Category: Yes Lakota

Julie Shaffer’s Facebook: My response to the salacious Enquirer article

It’s true; when I was with No Lakota Levy we did approach Patti Alderson at the Community Foundation to partnership with them to attempt to heal the community. We had a plan to give substantial amounts of money to help kids and the community as a whole, but within a week of making the announcement public, Patti decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea and pulled away from the community unifying idea. Disappointed our guys went to work to begin our own foundation to be able to help the community in some way.

(To review this story as it personaly affected me CLICK HERE.)

The maneuver to me appeared to be completely motivated by community politics. Word from within the Lakota front who inform me of many things, let me know that a group that fights tax levies cannot be seen helping children, because to their minds the only thing that can help children was passing tax increases. Now, my opinion of Patti is that she does a lot of good in the community for what I see, but she stuck her name on my personal situation, and since her name appeared in probably the most salacious article the Cincinnati Enquirer has ever produced, I have to address her involvement and what led up to the demise of something that was intended to be very good.  (You can review that article here)

Shortly after this collapse of the No Lakota Levy reaching out to help heal the community while the levy fights continue I attended one of the large school board meetings at Lakota East and was shocked at the amount of parents who urged the board to attempt to pass yet another levy for the fourth time, instead of asking the union to take a 5% wage cut to balance the budget. I reported my findings at this article, CLICK HERE.

The more I thought about the situation, the refusal of the pro levy people to work with the anti levy people for the good of the community, and the push by a handful of parents to advance another tax increase on a community that already has high taxes, the short sightedness of it all stirred me into a rage. While all this was going on I was getting comments and messages along with information from my “feelers” within the school that I was anti child, anti education, and bad for the community in an effort to paint me negatively in front of their next campaign. Yet it was the group I was associated with that was reaching across the aisle to bring peace. And that peace was refused because the pro levy factions needed to maintain the public image that No Lakota Levy was a group bad for the community.  Because their message was that if you want to do “good” for the community then a new levy needed to be passed.

This blog site of Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom has become over time to be something like a newspaper that many people come to for information. Its numbers compete with small press newspapers daily, so I decided to take advantage of my site to stir the pot a bit and paint the picture of the situation as I saw it using a graphic metaphor. I didn’t hold back, for one, a blog site has an expectation to be a different news source than a traditional newspaper. So my readers like to see passion when I exhibit it, which was genuine. But I also wanted to see if I could smoke out some of these pro levy people who worked behind the scenes to make it so good things couldn’t happen, so the illusion that it was Lakota Schools who held all the cards in doing good things for the community could be exposed.

When I put up the controversial articles, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get much reaction from the pro levy people. I shrugged it off and moved on. Approximately two weeks later the No Lakota Levy group had our press conference announcing the new foundation to help kids and it felt good to do something positive. The press enjoyed it. But ironically, the pro levy people seemed to become infuriated in a way that I wouldn’t have guessed. You can see some of their comments about me personally here upon this announcement.  (CLICK HERE)  And as you can see when reading those things, people used far worse language than I did in the bit I wrote and it was personalized where my wasn’t.

Within three days of our big press conference, Julie Shaffer went to my articles and took out sections of them and put them on her Facebook as seen below. Keep in mind that Julie has worked on previous levy attempts and she is now a school board member. Her intention here is to fan the flames of her supporters obviously against me. I wanted to see her do this, but what is most telling is that she waited until I was involved in something very good to take the shot.

I didn’t get all the screen shots from the posting, but down the page a bit was Pam Parino urging Julie to send this information to her “friends” at WLW, which she apparently did. Pam is a long time levy activist; you can see how she attempted to extort WLW a few years ago at this link. Now I still get along with people at WLW, but I was surprised at how they turned on me during the broadcasts of March 15th 2012, especially considering how they chose to broadcast. But I was told by Scott Sloan that I am a public figure and that I couldn’t say these kinds of things even if similar statements were made on their very shows. I disagree. I may be a public figure, but I am not a public servant. I can say whatever I want and it’s up to me to decide if voters will reject or embrace it. Not any social standard. It’s my risk to take.

My feelers at Lakota told me that the superintendent was personally sending out links to Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to “community leaders.” My initial response was, “good, maybe they’ll learn something.” Then some of my friends asked me to take out some of the things I said which might affect the good work they were trying to do, which was fair enough, so I put the articles that might cause such trouble on password protect not to protect me, but to protect them. The entire time I saw no reason to not stand by my statements.

