Category: Progressive

What they are Doing at Ross will soon come to Lakota: A promise I’ll make if you’ll vote correctly

In case you haven’t heard dear reader, the future of Lakota is actually happening in the Ross Township school system where they just passed a levy a short while ago and now the teacher’s union there is begging for a raise based on the extra revenue. And as reported by the soft taco education writer for the Journal-News, Michael D. Clark, the Ross teachers just rejected the latest offer by the school board even after a federal mediator came in to help resolve the matter. We also have seen nationally that the Chicago teacher’s union have been striking yet again to demand pay increases leaving thousands of parents scrambling to find somewhere to put their kids during their busy workdays. In my world, I would say to fire every single one of them and replace them with brand new employees who are not part of the union. But these are all government schools. We hire a school board through the election process to represent us at the table, but honestly, and they all know it, there is only one eventual resolution, they will have to agree to the pay increases one way or another because all other options to manage the situation is illegal. The government has ensured its employees of that much, and they use it against taxpayers all the time, and to hell with the children. The Ross teachers don’t give a damn about the kids otherwise they’d take the money the school board was willing to give them, and they’d shut the hell up and like it.

And that is precisely why the Lakota teacher’s union is eager to elect Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer to the school board so that when it comes time to have this same negotiation next year with the union, that Ray and Julie will lay down and give them all that they want without a lot of fuss. Because after all, the deck is stacked against management and they don’t want a lot of bloody news in the newspaper hurting their union brand. Ross Township in relation to other schools in Butler County is out across the river in no man’s land. Not really along any big commercial paths. It’s kind of the wild west version of a community in the very Republican county. So its easy to ignore and overlook in the paper. But it has all the same problems that a big school like Lakota has just to the east by ten miles or so. And what is happening there is a mirror reflection of what is coming to Lakota where a lot of people will be very upset when the same conditions are presented to them as voters.

Michael Clark and reporters like him are part of the problem. They are just going through the motions in life, and don’t want to disrupt their contacts on these school boards. So his reporting is soft shelled when it comes to the education beat because his newspaper employer relies on the old system to work, they need the sports pages, the advertising connected to that system and the ankle deep reporting that never gets to the heart of the kind of topics that are really floating around in the depths of all education. When he writes a story, it doesn’t put pressure on the union representatives like Robin Plowman at Ross to get her members in line to the school board demands. It only puts pressure on the school board because all the powers of nature are aligned by the rules and regulations to destroy their position, made worse by the reporters who are clearly aligned politically with the teacher’s union. For school boards its like being trapped in a house surrounded by armed forces and they’ve cut off your power and water and food supply. Eventually you’ll have to come out into a hail of gun fire. And as a school board member, you are expected to like it.

What we need desperately, especially at Lakota are school board members like Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn to hold the line during next year’s contract negotiations and when the teacher’s threaten to strike, which they will, to be willing to tell them to take a hike. But that is only one part of the puzzle. To fight their out of school antics, there need to be people like me willing to fight them with their games. I’m not saying it has to be me, it would be nice if it was a bunch of people like me, but someone has to engage them radical antic to radical position because that’s the way they fight and it’s the only path to beat them. The community has to back its school board and take the fight to the lap of the teacher’s unions knowing that you can’t trust the newspapers or the television reporters to stand behind the community representatives. I am certainly willing to do that and I have under considerable fire which I enjoy. That has been the point of this continued fight over the last decade. What’s different now is that there is a chance to get a real school board in place instead of a lot of those soft-shell tacos that Michael Clark likes so much so he can write those easy stories and not ruffle any feathers with his editors. He has enough ruffled feathers living in that beard of his especially this time of year as birds too lazy to fly south for warmer weather just reside in his beard.

What voters have to come to terms with, and we all have to accept is that teacher’s unions do not put children ahead of their paychecks. They use them as extortion pieces, but they don’t love them at all, and will abandon them in the classroom to put leverage on their contract negotiations without a second thought. There are lots of teachers that I have talked to who will say to me that union membership is a requirement and that they have no choice but to hide within membership and do what the leadership tells them. The union understands that too, they don’t give their membership a choice in the matter, they expect their members to follow their lead and use their numbers as leverage in negotiations. If the teachers go along with it but silently send messages out that they really just want to teach the kids, they are still acting against the children by allowing the union to have all that power. They are contributing to evil every time and its their fault that these negotiations go so poorly. If they are honest with themselves, they just want the pay increase. They aren’t doing the work for the pleasure of teaching children—even if the district can’t afford them. They just want the money and the union gets it through collective bargaining which is stacked against the school boards in every circumstance.

At Lakota things are a bit different. I am personally willing to fight the union if the school board will stick up to them. But first we must have a school board that will do so. The next time there is a strike at Lakota I will take that fight to them building a coalition of our own and to hell with that federal moderator and Michael Clark’s reporting. Put real school board members on the board and I will promise that I will defend that board with whatever it takes to beat that union. But first you will have to vote for James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor on Tuesday November 5, 2019. Do that much and we’ll take care of the rest. Unlike reporters such as Michael Clark I will get the dirt on every member of the teacher’s union, who they are sleeping with, who they didn’t tip well at a local restaurant, even what kind of underwear they are wearing and we will paint the world with their antics. And they won’t like it one bit. That’s what will happen the next time teachers at Lakota try what they are doing now at Ross and ultimately Chicago. It’s a game I’m sick of seeing and I’m not a soft taco kind of guy. I like a lot of hot sauce and there is plenty of it there to consume. Now get out there and VOTE!

Rich Hoffman

Its all about Guns in Lakota Schools: Remember to vote for Lynda O’Connor and Jim Hahn for School Board on November 5th

From the beginning it was always about guns for me regarding the school board candidates at the Lakota school district which we are voting for on November 5th, 2019. Not so much as we use guns to shoot people, but that they sustain ourselves from people who would like to shoot us. The political philosophy being embraced or not really, points to the essential differences of the management system that is up for debate. Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray represent anti-guns on teacher’s points of view, exactly the same position as the teacher’s union and Democrats nationally. The roots of their belief system is that we should all depend on each other, flaws and all for the betterment of a utopian society lacking individual identity and trusting in the system we have invented to sustain us. As opposed to Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn who believe guns should be worn by teachers as first responders in the moment of a hostile crises and that individuals, not systems, are the keys to solving many of the social ills starting with the ownership of firearms in general.

To further break down this parody Julie and Ray want voters to trust their very flawed personalities with the lives of our children, and that also is the position of the progressive teacher’s union politically. Once anybody admits to themselves that guns are in American society, and should be in all American schools, to protect the acquisition of individual possession then the formula for all public education to teach contrary realizations is exposed and ruined forever. So of course, Julie and Ray don’t want guns on teachers, they want everyone to trust the system they represent, and to their specific roles, are terribly underqualified. However, qualification is an individual assessment, so for them, so long as they can blend into the background, their personal faults ethically, financially, and morally can be ignored.

