Category: Drama
Protected: The Cash Cow of Lakota: Pinching off the supply with “Yes to Lakota Kids”
Rich Hoffman is Evil, Mean, and Wants to Hurt Kids: Letters from my critics
For some bizarre reason the announcement that the new group created by the No Lakota Levy has created a firestorm of controversy……………..who would have thought such a thing. (SHRUG) And I was the target of much criticism. As of this writing I have only been able to read a fraction of the emails sent to me or to follow the links discussing me online. So for fun and perspective I am putting a few of them up here to share with my readers.
Anyone who reads here every day knows how foolish the following comments are except for the comment by Joe Montana. If you hit the link below you can see the whole thread of these comments, and the author called Joe Montana was actually thought to be me. But I had never heard of this online forum until one of my readers tipped me off to it today. So as a scientific experiment it is interesting to study just how these people think. Obviously prior to this posting are over 600 articles that I have written each of them over 1000 words a piece, so there is a lot of documented evidence that shames these poor people to shame. I respond at the end of this posting to one of the emails I directly received that I only read because I recognized the name coming from The Pulse Journal last week that I responded to this week. In fact, I’ll post my letter that is in the Pulse this week after my response to Laura Sanders who I use as a climax to this mess. Enjoy.
Joe Montana below starts a discussion in reaction to the announcement that Yes to Lakota Kids is providing money to needy students struggling to pay the $550 fees to play sports at Lakota. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW THIS ISSUE. (Caution, the text below is presented as written, grammatical errors and all.) Also, remember that all the anger and talk of boycotting below was started with my announcment of helping children. That’s how messed up these people are.
http://yappi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4978906
JoeMontana
Lakota will balk at this, for sure.
It would be great for the kids, and great for the district…
BUT, unfortunately, the only thing Lakota admin/board cares about is funneling as much money as possible to their union cronies.
Thus, since NoLakota is actually trying to help the district–rather than funnel money to the teacher’s unions–the higher-ups in the district will shun and badmouth them…
Don’t believe me??? Just watch this unfold, and tell me if there’s ANY other possible explanation than simply that these crooked thugs are trying to funnel money to their union cronies…
Stizostedion
I get so sick of idiots complaining about what teachers make or how much time off they get. Think of the job we are trusting them to do. We want them to mold the minds of that which is most precious to us, our kids. Yet, we don’t want to pay for it, at least not what it’s worth. Everytime a community votes against education it’s an assault on children. That guy running the No Levy campaign in Lakota is punching every kid there right in the stomach. And he’s laughing about it. People there need to take action against that guy and all the jack knobs falling in line behind him. Picket those businesses, picket his business, picket his house. Make sure people know he’s hurting their kids and their community. It’s one thing to make this about politics and money, but make it about the kids he’s hurting and he’ll wither. Because that’s what bullies do when faced with united opposition.
fish82
That’s the thing…there have been changes in compensation. No Lakota asked for a pay freeze. They got that. Instead of offering support, Rich Hoffman moved the goalposts and asked for benefit cuts. He got that. He moved the goalposts again, and asked for salary reductions.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m no cheerleader for Teacher’s Unions. That said, Rich Hoffman is a lying, passive-aggressive dooshbag.
Easthawks14
What’s most disturbing about this is Rich Hoffman is using this as an opportunity to become a hero and gain more favortism within the community to support his cause but what about all the other students that have been hurt – those in the arts, band, other activities, etc.What’s also disturbing is No Lakota is largely backed by business owners who don’t want to pay more taxes. Common sense would say you want your business to be established in a healthy community that is prosperous and growing. Will a community with a minimalized school system foster growth? Will their business benefit from this? I hope their revenues fall as fast as my home value. There needs to be an all out boycott of businesses that support NoLakota.
Dear Rich Hoffman
You are making teachers out to be lazy, not worthy of the salaries they earn. I have close friends who teach in Lakota, and believe me, they do more in a day than you will do in a week. BACK OFF!!!!!!
If you are going to post salaries online, then make sure you get your facts straight. The top 625 are NOT ALL TEACHERS. They are administrators as well. The average teacher salary is $58,000. The average salary in Liberty Township is $107,000. Do you have a problem with that ratio? Don’t you think our community can afford to pass a levy?
I know now much your home is worth, and it’s about half as much as most homes in Liberty Township. People built their big houses here, knowing fully well how much their taxes would be. We are a highly-residential community with no big businesses to offset our property taxes. I pay $5400/year in taxes. How much do you pay? $2800? If you don’t want to live in an affluent community with good schools, then move!
You are ruining Lakota.
Laura Sanders
Pretty interesting isn’t it. Amazing how these people think. To my frequent readers here, you might think that these comments were written by children, but no, these are adults—I know it—it is scary to think. But these are functioning adults who are really lost and have a long way to go. So I am including here what I sent back to Laura since she decided to send me her real name and email address.
Dear Laura and the rest of you misfits, buffoons, lowlifes, and ignorant apologists:
You and your kind are the problem. You only see your little piece of the pie. And I’m concerned with all the jobs, not just teachers. And being able to pay is not the same being stupid and just paying. And I was here long before you were, and I’ll be here long after. You are a fair weathered resident that needs a vast education before we can even have a conversation.
I don’t care who your friends are. Don’t you even think to tell me to back off. You’re likely to piss me off more than I already am. You left me two messages; both of them aren’t worth the time of my dog. I do so much work in a week that I could do your job and any 10 of your teachers at the same time. Don’t be so stupid to assume you have any idea to declare your friends are equitable to my work week.
Keep drinking the Kool-Aid sweetie. And learning the value of someone’s home is pretty easy. That’s no technical marvel, but it’s cute that you think it is.
And to answer your question, yes, I think $58K in average salary is way too high for what we get out of those employees. For the same reason that Payton Manning was cut from the Colts, teachers with a high salary at the top of the scale that are under performing should be removed to make room in the budget. That’s good business. The education output will not change. Believe me.
And you are comparing household salary to individual salary. You just made my point for me. If the average salary at Lakota was in the mid 50 range, we’d have a balanced budget. In fact, we’d have excess money.
A correction from last week’s Letters to the Editor–the average Lakota employee is not making $58,000 per year, but rather $63,000 per year.
And no, we are not obliged to pay a tax increase because the community can afford it. The superintendent and school board have shown so little skill in dealing with a multi-million dollar budget that I wouldn’t give them .75 cents to buy a can of soda from a vending machine. The final straw for me was the second budget meeting held at Lakota East. Their idea of meeting the budget is to cut away the outside crust of their funding pie instead of dealing with the middle. Every cut made, including the administrative cuts from Monday were token cuts that deal with jobs that should have already been reduced. The cuts do nothing to handle the problems of fiscal year 2013, and 2014. There is no long-term plan but to ask for more money—forever!
If Superintendent Mantia tried to sell the smoke and mirrors game she and the school board pulled with these large forum budget cutting meetings in the private sector she would have been fired after the first meeting. They were an insult to the intelligence of the community.