Within days the anger mounted and I was getting very heated messages like, “Rich Hoffman, you’re going down!” I knew the pro levy people were mounting an offensive, which I anticipated two weeks prior, so I wasn’t surprised. But once the Enquirer article came out, I was a bit surprised. It was way over the top and made me realize I should have just kept the article up so people could have seen the context of the metaphors I was using to describe the situation. Because the way that Mike Clark assembled his article painted me in such a bad way that there was no way to explain it without a tremendous back-story, which there wasn’t time for. I agreed to do the Scott Sloan show and I didn’t have a problem with the hard nature of that interview, but I was surprised at how he inflamed the situation after our interview, which again was fair play. Their ratings at my expense. When WLW called me later in the day to see if I would do a spot on Eddie and Tracy’s show I said no, because they had put me in a really bad position. Eddie and Tracy tried to call me out on the air knowing I almost said yes to the interview, so they attempted to push me over the edge to get me to come on. But they only had a piece of the story, and openly calling me a sexist all day long broke friendships that I felt for some of those guys, who have used worse language than I did on many occasions. So I elected not to blow my top on the air for 200,000 people to hear, and to calm down. Yet the blood was in the water, and I put it there to learn the lay of the battlefield. When I wrote that quote I wanted to see if Julie would take the bait, I wanted to see how Mantia would react, and who was in the pro levy network so I could figure out how to fight them. Because taking a passive approach wasn’t working. After three levy failures, it was still the minority who sought to impose on the majority their intentions for a levy increase and they had a network that was vast enough to prevent our work with an independent foundation headed by a powerful local personality in Patti Alderson. So I needed to see how these people were connected. When they thought they had me on the fence they emerged with bold words. Patty felt strongly enough about me to speak before the Lakota school board. She wanted to clarify that her group, which also raises money for needy Lakota students, has no affiliation with Yes to Lakota Kids. Alderson told the board audience of more than 200 people, that No Lakota officials had approached the foundation last month but that “we refused to accept their funds.” She said that with a pride that I found fascinating. She also said, “We refuse to accept funds where political statements are attached.” What she should have said is that she refuses to accept funds that had political statements that she didn’t agree with, because by endorsing the pro levy faction she is supporting the political position of the school, and not the entire community.

Out of all the terrible news that came from the Enquirer article the parts that actually made me laugh that day were from West Chester Township Trustee Catherine Stoker who said “the language used by Mr. Hoffman is not only egregiously offensive, but reflects badly on the No Lakota group that Mr. Hoffman supports.” So does that mean the No Lakota group had a good name before all this? If so, then why was our help turned down? And who in the world is Catherine Stoker? She’s a public servant. She should have shut her mouth and done some work instead of trying to grandstand on my head, which is what she was doing as a favor to Superintendent Mantia and the pro levy people. And who decides what’s egregiously offensive? Her? The pro levy people? Or these next two pretentious specimens.

Lakota school mother Kim Hesselgesser said “I was very disgusted by the blog Rich Hoffman posted.” I was also very saddened for this extremely disturbed man. To me it is evident that he has some agenda that goes far beyond increased school taxes. Although I hate the fact that he is getting exactly what he wants – a lot of media attention. I feel it is worthwhile to make the public aware of who they are truly supporting when placing No Lakota signs in their yards. Pro levy or no levy…is that the type of person you want leading a group in our community?” Well, Kim, if you don’t like my blog postings—don’t read them. You refuse to see what’s right in front of your face. You have no right to say that I’m an extremely disturbed man. You have no authority to speak from. You read one thing I said because Julie Shaffer put it in front of your face and you cast a judgment without any thought, just like you do when you support a school levy. If someone like Julie, or Catherine tells you to pass a levy because it’s for the kids, then you do what they tell you without further consideration. And that’s the problem. We will still be paying off the debts your type of people bring to our community decades in the future because you can’t get your mind around the truth. You just listen to what people tell you to do, and you make statements about which you know nothing. I’d respect your opinion if it was yours, but it’s not. You have no right to tell all of Cincinnati that I’m an extremely disturbed man. Based on what? Because I don’t agree with you? You made that comment as a fact, not an opinion, and I’m considering in the back of my mind of what to about it next. I’m waiting to calm down before acting. I can see such things being said in online forums, blogs, blog comments, but it surprised me that The Enquirer printed that quote. That’s very dangerous stuff and yes, I am deeply pissed off about it. If that’s what you wanted, then you succeeded.