This interpretation of guns is a heady matter that is not conducive to the lazy thinkers and mass collectivists that have transcended from the deserts of the Middle East and migrated along the coasts of the Indian Ocean during the evolution of the many oriental religions of sacrifice and collective salvation. The gun has no place in those cultures because the aim of life is not to acquire individual traits, but to get rid of them. If you study the modern liberal, that is the roots that you will find dear reader, and that is the foundation of all teacher unions and government schools. Every single one of them. And when it comes to managing those school boards with like minded people, Julie and Ray are just the kind of people they want running things, easy to beat, flawed personalities, and not very smart.

In fact, at the core of education as we all assume is the individual attainment of intelligence, after all that is the purpose of education, to acquire knowledge. But that is not the goal of government schools led by these sinister, oriental style forces. They want a breakdown of individualism and an advocacy of social collectivism where the institution is worshipped itself, not the participants. You can see that at any Friday Night Football game at Lakota. The parents in the audience watching their kids play games under the lights of an October sky will say, “we won,” or “we lost.” By attending the game, they feel they are part of the game and therefor, the institution represented on the scoreboard. Individual touchdowns by heroics are lost to the next day news so long as the school gets the credit for individual behavior. And that is the way it is with these people, and it always has been.

So to come to such thoughts is a very individualized process, and for that people arriving at such a state need guns to protect themselves from the advocates of institutionalism, whether the attackers are crazed pot smoking lunatics or Manchurian candidates seeking actual assassination to preserve the status quo. You would be surprised to what extent lazy, dull; people will fight to avoid more work and real thinking. They would truly rather kill you than to step up to the level of thought you might introduce them to with a little effort. To that proof I would offer Socrates as an example, who was poisoned for corrupting the youth of Greek society. Today instead of killing Socrates as a middle-aged man they just kill them before they ever hatch out of kindergarten. The public schools don’t want the next great philosophers, and great thinkers and innovators. They want boring people that they can control easily, and they certainly don’t want them to have guns to defend themselves with.

Ultimately that is why teachers in school must have guns and why we need school board members who support education curriculums that advocate individualized learning and will push back against the tide of state and federal mandates to the contrary. We want kids to learn in school and we want guns to protect what they have learned from villains of old oriental philosophies from eradicating that possession from their minds with the threat of death. Guns protect all individualized possessions, even knowledge. Anyone who knows history well could think quickly of five or six situations where governments, kings, or anarchists have shown up on the doorsteps of a great thinker and killed them so that society would not advance beyond the intellectual reach of the worst and most wicked. For that is the true intention of evil and the reason it is bad.

Guns are about preserving what we teach to individual students so that they can live and carry out the products of their understanding. Not in just saving their lives for the sake of one more statistic sitting in the stands of a football game cheering for the institution when they could be at home reading a book and getting smarter. The goal of a school should not be to accept the perverted sexual understanding of the most obsessed mind with the basic functions of reproduction, but to teach them to think beyond such primitive cravings, to the point where we don’t even think about being transgender, but what is the state of life outside of the universe, or multiverse. It is up to the education system to teach to think beyond limits, not to hold everyone under them.

And that is the subtle message of this election, Lynda O’Conner and James Hahn stand for guns and the protection of individual possession of knowledge, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray aren’t even smart enough to ask such a question, so they don’t want to be left behind by smarter people than they are, rather they want to keep guns out of the schools, and instead keep the topics of conversation on transgender bathrooms and how to blow $100 million by paying teachers countless amounts of money then asking taxpayers to subsidize their failure at some future time. By voting against guns in schools and in society, anti-gun personalities like Ray and Julie stand with the original masses in disregarding individual behavior in favor of collectivism. And when you see how Ray and Julie have led their lives, you can understand why they are so eager for such a position.

Rich Hoffman

The Losers of Lakota: Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are the keys to the bank vault the teacher’s union wants to rob

Let’s just say that the election for the local school board members at Lakota has been a miserable experience for me. Not because on the Republican side of the voting selection there aren’t good candidates. There are, Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn are very good candidates whom I am sure if both are elected together would represent us very well on the school board against a hostile teacher’s union that is always looking to wreck the budget we all supply that school with our hard earned tax money. But along the way, doing research of all the positions for all the other candidates, and the people attached to them, it has just disgusted me. That would of course be the plight of Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer. Julie is currently on the board. Ray lost his seat a few years ago and now wants it back. Both Ray and Julie are part of the budget deficits that I have complained about over a decade so I have never been big fans of them personally. But it has only been until this election that I did any real look into the quality of their positions, and what I have learned by asking lots of people, and reading lots of things is that they are just complete losers I wouldn’t hire to wash my car. They are far worse than I thought they were, and it has been depressing to learn.

Looking at all these candidates the way I would in hiring for a new position for some important job, which a school board management position is, it is clear that Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray shouldn’t be anywhere near a job consideration due to their severe ineptness as people. No wonder they are such bleeding-heart liberals. They can’t afford to be anything but, and that is not doing any children in the Lakota school district any justice, which angers me considerably. They should have respect for the rest of us to not waste our time. Now, for me, Julie Shaffer lost me a long time ago when she and I debated school topics on WLW radio. Back then the school board was Joan Powell’s and she was building her little coalition of liberal union suck asses and Julie was part of it. Electing a school board is to hire representatives for the taxpayers to negotiate on our behalf. Not to be stooges for the labor union which already is well represented in school board activities. They don’t need help. But the way Joan operated until she stepped down a few years ago was to be a stooge and Julie was part of that culture, which is why everything operated as a deficit. Of course she couldn’t debate me on anything anywhere, in public forums, on the radio, anywhere, so Joan, Julie, the previous school superintendent along with many mad mom Lakota socialites tried an early version of the “me too” movement on me with the help of the newspaper reporter Michael Clark. I’m still angry about that and likely will be for the rest of my life. It showed me just what lowlifes these people really were who were spending massive amounts of money that we give them so recklessly and maliciously. I can handle people who come after me, which Julie clearly did, but in so doing she showed what she was really about. After the last levy since they stopped asking for money at Lakota due to declining enrollment, I haven’t paid much attention to her or the school, so Julie has been off my mind pretty much. However, after the last debate done this year for this election I was reminded just how bad for the job that she is and to be honest I am embarrassed that she even lives in my community, let alone sits on the board representing me as a decision maker. I saw her recently at Sam’s Club in Tri-County and thought about confronting her about things I had learned about her bad behavior regarding extracurricular Lakota events that were quite embarrassing, but her husband was with her, so I left it alone. I don’t want to be the guy that destroys her family. But I wouldn’t vote for her for anything if there was only one name on the ticket.