The only hope I have for Lakota’s employees is that in 2013 Ohio will have the Workplace Freedom Amendment which will allow teachers stuck under the Lakota Education Association contract to leave that union enabling the community to deal with them individually instead of the current collective bargaining agreement that is bankrupting our current $160 million plus budget. Be sure to sign the petition when you see it to help us make that happen. In the meantime, No Lakota Levy has started Yes to Lakota Kids to help families pay for the sports fees that the district has consumed on excessive union contracts. We are taking donations and this will help kids in the short-run while the adults of the community get the budget straightened out by driving teaching costs down. You can get more info including applications and helpful links at www.Yes-to-Lakota-Kids.org
And to those who are thinking of retaliation against me in ANY way. A fair warning……………….
Bad idea…………….I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):
Home Schooling Under Attack: Government schools are for lazy parents
I certainly understand the tendency for parents to believe that they must send their children to public school in order to be a good parent. After all, our current culture has instructed us through those same government schools that going to a publicly run school is important to our lives. So I support my local public school grudgingly even though I believe that home schooling is far superior to public school. My kids went to public school. They attended Mason for the first half of the school lives, and then they graduated from Lakota. But for one year in between those transfers they were home schooled by my wife, and I think that was the most important year of their lives. It was hard at the time, and the choice was difficult. The decision to pull our kids out of school came from a battle over sex education in the fourth grade that we disagreed with. The school retaliated at our lack of “consensus.” My wife had been a room mom and helped the teachers three times a week and loved it. She dedicated enormous amounts of her time to not just my kids, but my kid’s classmates, which is how it is supposed to be.
But the school could not tolerate our family’s position against the sex education policies as they feared more parents might follow our rebellion, so they went after us in an aggressive way as a family, which was a really bad idea on their behalf. The school let my wife know that she was no longer welcome to be a room mom and my kids became targeted by bullies as soon as my wife was no longer in the building. That decision by the school led to unnecessary violence and a lot of hurt people climaxing in a fight between me and 22 teenage boys in front yard of our house.
The boys were encouraged by teachers in the school to pick on my kids and the police took the side of the teachers because of the union “brotherhood” which led to the massive fight. The boys made it so my kids could not ride their bikes on the sidewalk in front of our home, openly challenging us to a confrontation. And I was not going to allow my children to be bullied by a bunch of rough-looking 10th, 11th and 12th grade Mason students. It is now a family joke that when the movie Gran Torino came out a few years ago, it was that last role by Clint Eastwood that reminded them of life in our house during that time, because I was at war with the entire neighborhood. Instead of being an old man at the end of my life like Eastwood was in that film, I was a young thirty something that seemed oddly misplaced among others in my age group who preferred to just keep the window curtains pulled and do what the thugs told them to. Instead I dug down and was in constant confrontation everyone which can be most closely explained in the clips below, which is why this film is a personal family joke.
The fight was unexpected. The calculation was that like every other family we would stay inside our locked up house and hide from the scary teenage boys. They didn’t think I would go outside and confront the mob with my bullwhips and fight them squarely because many of them were under aged, only a few were over 18. But that’s what I did and it caused quite a ruckus that lasted for an entire year and involved the police force of Mason all the way up to the chief of police. But this whole mess started in our kid’s elementary school and I finally convinced my wife that the best way to teach our kids was to home school them, so we pulled them out of school, and that caused our entire family to turn on us. So not only did the community turn on us but our family did as well. In that year we learned that there wasn’t anyone we could trust but ourselves. And that was the year that my kids learned more than any other, and most notably shaped them into the adults they now are. During that trying time I heard every one of the points that Glenn Beck discussed here from his GBTV episode on home schooling. He is 100% right! My family has been there and done it and can testify completely to what he is saying.
Now in hindsight, with my kids both grown and living their lives I can say honestly that I wish we had done home schooling for more than a year. Both of my kids finished their high schools with online courses and nearly two years early, because they wanted to travel and see the world, which is what they did. When their peers in school were graduating high school and getting their diplomas my kids were touring the London Museum of History and taking pictures of Big Ben. They followed the path of their mother who also left school early after her credits were finished. By the time my wife’s graduating class was putting on their robes to graduate she was married to me and we were on a cross-country trip traveling anywhere fast at over 100 MPH. Out of my core family I’m the only one who actually walked the stage in a robe with my friend Hickory who I’ve stated here sold his Honors Society Robe to a fellow student for a hundred bucks. CLICK HERE to review. My wife and I have lived very full lives and the whole graduation experience seems petty and stupid to us compared to other things we’ve done, and we would have done our kids a better service if we had home schooled them earlier and for more years.
I always viewed public education as education propaganda. It started for me in kindergarten. My teacher was an idiot and I remember thinking that at the time. My mom was always very active in my life and she like my wife was a room mom who took care of not just me, but my class mates. I remember watching lots of movies with my mom and know for a fact that I learned more from watching movies and documentaries with her and spending time around my grandparents than anything I learned in school.
Public school always felt like a waste of time. I spent most of my time getting into trouble with the teachers, getting into fights with other students, or drawing on my papers and writing stories. The art teachers and English teachers tried to capture my talent and steer me and I shut them all out. If I had listened to those teachers it’s quite likely I would be working for a newspaper somewhere as a reporter making a fraction of what I make now, and I wouldn’t be about to release my second novel. That’s not a knock against my reporter friends who read here every day, but they know it’s the truth. Advice is only as good as the person who gives it, and I wanted no advice from a teacher who worked for public education because I saw no value in their job. I felt that way as a child and I feel more strongly than ever as an adult. To me teachers were mind numb soldiers for something I wanted nothing to do with. I did not want them to impose on me the limits of their thinking.
When my kids were 5 and it came time for enrollment my mother was especially concerned when she heard my wife and me arguing about getting my oldest daughter ready for school. My wife enjoyed school until she met me, and saw nothing wrong with it. For her it was a bench mark, a natural progression to adulthood. For me it was like sending my kids to a death camp of propaganda. There was never a question that I was always radically independent compared to others around me, so I bent on my position because my entire family thought I was the one who was wrong. Of course as it turned out, I was the only one who was right. But you live and learn.
I told my daughter before she got on the school bus for the first time not to worry, that I’d deprogram her when she got home. Of course at age 5 my wife thought my daughter wouldn’t remember me saying that but at age 22 she still does, and luckily she listened to what I said. Now after all those years of raising our kids and seeing all the problems up close I was excessively right at age 25 about the intention of public education. The goal is not to make the best and brightest. It is to make kids average. Home schooled kids do better even with parents teaching them because those parents care about making their kids exceptional, and setting the bar high makes the children respond accordingly. That’s what’s missing in public education, it’s the expectation level.
Home schooling as an option is good because it brings competitive forces to public education and forces them to adjust their costs. Teachers are not worth 50K to 60K per year when they produce such complacent results next to the home schooled child taught by a parent with maybe only a high school education or college at best. Having home schooling as an option helps break up the monopoly of public education which is the intention of the government-run schools, it always has been. I knew it when I was a kid, even if I didn’t know why. I knew it when I was raising my own kids. And I know it now. My kids have had much improved lives because most of their socializing occurred outside of public education. They have done more in their first 25 years than most of their classmates will do in their first 50 and that’s a real shame. Social limits in life are started in public education. The chains are placed upon a child’s mind in government-run schools and I am even surer of it now than I was when I was younger. When I was a young man, I only had a feeling about it. Now I have facts.