And Laura Sanders who has personally emailed me with what I consider to be messages way outside her level of expertise and who I personally addressed at this link (CLICK HERE) said “Mr. Hoffman uses misogynistic and vile language when addressing women and mothers because most teachers are in fact, women and mothers. He wants the public to think that he is merely attempting to rein in public school spending, but his underlying mission is really one of hatred and fear of women earning decent salaries. He alone is the destructive force behind the last three levy failures, and I hope this … convinces the women in our community that he is not a rational or credible source for the counterpoint argument.” Laura—you are out of your mind to paint me in such a fashion. While I am certainly not one who supports feminism, mainly because I think it has destroyed the modern family, it does not give you the right to paint me with the broad brush of stating what I think and making the high salary issue all about hating women. That is a pathetic argument and I can’t believe you said it. Just like Kim you used generalities to explain aspects of me that you know nothing about. If you did just a little research you would know what my number 1 Rule is on my Ten Rules to Live By. You can see those rules for yourself at the bottom of every signature at the end of every post I make. The number one rule is to honor women, because they are the pillars of our society. I believe in it so much that I wrote a book about it, and I made boys who dated my daughters read that book so they’d know my position. Those Ten Rules to Live By are in the back of that book published in 2004! Everyone and I mean EVERYONE who knows me, particularly women, knows how much I love them. I have daughters, I have been married for over24 years to the same person, and I have a lot of women friends. I help women carry heavy objects—always! I hold the door for them when they come in behind me—always! In fact I do a lot every day that doesn’t even begin to articulate the kind of person you and your pro levy friends have attempted to paint me as. And for what, so you could try to destroy me, and get me out-of-the-way so you could have your money!!!!!!! IS THAT WHAT YOU THOUGHT GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO MAKE STUFF UP AND PUT IT IN THE PAPER ABOUT ME WHEN I’VE WENT TO GREAT TROUBLE TO BE OPEN HERE AND SHOW EXACTLY WHAT I AM! That’s what you have told the world through your actions!!!!!! You spoke about nothing of which you had an understanding. You smelled my blood in the water and you crossed the line with made up assumptions!

I had a conversation about you with a man the other day who attends your church. He told me you are just the sweetest girl there is and he tried to calm me down after that email that you sent me which I was still mad over a week after you sent it. I listened to him and took your actions as just political rhetoric and blew it off. But what you said in the paper was not just inflammatory, it was personal, and your type of people believe you have a right to step all over me to get what you want. My comments might have been audacious, but they were left obscure on purpose. I wanted badly to reveal the names I was thinking of when I wrote the salacious blog posting, but I didn’t because that would make it personal, and even if I want to bring my enemies down, that is not the way to do it. There is a difference between political rhetoric and personal attacks and what you, and your pro levy friends did to me on Thursday was a personal attack designed to hurt me in every single way possible, and I had planned for you to do it. But I was disappointed to be right once again. I will tell all of you something. There will be payment given to me in one fashion or another for what happened on Thursday. You can decide for yourselves what that is and I expect at a bare minimum a public apology. Failure to act will dictate action on my part.

This isn’t just about name calling anymore. I am happy to argue back and forth, and even debate on the radio as we have in the past in friendly competition. And when you make yourself a public official you make yourself prone to attacks. And when you work in a government job, you are prone to tax payer scrutiny. But I have made a choice to never be involved in an elected position because I want the freedom to be able to speak my thoughts, even when they are outlandish to get my point across, because sometimes that’s what it takes. But what the people mentioned in this article attempted to do was destroy me for standing in their way, and that WILL not be tolerated or left unresolved!

I stand by my comments that I posted. I wrote it as a metaphor to the type of woman who just don’t grasp fiscal concepts, and their opinions should therefore be discarded in political theater. I spoke in generalities to protect the real people I was thinking of even though I was very angry with them for desiring to drag our community through a fourth levy attempt. But what the women above did was turn me personally into the poster child for progressive politics to attempt to remove me the way they have for many years any barrier that stood in their path. If I had to guess, 80% of all legislation that gets discussed daily in any governmental body has it’s start with these same radical types who came after me so aggressively, so the same blind pro levy supporters who refuse to look at any facts and vote purely on emotion are the same who lobby members of the house and senate to pass all types of ungodly legislation, and pass more rules of every kind in every neighborhood across America. It’s these pro levy types who have made it so a kid can’t just go out and ride a bicycle anymore, but have to arm themselves from head to toe with padding and helmets. I see these radical progressive agenda driven pro levy supporters as being a huge problem on not just our communities but our human race, and I said what I said to call them out on it, to let them know that they aren’t fooling anyone—maybe themselves. I used a metaphor that was taken literally to use against me as a political maneuver which was fine, but everyone mentioned here took it several steps further and for all different reasons. Some of those reasons were strictly economic. Some were political. But mostly it was pure hatred for anyone who thinks different from the pretentious pro levy supporters. And these people felt they had a right to “destroy” me and everything I have ever been, or will be.

And it all started on Julie Shaffer’s Facebook. See what happens when you elect a levy activist onto your school board. And do you see now what kind of school board we have? She’s the Vice-President. What does that say about how wrong the entire situation is and what we have been fighting against? And since they can’t win the arguments against me with facts, they sought with every gun available to them to destroy the mouth piece.