And she’s the good one. Ray Murray I have learned is even worse than she is.

Ray Murray I always thought of as kind of the Juan Williams of the Lakota school board. I disagreed with his politics but thought he was a nice enough guy to not run through the ringer. He’s a neighbor of mine, he lives close to me and I see him around. My wife likes him a lot and always has. But I kept hearing things about him from people around the community, especially the business guys that Ray wasn’t such a good guy. Well, I had no reason to think otherwise until he threw his hat in the ring for another run at school board then heard his alarming comments at a recent public forum regarding budgets and his views on transgender politics. So I followed the leads where they went and sure enough found out that Ray has drugs in his past and that he has had some serious financial problems. I don’t want to embarrass him; people go through things in life. Some of those problems were years ago, but some were quite recent. If he wasn’t running for school board, I might slide a $100 bill under the door so he could buy lunch, but I sure as hell wouldn’t elect him to a managing position of millions and millions of dollars at Lakota. He was part of the problem before, and knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t give him the keys to a demolition derby car. I sure wouldn’t let him near my wallet. He obviously has a hard time with money, and we’d be crazy to put him anywhere near some. His comments at recent Lakota school board debates are just the tip of the iceberg. He is a walking financial disaster. Look him up on Courtview for yourself at the Butler County Clerk.org site. You’ll see what I mean.

Then there is the reporting, if we had decent local reporters, we should know a lot of these things. Honestly, a local blogger who is busy with millions and millions of other things shouldn’t be the one covering these stories. I’m not even talking about the partisan angle, which from my point of view, the Journal News reporters, well all the Cox Media people are deeply in bed with all the progressive activism that is going on all over southern Ohio, and they sit on stories that might make their people look bad. A lot of this information about Ray should have been covered by them years ago, and maybe if it had, we wouldn’t have had some of the very contentious levy battles that we did, which was very costly to the community. Their coverage has been and continues to be disingenuous to the community who would like to read their articles but have learned that they can’t trust the content.

I will be glad when the election is over because I simply don’t like seeing and hearing from these losers as much as I have over these last several weeks. These people have not been representing me as a voter but have been serious partisan hacks hidden behind a mask of bipartisanship which was always a complete lie. I’m not sure we can believe anything that comes out of Julie Shaffer’s mouth and certainly not out of Ray Murray. I’m not even sure he ever lived in Chicago at this point, let alone was a cop as he has been saying. I was so disappointed in him that I just stopped looking to confirm. The other topics I learned about left me sick. Its nice that we have some options in this election and we’ll see if people show up and actually vote. However, the process up to this point has just been a disgusting look into a bunch of losers at Lakota who should be hiding in the cracks of society instead of being placed on a pedestal. But of course, those who want to steal from us want a key to the door of the bank vault, and for them, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray are the incompetent stooges who would let them in and to take everything and then some, then ask for a levy from the tax payers to refill the vault. That is the game that has been going on for a long time and the more you learn about the whole thing, the angrier anybody would get about it. And that’s certainly where I am at.

Rich Hoffman

 

Bipartisanship on the Lakota School Board is a Fantasy: Why being a Republican matters when managing money is the objective

One thing that is very obvious, especially this time around within the Lakota school district, and specifically Butler County, Ohio is this complete falsehood that any school board is a non-partisan entity sacrificing their time and energy for children. Wrong! School boards, especially the one at Lakota, are extremely partisan and they want to appear that way so they can get elected in Butler County to anything, due to the conservative electorate demographics that are required. When board members past and present like Ray Murray, Julie Shaffer and many others declare that there should never be an “R” or a “D” next to the name of a school board member they are wearing a mask of falsehood meant to deceive us all. They want to project that school boards giving children an education is “bigger” than politics and that people like me are trying to divide our community with partisan bickering. They are liars, and thieves, and no better. I would go on to say that they are scum of the earth because of their deceitful nature. School boards are nothing but partisan because of the liberal element that comes with every government school due to labor union membership. You can’t accept as an endorsement the school labor union but not the endorsement of the local political party and expect to make a case for neutrality on it, which is precisely what those two idiots have been doing.

Think about it, during this election season which ends on Tuesday November 5th 2019 we have continued hearing about this big budget surplus from Lakota of over $100 million, and rising. Ray Murray and Julie Shafer have been critical of the Republican endorsements of both Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn because in their view the school board is a non-partisan collection of community members, yet they were proud to get the endorsement of the LEA labor union. Julie will even say that she is a registered Republican. Well, all those statements are is a trick or treat mask. The labor union wants those two losers (Julie and Ray) on the board to make contract negotiations easier for them as Lakota blows a ton of money on a $200 million long term facilities plan entailing rehab, renovation, and replacements of buildings and much more which is not in that 5 year forecast that everyone has been beating on their chest in regards to that $100 million surplus. Believe me, the liberals on the board, wither or not they call themselves Republicans or Democrats already have that money spent, which is the cause of this emergency prior to the election for proper school board members.

Finally we have a choice to get a three vote majority. If either Ray or Julie get elected, that $200 million project is getting greenlit and that $100 million surplus is gone. If voters stay home that night and don’t vote, the endorsed labor union candidates will get elected and this chance to safeguard the budget will fly right out the window and it won’t take but a short time for us to go into another levy fight. While its true, I’d rather think about other things than this stupid Lakota school issue, because honestly, I’ve never been a big fan of the work government schools do with children. If we are going to have a big, giant black hole of a government taxation agency programming our children into liberal propaganda, then at least we can elect a school board to manage the money with true Republicans who are fiscal conservatives, or at least can read a balance sheet and understand what the treasurer tells them.

I’d rather not dig into the lives of these people, and I call them losers for a good reason. Especially the more I learn about them. Between Ray and Julie, I’ve heard enough. I didn’t have a very high impression of them before this election, and now that we’ve been through a few months of campaigning, I’ve learned enough to be disgusted by them. I have no question that they are liars and completely inadequate in managing any sum of money. Julie Shaffer may be a registered Republican, but she doesn’t vote like one. She is clearly one in name only, and she want’s to keep that mask on to even have a shot at winning anything in Butler County, just like her predecessor Joan Powell and the many others following in her wake who have pretended to be Republicans only to turn into big, sloppy liberals. You bet it matters what political party they are affiliated with, that’s how we measure their basic values and getting the respect of a political party enough to get an endorsement means a lot.

As I’ve said before, school board members are our representatives to protect our interests. How can they do that if it is the enemy of our interests who endorse them? And yes, the teacher’s union is the enemy of our interests. When they negotiate for the next union contract in a few short years the leaders of the teacher’s union aren’t thinking about the kids, they are only thinking of making more money and if they don’t get it, they will threaten to strike. They won’t care one bit if the kids don’t have a classroom to go to or if they are serving a good example as adults while they negotiate with the school board. The teacher’s union want weak people to negotiate with which is why they are endorsing Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray. None of them want Lynda and Jim on a board together, you can bet that because they will vote no against a lot of liberal ideas the teacher’s union wants to do with our tax money, such as implement transgender bathrooms while they blow through that $100 million surplus like gambling addicts at a casino.