There hasn’t been one day that my wife has woke up and wished she went to her graduation ceremony. She doesn’t ever feel like she missed something, because the activities we were doing were much larger in scope of experience. But many of the family that ridiculed us for home schooling our kids used those experiences in public education as bench marks of social development, getting a class ring, a jacket, and a cap and gown. It turned out that those family members were still stuck in some perpetual 15-year-old mentality and even at age 40 and 50 years old looked fondly back to their high school days with yearning. And I think that’s pathetic.
I outgrew public education within two weeks of starting kindergarten. My wife outgrew it at age 17. My kids did by second grade. The rest of the way they learned most of their information from me and their mom at home. They whizzed through school and were routinely on the honor role every single year, because it was easy for them, because I set the bar high at home. Public education is simply a bad product. It’s a failed social experiment and needs complete reform. It certainly doesn’t need additional funding. It needs less, and it needs competition to keep it honest, and all the unions should be made illegal. Unions have no place in public education.
So use public education if you want. Have your kids play the sports and socialize with the other kids. But in my opinion if you rely on public education to teach your kids exclusively, you are a lazy parent and a fool. You are surrendering your child’s life to an institution that will mentally confine the thoughts of your child to a life of social slavery and mundane misery. If you really want your child to learn and to be a good person, then you’ll home school them and you’ll do it as soon as humanly possible. In my eyes, it’s your obligation as a parent. And those who don’t at least try it I have no respect for.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):
The Courage of Jada Williams: Fighting against the machine
The reason I fight against the public school establishment and the money it takes to fund it is embodied perfectly in the recent harassment of Jada Williams, the 13-year-old girl who recently wrote an essay about Frederick Douglass and compared it to her own life. In Jada’s essay she stated, “How the teachers do not want children to exceed their levels. They want you to stay on certain levels. They don’t feel like they need to instruct you.” Jada is saying from the viewpoint of a student what many of us have always suspected, that teachers under union rule have become complacent and are more concerned about social reform of a progressive nature than actually teaching children anything. The story has touched off a national outraged after Jada won the Frederick Douglass Foundation of New York award, The Spirit of Freedom. Once she returned back to her school the teachers had passed her essay around and attempted to paint her as an angry child that needed help. Glenn Beck covered this issue recently on GBTV: Check it out.
Well, all the behavior above is constant with many such stories and is exactly why public education is failing. Instead of the best of the best, such as Jada, being displayed as an example of excellence, she is instead harassed. People like Jada are frequently the targets of “bullying” in public education because the teachers subconsciously enjoy the behavior of bringing down those who show themselves as exceptional. After all, public education is not about teaching children to be the best. It is to teach them to be average, to not stick their neck up too high; otherwise it might get chopped off. Schools only use the talents of people like Jada to win tax levies in their districts, then once the money is won by the community children like Jada are tossed onto the scrap heep and abused until the school needs more money. You can see the actual reading of the essay here:
Lucky for Jada, she had a mother who stood behind her daughter and understood the game being played against her family and they fought back, which is how the story managed to break out into the national media. If not for this family fighting back and not just taking the bad behavior, this story would have been stuffed under the carpet forever.
I can say that in my own district of Lakota I know of a family that experienced similar bad behavior on behalf of the teacher. The school rationalized that the sex was between “consenting” adults and circled their wagons to protect their own. The case ended up at the State Board of Education, yet nobody in the media covered it, and the school went into damage control because they were trying to paint a picture of excellence to the community so they could win a tax increase in a fall 2011 vote. It’s exactly the same behavior as what was leveled at Jada Williams. The staff and teachers treated the situation as though this particular family was the villains, because they threatened the sanctity of the education institution. You can review that case by CLICKING HERE.
What all these stories have in common is a lack of customer service. The public schools, (government schools) believe that the community exists to serve the employees. They have a similar attitude toward the public that one might find at the license bureau where the employees tend to treat the customers badly because they know the customers HAVE to use them if the customer wants to drive a car. The teachers believe that the parents need the school otherwise their child will be uneducated. So they treat the customer with little respect. However, Jada Williams is obviously smarter than those around her and the teachers know it. So they attempted to pull the mother into the scheme of things to put pressure on Jada to “fall in line.” Lucky for Jada, she has a good mom and knows that her daughter was being manipulated, that the grade changes from “A’s” to “B’s” were not because her daughter was performing badly, but because the teachers were punishing her daughter for criticizing the teaching profession.
The way to end this kind of tyranny is to call it out when you see it. Do not trust that the teachers have your child’s best interest in their minds. Do not assume such a thing. Hold their feet to the fire because they exist to serve you, the customer. They are in essence no different from a typical worker at a fast food restaurant. If you don’t like the way they make your hamburger, or if they get your order wrong, do you not routinely go back to the counter to have it corrected? And sometimes, you must do the same thing at the public school, because the employees are lazy and well protected by their syndicate union. The only thing that can protect your child is you the parent. If you trust the teaching union syndicate 100% of the time you are doing your child a disservice.
It took courage for Jada Williams to do what she did in her essay. And it took courage for her mother to stand by her side when the heat started to pour on. I wish with every cell in my body that every American were like Jada and her mother. If they were, I would have no need to write here, because I would know that people would do the right thing. But unfortunately Americans like these are few and until they are many, they will be held in high esteem and honored for their uniqueness, which is the actual tragedy. For a society to exceed, it needs many Jada’s. When they are few and far between, they can be ridiculed as being “different” then we have a democratic system that is ruled by the stupid, and that type of society will fail eventually.
It is that kind of society that we currently have, a rule by the stupid, because they rule in mass. This is why America was designed to be a Republic, so that the majority of fools built by public education could not run the country into the ground on the whims of mediocrity. But the smart among us cannot hold back the damn of foolishness forever. More Jada’s are needed! And more parents of such geniuses are needed to run the gauntlet of public education to protect their children from ineptitude and perpetual stagnation so that society can once again succeed.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):
Teacher James Hooker: Leaving his wife for an 18 year-old-student
Am I surprised that James Hooker the Modesto City School business and computer teacher made $110,537 in 2009? Am I surprised that this same teacher aged 41 just left his wife and children to “follow his heart” and have a sexual relationship with one of his 18-year-old students? Am I surprised that one of Hooker’s children is a junior at that very same school and is almost the same age as the girl Hooker is leaving his wife for? No. You can read the details of this terrible story at the link below.
http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_20078313
The teachers unions and other education apologists are attempting to proclaim that this relationship between teacher and student is unusual, and that such things are not wide-spread in public education. Well, those apologists must have already forgotten the story about the teacher who fed his own semen to his students which was covered here. CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW. There are thousands of these cases across the country and point at an inherit sickness in our culture that I consider to be devastating.
Hooker as a human being is not equipped to teach anyone. He should have never been a teacher and the evaluation process should have filtered him out of the system. It is only because of aggressive teachers unions that a person of such low quality could be employed at a job that can pay him six figures. Hooker is a person of low quality because of his very simple statement, “In making our choice, we’ve hurt a lot of people. We keep asking ourselves do we make everyone else happy or do we follow our hearts. I just kind of knew that she’s the one.” Such a statement or resemblance of it in a sane society should have resulted in immediate termination during an evaluation process. His boss at the school should have seen in this teacher that he was functioning from an emotional foundation that is not rooted in reality, and should have ended the employment contract immediately.