It’s not Lakota as a school that I am fighting. The school will still be there if every employee were removed, and the kids would still be successful because the parents in general of Lakota, as I’ve said many times, will make sure it stays good. I’m fighting the radicalism that has embedded itself into our tax dollars. And to continue that fight, I have to do it my way using my network of Overmanwarrior’s to help get under the covers. This group has always been the force that supplied No Lakota Levy with information, so the attempt to separate me from No Lakota Levy was a lot of energy spent on nothing. I know there is a lot of disappointment because the assumption was that the members of No Lakota Levy were funding me, and if I were cut off from them, I’d be rudderless. But my funding comes from my professional writing endeavors and exemplified by my The Symposium of Justice where my Ten Rules are published.  I wouldn’t bring it up if my integrity had not come into question. It’s my personal projects that allow me to fight like this. That’s also why at the bottom of the book on the front cover it says, “Tyranny has a new enemy.” Did you just think it was silly words on the cover? I meant it literally! So nothing that happened Thursday was unforeseen. I knew what to expect. But my disappointment is in being right and to witness firsthand the destructive nature of my neighbors and the manipulation that can be employed to advance an agenda even if it costs lives.

And if you want to know who I am and what I believe, look at my Ten Rules to Live By. I don’t talk about my books during levy discussions because I don’t want to confuse any messages with the selling of books. So I just put the link out for those interested, and never mention it otherwise. But those are my beliefs and I live by those every single day. I should know them, because in this case—I wrote the book on the subject—so I know the material well. The person that I am and what these reckless characters described in this article tried to paint me as are not even close to the same thing.  The words used to describe me by these people mentioned here are as far from the truth as one could get.  They took small little bits of information because they didn’t want to work for the truth even though I placed it here for all to see.  They did with me what they do with the funding problems at Lakota, saw what they wanted to see and assassinated the characters of anyone who stood in the way of what they wanted. 

 Here are the rules I live by:

1. To honor women, they are the pillars of society.
2. Stand as an example of the highest moral order.
3. Avoid mental depletion such as intoxication, and ignorance.
4. Pursue learning like a person on fire pursues water.
5. Live with integrity, where values are in line with behavior.
6. Live the given life, not the dreams of others.
7. In a crisis handle everything calmly and without confusion.
8. Be capable of firmness in the heart.
9. Sorrow is everywhere, accept it with a smile.
10. Resist hiding in numbers, stand as an individual contributor.

And to add a bit to that, I consider telling the truth even if the names are ugly to be of the highest moral order. That’s why I stand behind my comments.  The truth does not live behind political correctness.  It lives in the facts.

 

To understand the truth it helps to view the world through Hoffman Lenses.  To understand what those are CLICK THE LINK.  If you can’t handle the truth, then don’t read here.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/socialists-live-hoffman-lenses-on-urban-meyer/

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
 

The Power of Guilt: What Rush Limbaugh and Rich Hoffman have in common

Below is the link to the article of which this post is dedicated. 

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2012/03/14/lakota-anti-levy-figure-whips-up-controversy-on-blog/

When Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown University student a prostitute on the air at the beginning of March it was several weeks after I had said similar things here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom about the type of people who attempt to make citizens who don’t want to vote for a school levy feel poor for not wanting to commit to further taxes. I didn’t mention anyone specifically, but alluded to a mentality that seemed to think applying peer pressure on their friends and neighbors in order to secure increases in school funding was appropriate.

Well my comments had been up for weeks, and clearly thousands of people saw them, and I personally didn’t think they were all that bad. But shortly after the Rush Limbaugh story shown below broke Julie Shaffer the new school board member and former tax levy advocate took sections of my comments and placed them on her Facebook page–and taken by themselves–without the context of the rest of the article, they sounded bad. So I put those articles on password protect so I could re-read them to see if there was any validity to the claims of my critics that they were harsh.

When I wrote them I was very angry, and tired of the criticism leveled directly at me saying that I “hated children” and that I was “greedy,” for fighting off the tax increase. So the text was more colorful than usual, but I still thought my critics were reaching, until I watched the news and saw where they got their idea from. Rush Limbaugh had just lost some of his radio sponsors and were protesting his show because of his comments and his enemies had him on the ropes. It became clear to me that the same type of progressive forces had just got in their heads to do the same to me.

The progressive mode of attack they use to protect their positions which cannot withstand scrutiny is to attack people like Rush Limbaugh whenever he says something they believe they can use against him in an emotional argument. Conservatives typically are terrible at playing this game with progressives because they tend to operate on a belief system rooted in the truth. So they can easily be attacked because if they cross the line, they feel bad about it, and that guilt is used against them to change their behavior in the future.

Locally I have seen this up close with the school levies. I have seen PTA groups work with principals of elementary schools to organize boycotts against businesses that have supported tax fighting efforts. The intent is not to allow all citizens of a community to vote their conscious, but to win votes, even if the method is arm twisting and extortion. Routinely those who oppose school tax increases are labeled as anti child, anti education, and anti community, and when citizens who do own businesses and are genuinely concerned about their taxes going up they are called selfish, greedy and destructive to the neighborhood if they oppose tax increases. The situation is so bad that there was even an effort to apply pressure to local businesses who opposed the levy by contacting the higher offices of some of those businesses to apply pressure on the business owners the next vote around. That is called “strong arming” the public and its wrong.