The only reason anybody would say school boards should be non-partisan is because they want to wear a mask to hide their true intentions behind. Julie is no conservative and Ray Murray is even less of one than she is, and they don’t want to talk about it because they want a chance to get elected. By making politics a non-issue they can continue to deceive voters into thinking it doesn’t matter, or placate them to stay home on election night while the vermin of the teacher’s union go out in droves and vote for losers so that their next contract negotiation is in the bag along with those $200 million facility improvements that nobody is talking about yet, quite on purpose. Are those harsh words, is it fair to talk about the character flaws of Julie and Ray during an election for a silly school that sticks its nose in our lives in very intrusive ways, all the time? You bet your ass it is. These are nothing but robbers who want to steal money from the rest of us and I get tired of them lying to my face, and to the rest of us. Where is Julie going to find $200 million for those facility plans if she can’t even find her pants? I can promise that the endorsed Republicans on the board, especially Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn would never be involved in such embarrassing situations, you know why? Because they are Republicans, real ones. That’s not to say that they are made of the robes of Jesus, but they are pretty much what they say they are, even in social situations. The politics of any candidate matters and there is a reason the LEA wants people to wear the masks of bi-partisanship—it’s so that they can rob the bank of Lakota and hold our kid’s hostage while they steal from all of us. And if that sounds harsh, I would argue that its not harsh enough.

Rich Hoffman

Shakedowns at Lakota: The trolls robbing openly the business community

It’s not often easy to understand the many veiled ways that a school system, any school system, extorts the business community for extra cash in the pay to play scheme that is what has become of government schools. When anybody talks about the teacher unions as a negative radical force, it goes far beyond the wages that destroy budgets that school boards are constantly having to deal with. It actually seeps into the management of the school system itself flowing over into zoning and finance. When we see these radicals in action they usually present themselves as nice cordial people, perhaps with too much jewelry and perfume–even the guys. Their pant suits would make Hillary Clinton proud as they profess to be “all about the children,” which nobody would argue with because they don’t understand the details. But when the lights are dimmed a bit, or these union radicals are sipping their lattés at Starbucks, their true intentions become much clearer and a hatred for the rich and industrious comes sharply into focus, even as they make plans to strike against a school system over more money such as what seems always to be happening in Chicago. And from the letter presented below, this practice of harassing businesses isn’t just happening in my home district of Lakota, it’s pretty much everywhere that labor unions operate with taxpayer funds.

What makes stories like this hard for people to understand is that its not the direct action that progressive teacher unions create themselves, it’s the results that they instigate as a radicalized political entity. Anybody who has the endorsement of a labor union and is running for school board is playing the game and do the bidding of that radical element. This example is within Lakota, but the same story could be told in Mason, Monroe, or any government school. The foundation for this particular practice at Lakota goes back to the severe mismanagement of the school board that went on when Joan Powell was running things. To a large degree Julie Shaffer has carried on the tradition along with Ray Murray and Brad Lovell. Ray lost his seat a few years ago to Todd Parnell. Lynda O’Connor and Todd have been two votes toward solutions and are both business friendly. For this upcoming election, Jim Hahn is poised to join the school board and like Todd and Lynda, is a pro-business candidate and would be part of the solution. But before we can talk about that we must define the problem that is expressed in the letter presented.

The names were blacked out to protect the innocent on the letter shown here. Even though I have permission to use the letter in its raw form it’s not really necessary for the story. The story is that a real-estate investment by an enterprising opportunity has been trying to gather up the funds to initiate the endeavor and they are being told in this letter that the common practice in public schools operating in this region are demanding even more money to leverage control over the project before a shovel ever hits the ground. And that threat will continue until the owner or prospector of the property makes a payment to the school for the increased value assessed by the legal entity who is also part of the game. Essentially that means that any investment coming into an area doesn’t just have to look at the costs of the project itself, but the amount of extortion money that the local school system applies to them. Of course, if they don’t play then as the letter says, they will be “blacklisted” and will have trouble elsewhere.

Such as in the case of Lakota, this is why incoming projects, shopping centers, home developments either move to some friendlier district without the kind of leverage that Lakota has or they just buck up and shut up so they can do business in our community. The teacher’s union create the false narrative that their employment makes a great school which attracts investment by developers. They have the media platform to get a sympathetic ear from both print and television news because the kids are used as a shield to advance the topic. But the chaos is driven by the insatiable need for ever more money that is always increased by the labor demand for unreasonably high wages, which must be paid for by the “rich,” property owners. Those property owners are of course the general taxpayers who own real estate—they are all looked at as soft targets by the teacher’s union out for progressive changes to society in general. But it is the business owners who take the biggest hit, just as this letter explains. If they want to do business in Lakota, or any school district through Ohio and Pennsylvania, they will have to pay the troll living under the bridge between finance and the local school system.

The worst part of all this is that it is the crazy labor costs that are driving the activism. Business owners typically don’t want to get involved in contentious disputes because the teacher’s union will threaten quite openly to boycott their work, which to any business could mean complete destruction. Its hard enough to come into a community with a business plan to get funding for the project, but then to survive a shakedown by the local school that might put 7% to 10% extra cost into the project. Then to have it all threatened with bad press and a bunch of angry latté sippers from the teacher’s union is often a “not worth it” decision. People may look around Lakota’s district and declare that everything is great, there are lots of businesses and lots of residents. But what isn’t talked about is that there could be more if the school system wasn’t such a negative impact on potential investors. When it is wondered why Lakota has had declining enrollment, this is one of the contributing factors. Or why young people move out of the area once they graduate. Or why Liberty Center still hasn’t leased out all its available space in spite of all the wonderful things it has to offer to the community, the cost of doing business is too high for most, so it limits our opportunities as a community.

Meanwhile the demand for such high cost appropriations does come from the teacher’s unions who are always threatening the school district with increased costs which pushes not so bright school board members like Ray Murray, Brad Lovell and Julie Shaffer into participating in these shakedowns to keep from having to go to the voters every couple of years to get more levy money to pay the unending appetites of the radical Lakota teacher’s union. The businesspeople are easy targets because they often can’t afford to defend themselves once they have sunk a lot of money into a project, then are stuck holding to it once the bleeding starts. Sure, the labor radicals are nice to them and are not shy to ask for more shakedown money any way they can get it with cordial conversation at public events, but make no mistake about it, the practice is vile and is just as criminal as any thief looking to rob a bank. It’s the same thing, only the school districts wait for some investor to come along with bright ideas to do all the work, then once they are too far along to turn back, find they have to secure more revenue to appease the trolls in the school district. And that is just disgusting. It is certainly happening at Lakota in abundance, but to be honest, it is happening everywhere. The reality is that nobody has the guts to cover it which is why it continues to happen on and on and on.