But if the administrator had done so, they probably would have lost 75% of their teaching staff and they might even have to fire themselves for being guilty of the same crime. No teacher in America should ever—and I mean EVER teach that reality is controlled by emotional whims, yet most of them do. A teacher may find a young girl attractive. He might enjoy the sign stimuli of her breasts, or her buttocks. He might like the newness of her skin and her naivety that indicates to a middle-aged man that he can return to a time before all his mistakes that he made and live again with a new start with a girl fresh off the assembly line. Such thoughts are natural aspects of biology and they cannot be allowed to drive the mind from logic with fantasies guided by primitive cravings.
Without a doubt Hooker in his marriage to his wife most likely believed that his wife at some point was “the one” and with his mature years of aged 41, he should have the wisdom to understand that he cannot destroy the lives of all the people who count on him to participate in resetting his own mistakes by destroying the life of an 18-year-old girl. His “following of his heart” in this case is not following his brain, which is what we expect out of a teacher. We do not expect teachers to instruct our youth to follow their feelings, but to use logic. That is why public education fails as an institution.
Hooker is however a product of his times. As a teacher he has studied the liberal doctrines of that particular profession. He has seen the left leaning bulletins from his teachers union come to him in the mail and the summation of all this progressive philosophy is that reality is determined by agnostic thinking—meaning what the mind wishes can be made into a reality. For instance, green technology will save the earth when in reality it is an elaborate scheme intended to make green technology companies billions of dollars in a global marketplace. Or teachers are valuable and essential to the stability of our nation’s future when the reality shows that even with increased spending, test scores have not improved and our youth seems to be degrading in every category of their lives. Reality says that home-schooled kids learn better than publicly educated kids yet the facts are ignored. Or that we should follow our hearts and not our heads and if we have sexual feelings for another person man or woman, we should act on those feelings. The reality is that this is a primitive desire to procreate and has nothing to do with logical human cognition. It’s purely a function of reproduction. This is a core problem in our public education system, after all isn’t this at the heart of sex education in modern America. Isn’t this what schools are teaching in health class–act on your feelings, and if the girl gets pregnant—have an abortion? Wear a condom to protect yourself from disease, especially if the sex is gay sex. Isn’t that what is being taught in public schools all across the nation? YES!
With such an emphasis is it any surprise that the teachers are unable to use their logic to fight off temptations with their young students? Should James Hooker be expected to not seduce his young, fresh student with the promise of starting over leaving the rest of his family to demise? No, because the concept of abortion says that life can be sacrificed if the individual is inconvenienced. It says that consequences can be abandoned if one simply wishes for them to be. That is the world of the public education teacher, taxes are infinite, green technology is good for the earth, and sex has no consequences. Divorce and abortion can free a person from their responsibilities if their heart tells them to. The head is to be ignored, because logic is not important.
If I ran public education I would terminate every single employee who utters such agnostic prophecies. The goal of an education institution is to teach and use one’s head. If logic is not being taught, then the teacher is ineffective and the education institution will be a failure in its intentions.
Until this problem of how teachers think is addressed, and teacher unions are no longer a factor in helping to shape public education policies with a progressive agenda, there will continue to be terrible stories of sex, abuse, and teachers in public education. It is an epidemic not because the population randomly produces a certain percentage of faulty citizens who will always misbehave, it’s an epidemic because we have a system in public education that allows poor quality people to be employed as though they have enormous value, and because of this financial comfort level, these individuals are particularly susceptible to social pressure by the progressive movement to live out the fantasies of a utopian fantasy that abandons personal responsibility.
I hear in the words of James Hooker virtually the same type of dialogue that can be heard in the classic novel and movie The Brave New World. The teacher Hooker is a product of a society that has indulged in social engineering and he is the byproduct of that folly. For all those troubled souls such as Hooker the warnings were always there in art. You can read more about those warnings in the below two articles, and if you have not yet read or seen The Brave New World, you can see it at the link below. It’s worth your time. And if you don’t believe in that source then I encourage you to watch the George Lucas classic THX-1138 also discussed in great detail at the second link below.
These teachers and the general failure of public education is a malfunction of our culture in general for embracing the wrong values. These things cannot be fixed with new laws. They cannot be fixed with money. They must be fixed with a new emphasis on the aspects of human life that we value. Until we know as a culture what we value, we can never fix anything no matter how much money is spent or what level of education we receive. The defect is in us. There is a James Hooker in too many people who casually throw away their wives and children for the lust of youth. This tendency is particularly prevalent among the liberal-minded progressives, predominantly teachers, because teachers are insulated from reality by their unions. They are insulated from the terrible consequences of their lives by an organization that seeks to perpetuate more of it in exchange for union dues and political power. And until this miserable fact is looked squarely in the eye, thousands upon thousands of young girls will find themselves targets of people like James Hooker and the multiple degrees of evil that drive their minds.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):
The Spy Master Takes Power: A mirror into the United States
Only in Russia does a chain represent freedom, but under Vladimir Putin’s leadership that is exactly what the Russian people are trying to convince the world of. Barred from a third term of Premiership by the Russian Constitution Putin has maneuvered himself into an obsessive quest for power and his behavior is alarmingly similar to Barack Obama’s own quest for power. It’s very interesting to observe just how close Vladimir Putin’s leadership is to Barack Obama’s. For those who forget how dangerous the Russian KGB used to be viewed world-wide it is alarming to see how accepting that same world is toward Putin who is in effect a master spy right out of a James Bond film and has found power much to his liking.
Putin loves power so much that he was the subject of Glenn Beck’s GBTV episode on this very topic. For whatever reason, most Americans find it difficult to grasp that much of the fantasy of spy films like James Bond are actually watered down revelations of the real mentality occurring in the actual world. I have provided many instances at this site about how the KGB has infiltrated American culture during the Cold War and had the intent to manipulate our culture to destroy it from within. This is a fact! It is not fiction. You can see one of those articles here:
You can see the video from GBTV below where Glenn Beck breaks down the most recent manipulations by the supposedly dismantled KGB, who now has a world leader from their ranks pulling the strings. This should concern every person on planet earth.
Spies like Putin know that most people are so addicted to their static patterns that they often will refuse to see the truth even if it is placed right in front of their faces. So for the sake of education I would encourage you dear reader to Google any term I use here along with the key word “OVERMANWARRIOR” and you will see the hundreds and hundreds of articles that I have written on that term. Pick any term, and you will see that I have written on it. Serious, try it out. So when you want to understand what static patterns are, know that they are what govern your life, and if you want to change those patterns then you must introduce a dynamic pattern and accept the results. If you reject the results, then your behavior will not change the evidence provided by the dynamic. Closing one’s eyes does not make the problem go away just like pulling the covers over your face may make one feel safer, but the danger outside of the covers is still very real. There is a real science to this stuff, and KGB agents, and the CIA are VERY aware of these methods. And they use them against each other, against other governments, and against the entire human race in various applications. This is not news.