I have been categorized in all the ways above and more because I have been putting the focus of the real problem with school funding on the runaway costs associated with school salaries. The progressive political machine that functions behind the labor unions and is subscribed to by parents who just want their child to get what they perceive a good education have used boycotts, letter writing campaigns, and protests to apply pressure to anyone who opposes their plan. And that plan is to create budgets that always inflate and must be fed with higher taxes without opposition. It’s that plan that has made school boards only able to deal with 20% of their costs leaving 80% to be untouched which is ludicrous.

My approach to the levy fight has been to take on that 80% and I knew when I did this that the progressive machine would be very angry with me. But if the solution is ever to be fixed in public education, then the 80% of the costs must be tackled rationally. And this has made me public enemy number one in my community as far as those who support progressive politics are concerned.

Going into this fourth levy fight I have been reading the online boards and studying what has been said about me so I can get an idea of how to plan for the next levy attempt. The trouble is there are never any real names behind many online forums. It’s difficult to tell who is doing what and to trace back what’s behind them. So one tactic in discovering who your enemies are, and what they are planning to do is to provoke them to do it when you control the circumstances, instead of waiting till they decide to attack. So on occasion I will install dialogue at this site to provoke a reaction so I can study the behavior.

As predicted the forces who oppose me sought to take my words and use them in the same fashion that the progressive left did against Rush Limbaugh. It started with a school board member posting it on her Facebook account. Then it migrated into many of her supporters wanting to picket my house, wanting to run me out of the community, and wishing to declare that I was a threat to their safety. All these inflammatory comments were on the tips of their tongue and were prepped for the next campaign attempt. They then went to the next step of contacting anyone who might support me and put pressure on them to withdrawal from me, because I was not to be trusted, I was inflammatory, and a right-winged-nut job—to use their words. Then they contacted the papers to drum up articles about what a menace to the community I am, and they took excerpts of my words and are planning letter writing campaigns to our local paper to expose me. Of course their hope was to isolate me of my support in the community, by painting me as a radical.

From the inside and outside at Lakota I have learned that the superintendent has been sending links to this site hoping to turn the community against me. (I wonder if she has been doing this during company time.) But what she doesn’t know is that was my intention all along.

When you are fighting against forces who believe that boycotts, intimidation, peer pressure, and the dismantling of a school system to protect wages and benefits are good behavior, then equal force must be used against them, which is what I’ve done. But unlike Rush Limbaugh and other conservative and libertarian activists I don’t feel I should apologize. When I am told that I hate children, I take that very personal. It is one of the worst names anyone could call me. I consider it a very low blow, and I do not have any reservations of turning the tide against those name callers, especially when I need to identify the behavior patterns of those who are plotting for another tax hike. Now that I have seen that behavior I can adjust, and with the increased traffic coming to this site, those eyes will see the articles that those same angry activists hoped to avoid, such as the sex story at Lakota involving the teacher and the parent using the child as a vehicle, or the Laura Kursman $90,000 payout, or the fat double-dipping contract of the current superintendent.

Because the other side has dictated that using inflammatory rhetoric is the way they have chosen to play the game, I will oblige them with heavy doses of it in return. And I will use those words as a marketing device to bring people to the truth, so their eyes can see for themselves what our community is fighting for. You can’t fight a radical with a smile on your face and a polite nod. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. You have to fight them the way they fight, and you have to be better at it than they are. Because in order for any community to survive, the radicals must be removed from games of extortion and peer pressure to cover up bad business practice. And this is the task that is before us.

Rush Limbaugh is using inflammatory speech to generate ratings for his radio show. I’m using it to bring people to the truth, not the same old people who read here every day, but I want the people from the other side of the aisle to join our levy fighting efforts. So I fanned the flames a bit to attract attention and bring people to the information that they may have been avoiding, because the truth is there for all to see. But they have to be willing to act on what they see, and not allow extortion methods to hijack their senses. The truth is more important to me than my public reputation, more important then having friends or supporters, or even having people wave hello to me at the grocery store. I’d rather get things out in the open so we can fix the problem instead of just throwing money at it to bury our community ten years down the road in debt beyond repair. The time to fix it is right here, and right now, and if some toes get stepped on and feelings get hurt in the process, then so be it.

I’m not interested in protecting the employees of a school system; I am interesting in protecting the community and the kids who are products of that community. Everything else must form itself to those two entities without compromise.

To those who wish to categorize me as a right leaning radical or Tea Party activists, the truth is that I’m a Transcendentalist in the purest form of the word.  Just to clear the air. 