Rich Hoffman

Pot Smoking and Ray Murray: The school board candidate who wants to shoot teachers if they have a gun

The Ray Murray I knew back in 2011 was nowhere to be found at the VOA Miami University debate on October 22, 2019 for potential school board candidates. I always thought Ray was a nice guy, but the person speaking at that event sounded like a drug induced lunatic. Suspicious of the things he said that night it became clear thereafter that there was a good reason. Under Case Number 0000477720 Ray looks to have been convicted of possession of marijuana and had to serve a year of probation. After seeing that, I would normally doubt that such a report would be accurate. So I checked it with two different sources and, after watching him in action and looking scraggly and worn out in ways I wouldn’t normally associate with him, there is good reason to believe it and then some. He sounded like a guy on drugs as he opened the door to scrutiny by talking about his years as a Chicago police officer and a champion for transgender politics. He painted himself for an election to be a virtuous person, but reality has something else to say.

Here is the problem with electing people with serious issues into a budgetary position, once they are compromised, whether it is in several broken marriages, drug use, being a cop and being scared of being shot at, people like that tend to side with the worst that our society produces. While its fine to feel sorry for them, and if they find meaning in life in a church by becoming some definition of a pastor, we should cheer them on for recovery. But we should not sit them down and ask them to control a budget of nearly $200 million while sitting on a cash surplus of over $100 million. If we did, we should expect all that money to go up in smoke just like any other pot smoking loser. Compassion is one thing, endorsing failure with elections however is something else.

I would go further and say that anybody who does drugs of any kind, even drinking is a cause to not vote for someone onto a school board. And Ray isn’t the only one guilty of this kind of scandalous behavior. I would say that his partners of liberalism on the school board have done far, far worse. Should we talk about it, well let’s just say, we don’t want to embarrass their children, although I would argue that honesty dictate that we should. When we vote for someone to represent us on a school board, or a trustee, commissioner, representative, senator, anything, we need to know what we are voting for. If we decide we want to vote for flawed people, then that’s fine. We shouldn’t be surprised when those flawed people get bad results, but at least we know what we are voting for. If Ray needs help with drugs, lets get him help. But that doesn’t mean we should put him in charge of millions of dollars.

Compromised people tend to look for redemption in public acts, which is why a lot of liberals are dangerous. People like Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are so compromised with embarrassing things that they have done in their lives that they are looking for redemption with elected office, and they are using taxpayer funded resources to cover their weaknesses. Because they want compassion for the ways they have lived their lives, they are quick to support topics like transgender policies so that they can hide in the crowd and get redemption. They vote in favor of the teacher’s union because they need a cover story of friends to hide their own weaknesses behind with a big banner above their heads stating that nobody is perfect, lets show some compassion for the downtrodden. That sounds fine coming from a church pew on Sunday, but in the world of money, finance and education, it has no place. People who live their lives clean and don’t drink themselves into oblivion or smoke a bunch of dope to forget about all their problems in life, should be in charge of things and have the public trust. And if they get caught doing bad things, we may not blast them out of a cannon and forget about them. We may give them a second chance at life, but certainly we wouldn’t elect them to a board to handle a multimillion-dollar budget.

Being likeable isn’t the same thing as being logical and cool headed when tough decisions need to be made. One thing that must be considered when we are talking about school board candidates that have shown mental instability, and drunkenness and smoking pot or elements of both conditions, is that upon election we give them a badge to get into any building within Lakota. If they are depressed about something who is to say that some drug dealer selling them a bag of pot won’t get a hold of that badge and use it to get into any school building on a rampage of violence, the kind of potential tragedy that we have all been talking about. What was it that Ray said at the debate, that if a teacher had a gun, he would want the police officer to shoot the teacher? Yes, that’s what he said, does that sound like a person who has it all together? Yet his only answer to the problem is to trust the system, yet what if one of these loose cannon school board members ends up drunk and passed out somewhere and someone gets a hold of their badge so they can get into any school? No matter how much we spend on security, you can’t prepare a school to defend stupid and reckless behavior on behalf of the school board members.

Many think its hip and cool to have pot smokers and drunks on the school board. But its no wonder that they always seek institutional support because if something goes wrong, its likely going to be their fault and they want to always reserve the right to hide their faults behind good intentions, such as transgender support and spending that $100 million surplus on give-a-ways to keep anybody from looking too deeply at them. Of course, the teacher’s union wants compromised people on the board of education, because it makes it easier for them to defeat the board upon contract negotiations. When we elect school board members, we are electing our representatives. The teacher’s union has their representatives and they stick together. We elect ours with these elections, so why would we want to vote for anybody who has a union endorsement? We shouldn’t. Then we must ask why the union is endorsing them. Well, the answer to that is that they think they are easy to beat in contract negotiations. If you are the teacher’s union, would you rather go up against a tough business person like James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, or some dude caught with pot or a person who can’t hold their liquor in public and ends up in compromising positions, all too often. The answer is obvious.

Its not wrong to want to help someone like Ray who no matter what has gone on in his life is at least getting up and trying to do better each day. But when there are problems managing marriages, money in his personal finances, and with substance abuse, then why should we think he can protect his badge from some malicious personality, and to protect our budget surplus. He’s ready to spend all of that $100 million over a 38-year period and to shoot teachers when cops come to a school during a mass incident if they have a gun. Ray might be a good neighbor and a nice guy to go to church with, but he clearly has trouble understanding money and cannot take a strong position on ethical decisions. Being one of the misfit toys out in the world does not make him a good representative of our school board. And feeling sorry for someone is not a qualification to make management decisions.