Most people however do not want to accept that many of the influences in their lives currently may be the result of war between two counter spy networks who have become so good at their jobs that they are on a quest for power themselves. I saw a young girl the other day who was working on computers and she was covered in “PEACE” symbol jewelry. It’s very fashionable for young people to buy clothing and jewelry displaying the “peace symbol” so I asked her if she knew the origin. She of course didn’t, and when I explained to her that she was a victim of Cold War politics and that the peace symbol came from the KGB implanting it in American culture in the 60’s to turn the youth against the adults so that the will to fight against Russia was diminished greatly averting the necessity for direct conflict with communist Russia. Russia knew they could not beat America in a production war because communism cannot beat capitalism. So Russia sought out to turn American youth against the adult establishment in an effort to destroy America from within. And now we have a president like Obama which is a result of these youth created by the KGB in the 60’s who openly embrace communism. The KGB is as much behind the creation of The Great Society as LBJ was, because President Johnston and Kennedy before his assassination were reacting to the communist push by the KGB infecting Cuba at the time and felt they needed to respond to the millions of protesting youth who had the power to vote.
As angry as I get at President Johnston for bringing America The Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal it is communism pushed upon American society by the KGB forced onto those presidents into making mistakes against our own Constitution. It was an act of war during the Cold War and freedom was the casualty, not actual human bodies. It was a casualty predicated by the KGB.
I told this story to the young girl who was no older than my youngest daughter. And she looked at me like her head was about to explode. I just smiled at the kid and let her off the hook with conversation about the computer she was fixing. Her reaction was at least more honest than that of most contemporary adults who pretend to understand what I say, then belittle the information behind my back as though by doing so it might change the facts of the matter. Most people are so intent to keep their beliefs intact that they ignore the evidence of new information which tends to shatter the illusion they wish to believe about the world around them.
Putin in Russia is doing almost exactly what Obama is doing here in the United States and considering that it is well-known that Putin is a former KGB agent, a particularly dangerous one, who has been running Russia for a number of years both in front of public image and behind the scenes, it should bring every American great concern that Obama who hasn’t been anything in his life before becoming a Federal Senator from Illinois who was propped up to become president by powers many people don’t wish to comprehend, are so similar in their behavior.
The details of what Obama has done are so numerous that I have enough material here to fill an entire book. Just go back through some of my previous articles to learn how. Obama shares with Putin a love for power, a manipulation of the people with his public image, and a desire for world domination that is alarmingly similar and that should tell Americans everything they need to know about the political world around them. But they chose to ignore the information and this is by design. I have even went to the trouble to teach your dear reader how this is done to you, and you have read the information, yet are powerless to alter your behavior to incorporate that knowledge into your daily life. For a review look at this article of how you are manipulated by virtually every entity in your life, family, friends, local politicians, national politicians, public relations experts, and spies from far away lands. There is a lot of competition for your attention and often you are so tired you don’t even know why because so many images come at you on a daily basis that it’s just too much to comprehend. So you turn on American Idol to relax and let them entertain you while your brain recovers from forces you don’t understand.
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/the-crows-test-how-the-human-race-gets-screwed-over/
Like the girl I tried to explain the peace symbol history to, most people point at the things I say and want to call it fantasy. However, they are using an inaccurate definition of fantasy. A fantasy is an assertion that is not based on any fact and the facts of a case like the spy manipulation of America by the KGB show that our culture has been transformed by Russia into a country that does not pose a threat to them. The fantasy is to declare that the opposite is true, that all these world powers want world peace and is a world that holds hands and sings songs around a campfire. That is the fantasy.
If Obama is not stopped in 2012 during our own presidential elections you can look forward to taking another step into the direction of Russia which has been their plan all along. And if you want to have an understanding of how bad Russia is compared to the United States take a hard look at the reality of the people between the two cultures. If you go online, you will see without any difficulty thousands of attractive Russian women who are willing to marry an American man just to get into the United States to live. You do not see thousands of American women putting ads in the paper to marry a Russian man to move to Moscow. The market just isn’t there. That fact alone should tell you dear reader everything you need to know about the situation. The law of supply and demand will tell you what the media, controlled by people like Putin, will not tell you. And that is how you know you’ve been scammed, even when the conditions shown to you by the spy masters of the world indicate otherwise.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):
Orlando Gets a New Treasure: Getting to the finish line in spite of the looters
A friend of mine just opened a new restaurant in Orlando, Florida. Every time I hear about one of these success stories, where an entrepreneur is able to leap all the hurdles placed in front of such an endeavor to open a new establishment I find myself enjoying the announcements more than I should. To me, these types of things should be common place in America. Ideas should be allowed to flourish, and actually encouraged. But the way things are it’s a minor miracle when something like a new restaurant opens because there are so many regulations and looters involved in the process of innovation. By the time all the regulations are satisfied, the permit issues are written, the taxes are paid in addition to all the requirements involved in funding the enterprise; it is only the strongest projects with the most money behind them that survive.
The reason is that America has allowed socialism to permeate every single government position in our country so the amount of government employees that are involved in any entrepreneurial activity directly impacts the chance that a project will survive to actually open. The situation is so bad that John Stossel of the Fox Business Network and Glenn Beck discuss John’s attempt to open a lemonade stand in downtown New York. Watch this video so you can see how difficult it is to even start a business, let alone defend yourself from all the looters who attempt to rob you with law suits and excessive taxes once the business is established.
This is why I get so infuriated by government organizations, primarily schools that push for tax increases. Every business you see is a minor phenomenon. The fact that you see many businesses in your neighborhoods is evidence of 5 to 6 failures for every success. So when a new restaurant is seen opening in your neighborhood or a shopping complex, you are seeing the lucky ones who made it. If an entrepreneur is politically active and gives money to a lot of charities, they find that their chances of success increase dramatically, because paying off officials with political support and getting the crazy emotional mothers of a community appeased with charity work calls off the looting dogs as long as the money flows, but it takes money to pay off such fools. So only the luckiest of the lucky gain the ability to use their money to pay off the trolls who set up shop in our political system.
It is not the “permit” department at your local government office who creates jobs and new ideas. It’s not the regulator of any agency. It’s not the bureaucrat in any capacity who does anything, but creates a barrier for the dreamers, for the entrepreneur. These barriers push up the cost of playing the game so that only those who have been lucky enough to squeeze through the cracks before the looters realize that there is money to be made, make it, because that’s the only way one can achieve success these days. The business needs to either be established or have large financial reserves to combat the looters in court and in politics, or the business must fly under the radar of convention and arrive before the looters realize that the new business is going to be profitable.
I know this tragedy first hand. I’ve been involved in many business start-ups and all of them were made unnecessarily hard by excessive regulation. I once had a building code permit issuer tell me I had to prove to him that the HAVAC unit he was demanding I buy was not required under the Cincinnati Building Code. I spent an entire weekend reading a boring book to prove that the HAVAC unit was not necessary for my change of use submission. In a book of over 750 pages I found one sentence that disqualified my project from the imposition. Once I found it, the administrator gave me a rubber stamp with a smile on his face, as though it was an office joke whether or not I’d find the one sentence out of the thousands that would exclude me. It was literally like finding a needle in a hay stack.