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
 

 
 

Protected: The Land of Illusion: Tears that fall late in the evening

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Lakota Superintendent Mantia: The employement contract

My anger at Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District is not some unwarranted diatribe incited by a simple disagreement. There is a history which is shown at the beginning and ending of this article where I gave two public presentations, one for Educate Ohio in June of 2011 and again for the West Chester Tea Party in October of 2011 shortly before the election. One of the reasons the pro levy people think my arguments are combative, vitriolic and harsh are because they typically only speak with people of their own kind. They do not associate often with the 18,000 people who voted against the tax hikes, so are ignorant as to how the other side thinks, and they make no attempt to understand. This is why both groups that I spoke to about Superintendent Mantia and my high hopes that she would get the Lakota budget under control were greater in number than those who attend the typical school board meeting. We have a lot of supporters in the No More Tax Effort. If more levies passed in this recent election it is not because people support those schools, it’s that the schools wore out the resistance, which is by design. The message the schools send is that if a levy does not pass, it will be back. So resistance yields to the oppressive tactics of union controlled public schools.

For those levy supporters who think I’m some lone wolf who simply doesn’t want to pay taxes because I can’t afford it, keep indulging in that fantasy as you stay in your little circles of pro levy supporters thinking that you are good because you don’t know how to say NO. No Lakota Levy as an organization and our supporters are deep, and active, as you can see in my public presentations over education. In my presentations I defended Mantia hoping that she would do as those of us in No Lakota Levy do routinely, and that is make hard decisions to balance our budgets. And I feel like she made me look bad for giving her the benefit of the doubt. In fact, every core member of No Lakota Levy has had to work with budgets in the millions of dollars, had to fire, hire or ask employees for wage freezes or reductions, and have had to spend many sleepless nights rolling around over those decisions. That is why we have no sympathy for Superintendent Mantia. She has turned out to be not what she sold to the community, and we are disappointed—me specifically. Residents from Pickerington warned me how Mantia was, and they were right.

I know the tricks of school superintendents. I know what they learn in Levy University in Columbus because I’ve read the same books and material they have. I got this material from my friends who are current school board members and have attended this class. My information also comes from former school board members who want to blow the whistle on the corruption that goes on in public education. The tricks are standard for every school and are designed by the Ohio School Board Association and the Ohio Education Association to extort from the public using Saul Alinsky’s methods of consensus, money if communities refuse to increase taxes on themselves. Those methods include, cutting busing to increase the burden on parents and force them to pass a levy. If that doesn’t work, schools take away liberal arts electives. If that doesn’t work they make sports pay-for-play. And if that doesn’t work they lay-off teachers at the bottom of the seniority ladder to scare parents into a declining school district and plummeting property values. These methods are used in every single school in the entire state of Ohio because they all share a connection to the OSBA in Columbus.

Another OSBA strategy is to form good relationships with realtors in a community so that home sales will be directly connected to school levy support. That’s why Joan Powell, former president of the Lakota School Board and current board member is so involved at Lakota—her full time job is that of a realtor. And one of Lakota’s biggest pro levy supporters is another realtor, Pam Perrino. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW HER INVOLVEMENT AGAINST MY GROUP. This is all by design at the Ohio School Board Association (OSBA). It’s a system designed to stack the schools and labor unions against the community. Both of those women will tell you they do what they do because it’s in their heart to do so, but they were brought into the circle of power because of their status as realtors. They may not be aware of it because they are only looking at their small piece of the pie, but they are part of the overall strategy, and they play their roles in levy advancement as expected.

And this is the reason for the disappointment in Superintendent Mantia. No Lakota Levy thought that Mantia should have proposed a wage reduction to the school employees in order to sustain the district far into the future. That way everything the public expects from the school could have still been maintained, busing, sports, electives and so on. But Mantia chose to preserve the system designed by the OSBA and imposed hardship on the residents just as the OSBA teaches at Levy University. In fact, she followed the text-book of levy passage taught at Levy University word for word. And this is simply unacceptable.

So this is the reason for the anger. We are not a stupid group of people at No Lakota Levy. In fact, we’ve seen it all, done it all, and could perform many of the decisions we are asking Mantia to make in our sleep without breaking a sweat. The solutions are so obvious and so easy that it doesn’t even require thought. But Superintendent Mantia is taking up a quarter million dollars in compensation from the district’s tax payers and she has not done the job we expected. She instead stood up for the teachers union that she started in as a teacher herself, and she knows as a double-dipper that she would never receive such a high salary with such poor performance in any other occupation but school superintendent. She is standing up for the system that has made her wealthy by employing these extortion measures taken straight out of the OSBA Levy University Class given every November the week after elections in Columbus, Ohio.

So I’m putting up the contract for Superintendent Mantia here for the residents of Ohio to see, so they can see what a juicy deal she has—a deal she would get no place else in any field of work. If Superintendent Mantia were in the private sector she would not stay employed for a single week making the level of income she currently is. I wouldn’t mind paying for a token superintendent job if it wasn’t filled with so many perks and loaded as if she were a celebrity on a Hollywood film; it deserves close scrutiny from a public that must fund her lifestyle for performance that is lackluster in only 6 months of employment. I would encourage you dear reader to watch these videos completely, especially the radio broadcast, and read this contract. If you are interested in understanding the scoop of the problem, you can at least do that much. I’m making it easy for you.