Rich Hoffman

Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray Want Transgender Bathrooms at Lakota: Lynda O’Connor and Jim Hahn could stop them if elected

Another thing that voters need to understand in the Lakota school district as they vote on November 5th 2019 to cast a ballot for new school board members, is where they stand on the transgender bathroom policy. Clearly by the video below, and on many other issues there are two right thinking candidates, and two who are out of their minds. The two good ones are Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn. The two bad ones are Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer. What makes Ray and Julie bad are several things, but for this particular circumstance its their policy of allowing sex to determine the focus of a taxpayer funded education that makes them such villains. Lynda and Jim are against the proposal of taking away parental rights from their children by allowing transgender kids in locker rooms and in the general bathrooms. Transgender politics is a dangerous progressive platform that is driven by government schools and is meant to erode away family value so that children are raised under the umbrella of an all intrusive government. The issue is not about fairness, its about family destruction. Listening to Ray and Julie below I would say they are not savvy enough to understand the politics behind the movement. And that makes them even more dangerous to the Lakota school board, because they are pawns to a progressive policy without even knowing it. But if left to them, if Julie and Ray are on a board together, you can bet they will be voting for transgender bathrooms and locker rooms. Listen to them for yourself:

In many ways Lakota dealt with this years ago, and Lynda O’Connor was part of the leadership in creating an option for transgender kids with a separate bathroom. The continuation of this issue proves that the agenda is not about keeping kids from committing suicide because boys want to be girls, and vice versa. It’s about eroding away the values of students into instruments of progressive thought and turning them into activists for change into a liberal, anti-traditional family direction. To be clear, Jim and Lynda working together on the school board would prevent further transgender issues from becoming a distraction. Ray and Julie would perpetuate the issue and vote to allow mixing boys and girls into general bathrooms and locker rooms. They are weak people who are not very smart making them easy victims of the aggressive teacher’s union. The union has supported both of them because they know that Julie and Ray are easy targets for their agenda of progressive considerations. To prevent this issue both Lynda and Ray would need to be elected because currently Lynda is outvoted on the board two votes to three for approval. The only thing stopping it currently is this upcoming election.

Its hard for many people to admit, including school board members, but education is much less about teaching kids anything, but is more about changing them into progressive activists. In many ways, no discussion about sex should be going on with taxpayer funded efforts. Liberals have been pushing for years to continue lowering sex education among student populations into younger and younger ages. In many cases students aren’t even thinking about sex as public schools are proposing teaching about it in the fourth and fifth grade. Progressive planners at the state level who make up these curriculums know that most children are home alone and bored out of their minds as both parents work these days. And when kids are thinking about sex, they are easy to control especially at school because the teachers become the adoptive parents. Julie isn’t thinking in such conspiratorial terms and Ray is too busy smoking pot and digging his hands into the pavement of Chicago streets to think very deeply about anything. But those are stories for other articles. For this, they just do what they are told by the union. And believe me, the leadership within the unions are all about advancing the progressive anti-family national position of their liberal organization.

Transgender issues are a minority and to provide them with a bathroom to use is fair. Anything beyond that is disruptive to the other students. I could go back to my school days and tell lots of stories as these issues were just becoming part of the narrative. I was a very good athlete and obviously all the school coaches wanted me to play on their programs whether it was basketball or football. I liked playing the games, but I hated, HATED undressing and dressing in the locker rooms. I hated it with kids of the same sex. I can’t imagine it with people who were openly gay and girls who were claiming to be boys. Nudity for me was always a very vulnerable position. I grew up going to church every week. My mom was a housewife and we had a very traditional family structure so I had clear definitions of right and wrong and not being vulnerable around strangers.

We have learned over the last decade or so however that sexual manipulation is actually very common among coaches and students and creating conditions where kids are getting nude is meant to teach them to lower their defenses. With me, I never did. I just didn’t play the sports, because I didn’t want to be stripped of my clothing and assimilated into a Borg Continuum that they called a “team.” I would say that most people reading this are at least my age or older, so they likely had similar experiences and all this modern talk about transgender locker rooms and bathrooms is beyond their understanding. But its quite an obvious attack on our lifestyles in America and its on purpose. It is happening at Lakota. But it is happening everywhere that the teacher unions touch taxpayer money.

When Julie Shaffer says that over 70% of students are thinking about committing suicide, she is talking about 70% of something like 2% of the student population, overstated on purpose to exacerbate the issue for overly emotional people. Rather than deal with the exceptions the progressive position is to use the exceptions to change the standard and drag more and more kids into the confusing condition of sexual identity when most of them can’t even read a book or do basic math. And that is the real crime. Even if nobody wants to believe that progressives at the state and federal level are attempting to destroy the American family with these transgender policies, the truth of the matter is that while we are talking about these issues, kids aren’t learning what they should be, so a change is desperately needed if we are to save them at all from these dangerous educations. What is absolutely certain is that if either Julie or Ray are elected to the Lakota school board, then they will have the votes to advance this agenda. They both support it, you heard it from their own mouths. But if Jim and Lynda are elected, then the issue will be held off and parents will retain their rights to at least manage their children’s sexuality as they should have the responsibility for. Its not the school’s place to stick their noses into such a small topic of the human experience and anybody who says otherwise is looking to limit the intellect of young people with such a trivial topic to consider. Which to my mind should be a crime. But for now, its at least subject to a vote and with an election, we can stop the continued damage.

Rich Hoffman

Everything You Need to Know about the Lakota School Board Candidates of 2019: The Teacher’s Union is ready to steal $100 million

It’s not my favorite topic in the world, but locally, the school board race for Lakota in Butler County, Ohio is a great opportunity for improvement, or a projected, unmitigated failure. And in a lot of ways, how goes things in the Lakota school district, the rest of the country follows, due to the amount of money that is involved and the situation involving government employee unions and the overall position of the Trump administration during a second term not yet resolved. There is over $100 million of surplus in the Lakota budget that the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get a hold of, and they are up for a contract renewal in 2021, and they have picked their candidates in this one. They want the budget novices Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray to be the winning votes during those negotiations and have supported them during this election. So, I have provided the full video of the recent Miami University VOA Meet the Candidates debate which was very well done I might add, so that voters can make up their own minds about this upcoming election. The differences between the candidates couldn’t be more obvious as presented here in the format totality.

Obviously from that video Lynda O’Connor has a lot of experience and is business friendly. I’ve known her for a long time and after sifting through the smoke of political theater have come to trust her with millions and millions of dollars of budget. So much so that I have felt I didn’t have to cover everything little thing that Lakota has been doing, instead looking more at national and international issues involving the Trump administration. But local issues will always be the core of what we do in our republic. The quality of who we vote for regionally has a direct impact on the national elements so we should never take our eye off the importance of local elections. And for that, Lynda certainly has my vote. And so does James Hahn. This is his first time running for the school board of any kind and he was obviously a little nervous in the video. I know him as well and can say that he’s a lot more comfortable with a balance sheet involving vast sums of money than either Julie or Ray is. I actually know all of them well at this point and without question Lynda and Mr. Hahn are the far better choices, especially for the many millions of dollars that are at stake.

Ray and Julie both will say in interviews and in those latte sipping formats with other voters that they don’t care about endorsements from either political party. Yet they are endorsed by the teacher’s union at Lakota and those members are very active on Facebook and other social media networks pushing for these two big spenders to be on the board so they can have easy access to that $100 million. Its like a bank robbery being planned through an election. The money is sitting there in the vault and the union plans to break into that safe to take it by electing union insiders onto the board and taking away fiscal conservatives like Lynda out of their way with a simple vote. It’s an off-year election so voter turnout will be typically low. The union members and their families will show up to vote for the pillaging of that surplus so that is what is at stake in this election, theft, or protection of that $100 million surplus.