But that wasn’t the end of the road. That was just one issue out of 32 similar complaints by the CBC office, and that was just one organization that had their teeth into my project. There were as many as 7 such agencies that my project had to comply with just to open and my choice was to do the work myself, or hire out a small army of lawyers, engineers, architects and other professionals to do the work of arguing each item for me. By the time all those employees are hired just to meet the cost of compliance the project budget increased by nearly a half a million dollars.
So these days I just write books, and study philosophy. I hire out my expertise because it’s unattractive to argue with all the fools in any endeavor that catapults the idea generators into the quick sand of the social looters. I determined a long time ago that since I refused to play the pay-off game because I find it ethically questionable, and too expensive on the front end, that I have no chance of getting anything off the ground in this modern environment. But I have friends who aren’t so restricted by such limits and they have managed to do the nearly impossible and open new shopping complexes, and restaurants. And for that I admire them.
That is why I get very angry when I hear people proclaim that my friends, are “rich” and they owe their school system more, or they “owe” the township more in taxes, or they “owe” Barry Obama more! They owe their state government more when it is proven that there are too many government workers to pay whose only purpose is to create more bureaucracy, which in turn drives up the cost of compliance as shown above. Anyone who says or thinks such things are correct thinking are fools—and socialist sympathizers. They are parasites to everything America has stood for and are destroyers of its future.
So I do salute with utmost respect my friend and the opening of his new restaurant. The small-minded and looter mentality will look jealousy at him and proclaim that he should do more for his community. They will say that he is wealthy, and if he has enough money to buy a restaurant then he has enough money to pay more in taxes. What those same fools don’t comprehend is that it will take years to return to my friend the money he invested, not just in opening the building, but the cost of fighting the looters along the way. And they don’t know that my friend has plans that will fuel his own retirement in the future and that these restaurants are part of that plan. He has no plans to draw a government pension or a check of any kind. He plans to take care of his own business the way every American should. And every time there is a new cost to him, a new looter who attempts to rob some of his money from him because they are too lazy to do for themselves, it pushes my friend’s retirement further into the future. The ultimate cost is to my friend who has worked hard, created jobs, and fought his way through every kind of red tape imaginable. The cost to the looter is nothing. They simply show up and demand money for doing nothing. It is my friend who must make more money to pay for more looters who have attached themselves to those who create, like my friend.
So congratulations are in order to my friend and those like him who have survived well enough to open a restaurant in the golden land of Orlando, where imagination still counts for something, and making money is expected, and not chastised as criminal behavior by the lazy looters of the government employee. The next time I’m in Orlando, I will stop by for a visit and pay homage to the great ordeal that has become of starting a business in modern-day America as controlled by the looters, the moochers, the derelicts, the welfare recipients, and the mentally deficient who occupy the jobs that make opening a restaurant such a pain in the ass.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):
The Orgy-Porgy of Norma: A Brave New World in the eyes of a loving parent
It’s almost funny how predictable the pro tax levy crowd is. Always shortly after a major school announcement they leave me comments and emails about how bad I am for not blindly approving infinite pay increases to those sacred teachers of public education, and that if I did not support public education with blind obedience I would drive down the property values of my community and ruin the lives of children. They also say that my resistance to infinitely high taxes makes me some kind of money grubbing cohort—serious—they really think these things. There are people like that in the world. You can meet one below. I’m serious, and they are the ones who have ruined America and the idea of “free education.” Read one such note that I received this morning.
This is thanks to you and your other money-grubbing cohorts. We’ll be moving to Mason. Enjoy losing more property values.
Norma Stits
February 25, 2012 at 4:35 AM
That poor woman actually believes what she says. She believes that I am greedy for not wanting to pay more money than we already do in taxes. She also believes that there is no end what current residents of the Lakota School District will pay in higher taxes, therefore ruining their property values forever and making the taxes so high that nobody will ever be able to afford to buy a home in the Lakota District because of the taxes. People like Norma actually believe there is no end. She would pay forever whatever was asked by those extortionists of public education.
Well, sorry to break it to you Norma, but you are wrong. Taxes don’t just affect you in your tiny little world of your tiny little home around your tiny little family. It affects commercial interest too, and commercial business has been dried up for 5 years because of the current tax rates which need to come down, not go up. You know who those “money grubbers” are? Those evil people who build and run the shopping complexes and restaurants you visit. In Norma’s world those people should give away their services for free. They should not seek to make a profit. They should donate any earnings they make to the “youth,” so that people like Norma can have a free education for her little children whom she’s too lazy or insecure to teach herself.
Well, I have two grown daughters who are quite attractive, and because of that I’ve met many young people, particularly males that have come out of the Lakota, Fairfield and Mason school system, and I’ve seen what the schools are teaching first-hand, and I see how stupid many of these kids are when basic things are explained to them. They are future products of stupid parents like Norma, ill prepared to even pay rent, hold a job, let alone—vote. I’ve met kids who show up and attempt to impress me with big words only to see they can’t hardly pull their pants up because they are trying to copy the black culture of their favorite R&B artists, (and I say R&B in an attempt to be respectful and not come loose on a diatribe about the degradation of music). I’ve seen kids who think a fun night out is to get plastered in drunkenness and that somehow I’d be happy to let my daughter wake up passed out in a room full of guys stoned on marijuana. My kids wouldn’t do such a thing, but the boys look at me strangely and roll their eyes when they think I can’t see while I speak about why those kinds of activities are wrong. They really don’t understand! These boys don’t understand either why I expect them to have jobs instead of playing X-Box when there are bills to be paid. Or why I’d be upset that they’d rather take a welfare check so they’d have more “time for themselves.” I’m not talking about poor kids in the ghetto; I’m talking about nice middle-class kids from Lakota and Fairfield.
Through my daughters I’ve had to learn the terrible truth that there are thousands of girls who are on Care Source, which is a form of Medicare that bails out these kids when they have sex, and get pregnant because their schools and stupid parents like Norma tell them it’s alright, that there are no consequences to actions. A boy can get a girl pregnant and it’s alright, the government is there to bail them out. The boys often claim that the act of sex just happened, that it was beyond their control. Yet it was. A boy had to stick a penis into a girl and inject semen into her like some parasitic animal in the wild, without thought or care. Without any thought about the next step, because the schools have taught these kids that the government will pick up the slack and pay for everything. Thousands upon thousands of kids think this way. Twenty years ago it would have been shameful to see a girl in her freshman years pregnant in school. It was scandalous. Today the teacher holds a baby shower for the girl in her classroom. The kids and their welfare mentality are victims of their environment and parents like Norma.
Norma may put her kids on Blue Cross and Blue Shield, but her behavior supports a system that endorses everything and more mentioned above. Ladies and gentlemen—and Norma, we are in serious trouble—culturally. Our youth is broken in ways that no amount of money can fix. They are truly victims of this age of broken homes, divorce, and intrusive public education establishments.