Use the tools I’ve placed before you! This is a very serious problem that is much larger than just passing a tax increase or not.

This will determine the kind of world we chose to live in for the foreseeable future.

Now, to be fair, I had several friends who attended the school board meeting on Thursday, March 9th, and below is the report from one of them to me from that event, which does involve Superintendent Mantia.  Her response is one that I believe a person of her caliber should be able to handle over the position of a lawyer, because lawyers are in the pocket of the unions.   With the kind of contract Mantia has, I expect her to be smarter than the lawyers.  They make a lot less than she does.  But here is the final word as spoken from her mouth to my friend.

At 10:50 I stood and asked why they DIDN’T DO ANY CUTTING ANYWHERE and simply lowered salaries and benefits until they were BELOW the budget?
After the four of us who stayed to ask questions at the close of the evening were finished, Karen Mantia answered my suggestion.
 
She took about 15 minutes and said that solution had been considered, but she was warned by the lawyers that it was illegal and therefore OFF the table.
They are going to chop the Hell out of the Lakota School District to meet the budget.
SIMPLY lowering salaries is OFF THE TABLE, when the alternate is to virtually destroy the school system in Lakota?

Ms. Mantia said she and the Board DID NOT HAVE THE POWER to lower salaries and benefits.

She said WE had that power, referring to the NO Lakota Levy Group.

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):

www.Yes-to-Lakota-Kids.org

Yes to Lakota Kids & NO to Lakota Levies

Protected: Yes to Lakota Kids: The press conference timeline

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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):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Butler County Workplace Freedom Coordinator Rich Hoffman: Apply now, make money and save the world

There are two primary reasons I accepted the position of Butler County Coordinator for Workplace Freedom. First, with my work at No Lakota Levy, and realization that the union labor in our public schools–specifically Lakota–do not have the will to balance their budget, and will seek perpetual tax increases to meet the demands of their labor force, the public education monopoly must be eliminated to stop the madness of tax increases every 3 to 4 years. That monopoly must end if education costs are ever to be brought down. So I plan to help get the signatures for an amendment to the Ohio Constitution that will allow a state-wide vote in 2013 to make union membership a freedom of choice rather than a requirement under force as the system currently entails under teaching contracts. At Lakota the current contract is up in 2014, so that would allow teachers under that contract to opt out of their union involvement and help Lakota balance their budget. My work as Butler County Coordinator is a natural extension to my mission at No Lakota Levy. The second reason is that during my work on the Issue 2 campaign in 2012, I learned that there were a lot of teachers and other public employees who wished to be removed from union membership requirements and forced due payments. Since Issue 2 was repealed, these employees need to have the ability to at least have the freedom of choice, and this amendment will give it to them. It will not end unions, but it will give freedom of choice to a system that does not currently have it.

The wording of this amendment change with a target date of 2013 is as follows;

Title: To guarantee the freedom of Ohioans to choose whether to participate in a labor organization as a condition of employment

SUMMARY

To add Section 22 to Article I of the Constitution of the State of Ohio

The proposed amendment would provide that, in Ohio:

1. No law, rule, agreement, or arrangement shall require any person or employer to become or remain a member of a labor organization.

2. No law, rule, agreement, or arrangement shall require, directly or indirectly, as a condition of employment, any person or employer, to pay or transfer any dues, fees, assessments, other charges of any kind, or anything else of value, to a labor organization, or third party in lieu of the labor organization.

3. Any person, directly or indirectly affected or threatened with any harm by a violation of this section, may bring a civil or equitable action to enforce this section, and upon prevailing, shall be entitled to injunctive relief, reasonable attorney fees, costs, and other damages.

The proposed law would not:

1. Prevent any person from voluntarily belonging to or providing support to a labor organization.
2. Apply to agreements entered into or renewed prior to the enactment of this section.
3. Conflict with federal law or apply to federal employees.

To implement this public vote, which appears even at this early stage to have major support from all Ohioans of all demographic groups and party affiliation we will of course need to collect thousands upon thousands of signatures which could take us the rest of the year. Many of us who watched how the unions repealed Issue 2 gawked at the way the union machine was able to twist the arm of their members to gather so many signatures and put the repeal effort on the ballot. So we learned from them, and implementing our own signature collecting push have decided to pay employees to gather up these signatures. We are a tired group and we must get back on the horse and start now if we want to meet the timeline discussed. So as Butler County Coordinator I will be paying employees for those signatures. And the pay is quite good.

Working for me in collecting signatures, it would be a great opportunity to make extra money as a second job. It would be wonderful for young people who want the political experience and relatively easy money since this issue is one that most people agree with. This issue is not as contentious as Issue 2 or other political initiatives were, this one is all about freedom, which is something all Americans can get their minds around. So collecting the signatures won’t be very difficult, it’s just a matter of doing the footwork.