It was in that video which I referred to earlier in another article that Ray Murray had said that it would take 38 years to spend that much surplus money, so to his mind, why not spend it and give it to people who need it. He was speaking just like a bank robber in the Old West preparing to loot a town for the plights of the poor and downtrodden. Only I’m not so sure that Ray Murray is the good pastor of a church that he says he is. Without question Ray is a likeable guy full of charisma, but so are a lot of bank robbers and other types of villains. If they can get something out of you without things getting messy, of course its better for them, and I would contend that is precisely what Ray is up to. I don’t think he’s as stupid as he’s acting in that video. If he and Julie get on the school board together, they will give that surplus money to the teacher’s union that has endorsed them and we’ll have another very contentious school levy in 2022 which is not that far off.

Of course, we have a choice at this point, we could elect James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, (both of them) to get a third conservative vote on the school board to protect that money. It would be like hiring extra security at the bank so that looters couldn’t rob the money. Jim doesn’t need to know much as a first-time board member, he just needs to understand money, which he does. The debate itself didn’t go too far into these issues because it wasn’t meant to. It was a nice surface community thing that was meant to be a softball game so to be in the realm of Ray and Julie’s comfort zone. Conservatives never look as good in those types of debates because they tend to talk over the heads of common voters. The details of such large budgets require smart people and both Lynda and James are, but such a debate format doesn’t want to show how smart people are, only how compassionate, giving, and likeable they can be which feeds straight into the union narrative for their looting scheme.

It was a nice event, the debate, but I did notice something that was unusual about those types of events, before the narrative went down the rabbit hole on transgender bathrooms, guns on teachers—or rather the lack of them, and how we would never spend that $100 million surplus in 38 years. At the beginning of the debate there was no pledge of allegiance to the flag. I’ve been going to these kinds of events for many years and there is always some sort of acknowledgment to the flag of the United States. But not this time. Lynda and Jim are trying to bring to the board of education a conservative presence to protect the budget surplus that we currently have at Lakota. And they are also trying to create a friendlier business climate to steer away from the extortion tactics of the past by Lakota against potential investors. And they are both flag waving Americans. But as the board is now, Lynda is outvoted 3 to 2 and Lakota like all public schools is controlled by the very progressive America hating teacher unions. And the evidence was clear in that debate by the absence of the pledge of allegiance. Thieves don’t honor the structure of the bank of the investors. They just want to rob it and to use the money for their own efforts. And that is what the teacher’s union at Lakota wants to do with Ray and Julie, elect them so that the surplus will fall into the hands of the robbers. And to hell with the American flag, and the conservatives of Butler County who live in the Lakota district. They are counting on everyone staying home on election night so that they can sneak into that bank and take that $100 million without firing a metaphorical shot and enriching themselves in the process at all of our expense.

The question is, will you let them?

Rich Hoffman

The Timid Lakota School Board Candidates, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray: Being a cop doesn’t automatically make a person an expert on courage

With a big school board candidate election coming up this year at Lakota in southwest Ohio the differences are quite obvious between them. Of the topics most talked about at a recent Meet the Candidates evening at the VOA Miami University Lecture Hall on October 22nd 2018 the topic of arming the teachers to prevent another mass shooting, especially at a large, affluent school like Lakota, and the various ways of looking at that problem was very well defined. Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn had the obvious conservative approach to things, self-reliance, and solution-based results at the point of danger whereas Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer were obvious liberals who believe in big government, passivity, and some kind of prayer to avert danger. Of them Ray had the most ridiculous answer to the question of arming teachers in the classroom, although Julie Shaffer wasn’t far behind with her 22% of shooters hit their targets under duress. Well, that’s 22% better than not having a gun. What a lunatic. But her thinking was very much captured in Ray’s statement which can be seen below, and it took everything I had to sit there and listen respectfully.

I get tired of people like Ray, people who are obviously timid peaceful people lecture the rest of us how society should be constructed to their sensibilities, then selling it as if being a police officer at some point in time gives him the right to say such a thing. As he told his story about wanting to dig into the concrete to get away from a firefight when he was a cop in Chicago all I could think of was the word “wimp.” Now that’s not a politically correct term, but lets face it, that’s what we all thought of it and if we didn’t, we would call ourselves liberals, people who count on some institutional system to avert our fears about the things in life that scare us. Just because Ray was a cop doesn’t make him some magical man of authority on the subject. Lots of people become cops for all the right reasons, and when they get shot at, they learn perhaps that the job is not for them. It can be scary, but for some people, being shot at is exhilarating and they are the best that they can be when danger is presented. I’m sure we have those types of people working at Lakota and it is they who should be carrying a gun. If Ray is too scared, well that’s fine. We don’t want him digging into the hallways of Lakota if there is a firefight. We want someone to engage the target, so I get it, Ray and Julie are not the people we want armed. But when a bad guy shows up, somebody needs to meet them while we wait for the police to arrive, because the body count will be measured in seconds of engagement, not minutes.

Speaking for myself I am an adrenaline junkie. I have been shot at and had guns pointed at me, many, many times. I am a little too crazy for the structure of the military or the police force but unlike the institutional perspective of Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer there are other ways that people get shot at in life. For a time, I was a repo man during the years that a lot of people go to the military repossessing cars from deadbeat owners who often become violent when they learned you were there to take their property away. I volunteered for every assignment I could because I thought it was exciting and when gunfire did break out, I thought it was pure heaven. Being that close to a dangerous situation was fun to me and I couldn’t get enough of it. I was also a bouncer at a night spot I worked at around the same period of my life. I wasn’t yet 21 years of age, yet I was throwing out drunks, breaking up fights, and taking fights to safe places with people much older and bigger than me. And in those fights guns came out all the time and I never thought twice about crying about it or digging into the pavement while bullets flew around. I’ve seen people get shot, and I’ve seen people die. And all that occurred in the private sector. I once knew a judge of very high rank in the city of Sharonville and when I got into trouble, he helped me out. It was a good arrangement and I learned a lot from it. But why did he help me, well, people who love danger as much as I did, and still do are hard to find. And he appreciated that trait and thought it valuable enough to cut me some slack when things did go wrong. Let’s just say that.

I tell that little bit of the story to say that some people love danger and they want to help others get away from it. And we need to empower those people to stop crimes before they happen. It’s better to have someone smashed up and in the hospital sometimes than to play everything safe and leave the problem to the institutions where some pot smoking loser kid who knows they are going nowhere in life decides to go shoot up a school. By the time Ray and Julie’s police arrive, 5 to 20 kids could be killed, because that is the kind of world we are living in. And you’d be surprised at the kind of people who hear a gun shot and will run straight through the bullets to stop the carnage because they have a natural inclination to do well while in danger.