People who tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about are only mad at me because they don’t want to hear what I’m saying. They want to blindly adopt destructive policies of living that will eventually destroy them with the same intensity that a moth attempts to fly into a flame—because they like the bright light. People like Norma are in love with the idea of socialism and they do not want to see the results of their error. Well, I’ve seen it. I’ve been up close to it through my kids because I stayed involved with them even now that they are grown up, because there’s always something to learn. And I have many friends in the business community who are struggling. It’s not for Norma to say that these friends of mine should not be able to buy another restaurant, or a new second home, because people who build and make things are who move the world, and they don’t owe people like Norma an explanation as to their actions. The money they earn by creating things that people want is not Norma’s money, it’s not the money of public education, and it’s not the GOD DAMN governments! It’s their money!!!!! They earned it!!! Money made and generated is not for some group collective.
There are many problems that must be fixed in this year of 2012 that took nearly a century to arrive at. And those problems were perpetuated by people like Norma who voted in politicians like FDR. These same voters also fantasized about sleeping with JFK, and LBJ and like a porn actress swallowing semen from a stranger, these voters accept the policies of THE NEW DEAL and THE GREAT SOCEITY.
I don’t want The New Deal or The Great Society of which this Medicaid culture of welfare has sprung up and created a whole generation of weak-minded youth who have reckless sex and expect society to pay for it. Doesn’t Orgy-porgy from A Brave New World ring a bell with people like Norma, or let me guess—they haven’t read that book!
“Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at 0ne with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.”
That’s a ritual from that classic book where everyone gets in a circle and has group sex so that all sense of possession and individually is erased from their consciousness. “Kiss the girls, and make them One.” Notice the capital letter on the word “One.” That is because the word ONE is an indicator of an entity onto itself. This is the goal of The Great Society created by the womanizing presidents of the sixties. This is the aim of public education; this is the aim of government insurance, Medicare and Social Security! And these are the pathetic creatures that my kids have to associate with as friends in their peer groups, these children of this distorted government experiment. To see what this Great Society is taking us to just read A Brave New World. That book seemed like a fantasy when I read it over twenty years ago. Now it’s a pending reality.
So call me names you orgy-porgy well wishers, you welfare recipients, you apologists for The Great Society. Your opinions mean nothing to me because your path is clear for anyone with eyes to see. Your story ends only one way, in cultural demise leading to complete social destruction. The end game is as easy to add up 2+2+2+2. One thing leads to the next, which leads to the next in a very predictable manner. Only people who add all that up and give any number beyond the answer of “8” are the ones being fooled. And people like Norma will add up all these conditions and declare that the answer is whatever she decides. If she wants the answer to be 10 then it’s ten. If she wants it to be 20, then it’s twenty. She will say these things because she is not giving opinions based on reality. She is ruled by emotion, the orgy-porgy of our day. The collective orgy of thought and action where there are no consequences with the giant safety net cast by mother government.
So with that, have fun moving to Mason, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. And until your house sells, and since you obviously lack culture, here’s the movie version of that book since you obviously can’t read. Maybe you’ll learn something.
For those who do know better than orgy-porgy Norma, please pass this to a friend to share the classic work of The Brave New World. If they won’t read the book, maybe they’ll watch the movie.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):
The Bully Problem at Lakota: Cover-ups, taxes, and peer pressure
Yes—those who hate me most know exactly who I brought to the Lakota School Board meeting. He was seated on my right and to those who sought to cover up his story, you know you felt a pang of guilt, of regret, and some fear that he was affiliated with me.
But why? How did this person come to sit with me at a school board meeting? How did we become friends in the first place? After all, this was a guy who used to be a levy supporter, and a very active volunteer at Lakota East. Well, it’s the fault of the Lakota School Board actually for not taking action to help the guy out when he had a problem. This guy came to the board and presented his case and the school did everything they could to cover it up. They took his wife aside and pressured her into signing her rights away out of fear that they would smear her for the relationship she had with a teacher at the high school who had instructed her daughter. This case went all the way up to the state board of education and still the story was contained. The teacher who sent very salacious emails talking about sucking, and doing the horizontal mamba with this little girl’s mother from a school computer didn’t get fired from his position for violating the trust of the teacher-student relationship.
Instead the principal of the high school sent the teacher in question to the other high school to help keep him employed and shut up the parents who had reconciled the incident between each other after a lot of pain. Even after the relationship had ended between the woman and the teacher the parasite continued to pursue the woman asking how “their” little girl was doing on papers sent home and on voice messages over the phone. It was the kind of voice message that sent shivers up the spine of the woman. It felt as if the teacher was “bullying” her into a position of control, and the teacher continued to do this for quite some time after the affair ended and the child was out of his class. Because in all reality, nothing really happened to the teacher, he just reported to a different building within the Lakota School System once the story was presented to the principal and school board.
Out of desperation and risking that I would shoot him just for stepping on my property, this father sought me out for help because he had nowhere else to turn. He wanted someone to be accountable for what this teacher attempted to do to his family. So I covered their story in greater detail in another article. Click Here to view that piece. Over time, we have become friends and I have gotten to know their daughter who is now out of school. After the incident with the teacher this little girl was repeatedly harassed by other students at Lakota. The bullying became so bad that the parents had to remove their little girl from a very respected activity due to the constant harassment, all of which is well documented with an extensive paper trail. Remember, this used to be dedicated Lakota volunteer who is very well liked and respected in the Lakota community, so the man has no reason to be inflammatory. Once the little girl graduated from school she once again thrived, and this was the 18-year-old woman who recently showed me around her house and shared with me her crushes that she had on her favorite movie stars. As she spoke to me I could not help but wonder what kind of evil would possess a teacher to use this nice young woman as a tool to seduce her mother into beginning a sexual affair. What evil would try to pry from this innocent girl facts about her father that the teacher could use to smear against the mother. And what evil could use the special needs condition of the young girl to demand audience from the very busy, and concerned mother who would do anything to make sure her daughter got what she needed in school.
So is there bullying going on at Lakota, and virtually every public school all across the country? YES! Of course there is. Public schools are notoriously class specific, and peer groups are created within a public school system to meet the various classifications of personalities. Because such a thing is a primal desire, to find likeness among peers, children will pick on those who are not like them and pound into shape those similar into a group collective. Individuality is frowned down upon by every member of the public school system, which is why I dislike public school and always have. But when the pressure gets to be too great that it translates into a student wanting to take their own life, then the situation is way out of control and has expanded beyond the realm of tolerance.
When I heard about the recent suicide at Lakota West, I didn’t want it to be another negative article to write against the Lakota School System. My heart goes out to the parents of this little girl. I don’t care what the situation was, a system that lets a girl think death was the only way out has failed the child and the family who trusted the school. And unfortunately it sounds like the girl was suffering from bullying at her school to such an extent that she thought she had no way out.
Since this story was reported by Channel 9 one time during the second week of February 2012 and nowhere else, facts are hard to come by. The letter that Lakota sent home to parents was nowhere to be found on their website, which seemed to be big enough news to dictate sending the letter home with kids. I did however see the article by the Enquirer about the new school board member Julie Schaffer promoting her “volunteerism.” But there wasn’t anything about this tragic death that occurred on February 8th in the paper that I saw, or on the Lakota site giving any specifics. That seemed strange for such a sad story.
