise. Not to sue for money they did not earn. 

The trend of today, with D.O.G.E. and the massive cuts to the Department of Education, and the election of Trump and others to office positions, George Lang included, as well as the future of Vivek Ramaswamy, are because the employees of government, such as Lakota schools, failed.  Protesting against voters’ choices will not solve the problem of how people came to feel the way they did.  Government employees, including school teachers and administrators, did not provide a good product, and people have come to admit that their service was not worth the money.  That is the environment in which Lakota schools and many other school districts find themselves.  And it won’t get better for them.  They thought that the politics of guilt would last forever and the entire levy structure of using children to acquire more tax revenue to feed greedy, liberal unions would always continue.  But the truth is, as we know it today, public education is a thing of the past, and it’s never coming back.  People, if given a choice, will not choose to spend their time around people who are hostile to them.  The way these radicals shut down opposition at school board meetings in general is why the Trump administration is opening up School Choice options and sending their management back to the states.  The radicals had five decades to figure it out, and what they gave us is embarrassing at best and certainly not worth the money we’ve spent on it.  So, who is to blame?  Attend a school board meeting and witness the quality of the people screaming for more money, and the answer will quickly become apparent.  The current school structure, where money is attached to a zip code rather than the child, is like the Berlin Wall trying to kill people attempting to escape to the West.  The mentality is the same, and the more the teachers’ unions dig in, the more people want to be as far away from them as possible.  And the people they vote for in office are those who will give them options away from those radical government employees.

Rich Hoffman

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