I thought hard about becoming a cop, or joining the special forces in the military, but honestly, I was never a yes sir no sir kind of guy. I don’t like the structure of those organizations, so I didn’t join, even for the ability to carry a gun and shoot down bad guys. It was tempting, but it wasn’t worth enduring all the silly rules. But don’t assume that being a cop makes someone an expert on gunfights. Personally, I’d love to be in a gun fight, every day if I could. So, Ray is speaking from an experience of a guy naturally timid, and that’s OK. But don’t assume you speak for everyone.

Just a rough bet, but I would say that at least 5% of the employees at Lakota have some bit of the adrenaline addiction that I described about myself. When danger happens, they only think of one thing, engaging it and stopping it. They don’t pay attention to the sounds of the gun fire; they are instead inspired like a fine symphony to conduct their lives to the beat of danger. And if not for those types of people, we would have a much more dangerous type of world in America. I would argue that suppressing those types of people with institutional constrictions has led to far more death than in allowing adrenaline junkies who love justice for all to carry open firearms to engage any potential targets in fractions of seconds than the time it takes to make a 911 call. And that again is proof of how ridiculous Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray have been as school board members. They make decisions based on their timid perspectives while the real solutions are handcuffed behind institutional virtue. To assume that everyone in the world is just as timid as they are is more dangerous than arming teachers. And that is what nobody is putting into perspective, that is, perhaps until now.

Rich Hoffman

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Vote for O’Connor and Hahn to Lakota School Board: It isn’t about being nice, its about being effective

The value to a person like me of the Lakota school system is in how little they take from the community to offer their free baby-sitting service. I think we are in a time where the college myth is no longer relevant, that we understand the cost of a liberalized education is very detrimental to young minds. But a lot of parents could care less, they just need somewhere to park their kids for the day while they do whatever they do. And if there are sports programs, they can play the lottery with their children by hoping that they may get a scholarship to a college and save them some money. That’s my opinion of the public education system which might be bleak to many, but its my observation that, that is the essence of it, so in my view, it needs to cost the least possible. The real figures that make up a good community are the businesses that create the desire to move into an area. The school that happens to be there benefits from the quality of people who are drawn to the businesses of a region. It’s a really broken system that measures all the wrong values, so while we all figure out the future of public education, we need a bridge from here to there that has smart people managing the resources so we don’t end up with the kind of mess that we have had at Lakota during the last decade.

At the recent VOA Miami University Meet the Candidate night which took place on October 22nd, 2019 I attended to provide coverage for those who couldn’t be there, and video of the event is provided here. I see this work as a kind of public service. Feel free to watch the videos and make your decisions on the candidates. For me the unquestionable choice for school board in this upcoming election is James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor. Lynda has been around for a while and knows how to manage the board and keep Lakota in a win column so that they don’t scare off potential investors into real estate as a deal breaker. I don’t think Lakota is a lure, not in the way public school used to be. Other factors certainly are a greater part of the decision-making process. And that’s where James Hahn comes into play. He’s a business guy and would provide Lynda and the current board member Todd Parnell with that critical third vote to keep the district running well with the massive amount of money that we do give them.

Much of the talk from that debate night was what to do with the massive $100 million surplus that Lakota is operating under. I filmed many of the questions and answers but was out of the room away from the camera when Ray Murray proclaimed that it would take Lakota 37 years to spend all that money, which was astonishing. I’m sure somebody in the room filmed that comment. But the gist of the night was that Ray and Julie Shaffer were nice people who just didn’t have a clue how to operate in this tightly controlled Lakota district where business owners have actually stood up for themselves against the extortion tactics that public schools often use to get more money in their pockets so they can throw it at the teacher’s union. Looming in the room around that event were many of them from Liberty Township and West Chester. Sure, everyone shakes hands at the end of those things and gets along, professionally. But the resentment of the game is a clear dividing line and since much has been said over the last decade about the negative ways Lakota has interacted with that part of the community, it is clear that the skills needed are well beyond Ray and Julie.

What’s different now as opposed to even a few years ago is that “just pay more money for the kids” isn’t enough any more for public schools, and at Lakota that is especially true. There are lots of psychological problems that make people do what they do, and as I often refer to strong supporters of government schools as rapid animals with their minds soaked into delusion as to what the school can actually do for their children, what everything eventually comes down to is money. Lakota has plenty of money that they are taking in. The question is, what happens to it? Without a pro-business school board who knows how to read a balance sheet, that $100 million surplus will be wasted on everything and the board will come back to the community asking for more money in a few short years.

Nobody wanted to talk about a school levy, obviously I was there for everyone to see, and many members of the old No Lakota Levy campaign were in the audience also very visible. Without question that changed the course of the dialogue a lot from pro levy discussions which of course the teachers and administrators always want to hear and centered on more fiscal responsibility which seemed like an oblivious concept to Ray. I am still astonished about some of the things he said during the debate. He may be a nice guy that is very likable but being likable isn’t a qualification unless the job is a Wal-Mart greeter. When we are talking about budgets ranging in the millions and millions of dollars, many times you want someone managing it who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about being liked. Quite the opposite.

Lynda O’Connor has come a long way in her years on the school board. I’ve always liked her but, in the beginning, I thought of her as another idealist who was pro education and would work the Republican ranks because of the regional consequences. But she has certainly proven to me that she is sincerely conservative. She also has a lot of hope in what can be done with public education and so long as we have that as the means of educating kids, she is the right kind of person for a job like the school board. James Hahn is new to all this, and that is great too. So long as he can learn from Lynda, his business experience will be a big help in keeping the business community close and part of solutions. The other two, experienced board members and part of what was the problem originally would be a disastrous pick.

Let’s face it, without opposition Lakota would not have that $100 million surplus. It wasn’t some miracle trick in accounting. Lakota has a good treasurer, much better than who was there before her. And I think the new superintendent is a good one. I’m sure he’d like more freedom to promote the brand of Lakota as more the center of the community than what it is. I don’t think its bad at all to be part of that anger. I see it as healthy. Nobody wants to read one more boring newspaper article about these topics from boring, fossilized reporters. They enjoy my work for sure, and I think giving it to them with an animated zeal is good for the decision-making process. Public school is a boring topic for those who have their kids all grown up and have moved away. They certainly don’t want their taxes to go up. They just want to enjoy their community, their jobs and a nice place to shop and go out to dinner on a Friday night. They don’t want to hear that Lakota has blown their $100 million surplus and is asking for more money because the school board mismanaged it. To avoid that fate, vote for O’Connor and Hahn. And make sure Lakota knows you are watching them. Because the moment you don’t, that money and much more will be spent, and we’ll have another levy. You can bet on that.

Rich Hoffman

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