I figured that the media and the school were just being sensitive to the family, and by keeping the story quit, they were being respectful to the grieving family, which I thought was appropriate. That is until I saw the comments online from Leslie Agoston who is a student at Lakota West and knows the victim. Here is the posting.
Leslie Agoston
I am a current Lakota West High School student. And I know what the girl went through and how she felt. I too get bullied almost every day. And Lakota could care less they just sweep it under the rug. They just care about their “excellence” rating. If they just stopped for a second and realize how many kids are suffering from bullying an incident like this would have never happened.
That is an interesting thing for a student at Lakota to say? That comment eerily sounded like the situation my new friend who came to the school board meeting with me went through. The comment from the student implies that the administration at Lakota doesn’t care about the bullying that goes on. It backs up the notion that my friend is not the only one who suffered from some indiscretion involving bullying at the Lakota School District.
But what constitutes bullying? Was it bullying to use a special needs kid to sleep with a parent? Might the child have felt pressure from such a teacher into revealing family secrets through acts of intimidation? Was it bullying to tell the mother that unless she signed a document releasing the school of responsibility that “word might get around the community about her indiscretions.” And apparently the students at Lakota West are complaining about bullying being a rampant problem that nobody is addressing.
Well, for clarity on this issue, let’s look at what Lakota itself says the definition of bullying is according to their website.
Lakota’s Definition of Bullying
“Bullying” is defined as an intentional written, verbal, electronic, or physical act that a student exhibits toward another particular student more than once; and the behavior both (1) causes mental or physical harm to the student, and (2) is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive that a reasonable person under the circumstances should know will have the effect of:
• Placing a student in reasonable fear of physical harm or damage to the student’s property;
• Physically harming a student or damaging a student’s property; or
• Insulting or demeaning any student or group of students in such a way as to disrupt or interfere with the school’s educational mission or the education of any student.
http://www.lakotaonline.com/parents.cfm?subpage=2642
I know that my friend and his family suffered from bullying according to that definition at the hands of a Lakota teacher, a principal, and the school board members who knowingly let the issue slide through the cracks. They did not pursue termination of that teacher, but instead covered the issue up, which is consistent with the statement made by Leslie Agoston in her comments about the recent tragic death of her fellow student.
I understand that any organization with a lot of people and employees will be far from perfect. But we do expect perfection from an airplane pilot. If a pilot lands successfully 300 times then crashes on landing 301 that pilot would be held accountable, probably with the loss of their job at the very least. If there was a loss of life, there might even be a trial. The community of Lakota is employing an army of very well paid administrators, teachers and councilors to prevent tragic events like what Leslie described. It is also expected that teachers behave ethically without trying to have sex with the parents. The kids are watching how the administrators and teachers behave, and kids cannot be expected to be better than the teachers, can they?
It is a tragedy anytime a young person losses their life. It’s bad enough to consider whatever the sum of the conditions were that made the little girl want to take her own life. Again, my heart goes out to the family in the deepest way. And I truly hope that what Leslie said is not true, that this bully problem is not so epidemic within the Lakota School System that the situation could have been avoided with the skilled intervention of the highly paid mentors employed by the community. Because if it could have, then this suicide is a very serious issue for the school board to consider, and so far, all I hear them talking about is the passage of a new tax levy. They didn’t even bring it up at the school board meeting on February 13, 2012. They didn’t even say a prayer for the little girl or cover the issue in any way which would have been appropriate with such a large gathering. All these elements add up to be just another situation as what my friend experienced in his own family, a school that pushes all bad news under the rug to hide from the community.
I really hope I’m wrong, but something tells me that I’m not.
The biggest problem with the whole bullying issue is that the schools have painted themselves into a corner. They are not equipped to deal with bullying. Only a parent is, and sometimes the best way to eliminate a bully is to fight them. That’s how you shut down a bully. That’s how it’s been done for 10,000 years of human evolution. And if the child can’t take care of it on their own, the parents must step in and do it for them.
When my daughter was 9 years old she was picked on by a group of boys in the neighborhood who harassed her and her friends to no end. My daughter stood up to the bullies and one of the boys spit on her. My daughter was devastated by the embarrassment and came home very upset that a person would do such a thing to her, especially since the boy was much bigger than she was. That’s when the parent must step in and take control.
I put my daughter and all her friends in the car and went looking for the boys. I found them playing in the driveway of their house with the spitter’s father working in the garage, all of them were laughing as we pulled up. I made the boy apologize on his hands and knees to my daughter so my daughter would realize that I had her back and that if she ever got into a fix she couldn’t handle, that I’d be there to sweep it up for her. She needed to know that her father was there. Of course the boy’s father protested and wanted to fight me, which I openly accepted. Then he shut his mouth and went inside his house leaving his kids to fend for themselves, which scared the shit out of them. Their father had abandoned them when it mattered. Little things like that matter a lot in the art of living.
These matters are too complicated for schools to handle, yet they sell their services to the community as though they can. They are kidding themselves. Respect for human beings cannot be created through rules and regulations. Respect is earned, and standing up for yourself or your child is the way it is gained in the mind of the human being. There is no other way.
It is in this misunderstanding that bullying is an epidemic problem in public schools and parents who believe that the school system can, and will put children’s safety in the front of administrator’s minds are kidding with you. Administrators don’t have the intellectual capacity, or the fortitude to do such a thing, and the cost to society is great. The bully issue in public school is just another byproduct of an organized, overly specialized, labor force that has handcuffed parents into inaction because they assure society that all problems can be handled in the classroom. So parents believing they don’t have a right to get involved in the affairs of their children in school leave the job to the teachers and administrators that can’t even balance a budget, let alone handle complicated emotional issues with children who aren’t even theirs.
The schools know this. They know they can’t protect the children to the level they have sold to the public. Their primary concern is always how they are going to continue to gain funding from the community, so they are always focused on hiding unpleasant facts from the public rather than dealing directly with a problem. This is why Lakota didn’t even discuss the suicide of a student just four days later at the largest school board meeting I can ever remember occurring at Lakota with all the media in Cincinnati covering the event. The school board didn’t even acknowledge the tragedy, because the goal of the meeting was to convince the community of the need for higher taxes, not to actually deal with any tough problems like mature adults. This is the kind of behavior that has created most of the problems in public education. That’s how they got into trouble with my new friend. They sought to suppress the story rather than dealing with it directly.
The bullies of the world know this. They know that most of the parents, administrators, and teachers are paralyzed into inaction by rules and regulations that the bullies could care less about. So like the liberal gun laws that seek to remove guns from society in the aim of world peace, the progressive educators think that by employing more councilors and administrators that they can stop violence and the tendency of violence from the school environment. They can’t.
The answer is more parental involvement, less administrators getting in the way of a parent and their children, and encouraging justice where it’s appropriate. When a teacher does something wrong, FIRE THEM! When a child acts inappropriately, expel them! And when you hear and see reports from parents that violence is coming at their children in the school, don’t pass the reports to your PR director to hide from the public. Deal with them; deal with each and every report even if the parents are overly neurotic, because that’s what the community is paying for. If there is anything that can be learned from these tragedies it’s that there isn’t any replacement for good ol’ fashioned care and attention. Money can’t buy security and a clean conscious, only work can solve the problem and without the work, tragedies will continue to occur.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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