I am taking applications at the link below. If you want to work for me, fill out that application, I only need the primary information. I’m not particularly interested in a detailed work history. I just need the basics.

Apply here:
http://www.conservativejobsohio.com/

I would especially encourage those who are fighting tax hikes in your schools, principally Fairfield, Talawanda, Ross, Edgewood, Monroe, and especially Lakota to help out with this. This is your end game; this is the light at the end of the tunnel. If you can end the union monopoly in these public schools, you can bring an end to the levy requests every couple of years. If you were already willing to distribute information to fight a tax, and have went door to door in those campaigns, this is a lot easier, and I’ll pay you! Instead of trying to stop a tax initiative by the unions only to have them come back with a new tax hike six months after a defeat; this amendment is the step in the direction of ending that maddening process once and for all.

To learn more about the group I’m working with you can visit them at the link below. You can still help and do everything I spoke about above no matter where you live. We have coordinators in most counties across Ohio and you can find them at this link, so this isn’t just for Butler County. But if you want to work for me directly, you’ll need to be able to collect signatures for Butler County.

http://ohioansforworkerfreedom.com/

For those who are interested, you can contact me here, or at the contact info at my home site of www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com where I can get into more detail, talk about the lucrative pay structure and answer any questions that I couldn’t cover here. If you’d like me to come and speak to your group, your Tea Party, your gun clubs, your YMCA organizations, whatever the gathering, just give me a buzz. I don’t want to fight tax increases in my schools for the rest of my life, and I’m sure you don’t either. This is the ultimate solution of freedom and fairness that is lacking in the current system and it needs to happen by 2014, so we need to start now.

Below are a couple of training videos to make things easier that were used to collect signatures for The Health Care Freedom Amendment that was successful in 2011. We are approaching this signature gathering in the same manner. So the information is still valid for this endeavor.

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):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

The Ghosts of Lakota: Fear, and illusion from Superintendent Mantia

I woke up on the morning of February 24, 2012 with the note you can see below. It’s from a parent in the Pickerington School district who has been watching the actions of Superintendent Mantia here in Southern Ohio. This parent is uniquely positioned to give a statement about Mantia because Pickerington is the school district that the current Lakota superintendent came from in August of 2011. It read as follows:

I’m a parent of students from Pickerington and let me tell you that Dr. Mantia will ruin your schools. She removed almost all music, art, phys ed teachers and librarians. Our libraries used the most current media material and the students loved library where they learned to use podcasts, they wrote book reviews and they had the greatest book clubs. The students loved to read because of the fantastic librarians. They are gone. She has combined music, art and gym together. They currently meet as a group at a school every 6-9 weeks. That means that they only receive physical activity for one week and it isn’t intense activity either.

She took a pay raise one month before she left after resigning. Please watch her and her agenda for the sake of your students, teachers, support staff and your wallet.

As my readers here know, I declared the Lakota School District officially dead after the February 13, 2012 meeting, so I saw no point in going to this latest meeting. It was as predicted more of the same strategy of protecting the wages of the school employees with the smoke and mirrors of fancy terminology that essentially meant nothing. The concession by the Lakota School System to retreat backward as a district with these three public school board meetings instead of restructuring their very expensive labor contracts is deplorable. With this third budget cutting school board meeting, the No Lakota Levy has officially begun the campaign to end this fourth levy attempt which appears to already be underway on behalf of the school board decisions. No Lakota Levy will soon announce a major initiative in reaction to these decisions by the school board. I am done with Lakota as a governing body. I officially cast my vote of no confidence in their direction.

Lakota under the leadership of Superintendent Mantia from Pickerington elected to eliminate 36 more jobs centering on art, music, and physical education, which is consistent with the behavior indicated above by the note from the parent. This is in addition to the 69 positions cut from last weeks meeting that caused me to regulate my opinion as a nail in the coffin to the Lakota educational body as a whole.

During the meeting last night several people were texting me and asking what I was doing, and why I wasn’t there. I told them that I was watching the DVR backups of Ghost Hunters, and my TV show was more important. I said that I thought the ghosts walking around on that TV show were more real than the ghosts walking around at the Lakota School Board meeting on stage, because both were just as effective as managers. In the TV show the ghosts make noise by banging on doors and sending out cryptic EVP recordings. The Lakota School Board does the same; they make a lot of noise with a stupid program named S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) while at the same time cutting those programs with staffing and as Jeff Kursman said at the meeting,

“These aren’t efficiencies, these are reductions. Efficiencies will include things that hopefully we’ll hear about in the next week or two. Things like outsourcing of technology when it comes with dealing with the central office, cutting back on central office administrators…centralizing purchasing or negotiating a better rate in health care. What I see you talking about here today is a degradation of liberal arts education.”

All that was occurring at the school board meeting was a bunch of ghosts making noise to a captive audience. Just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters the ghosts are powerless to do anything in real life because they are in fact dead. The school board is powerless to do anything but scare people, just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters. So I see no difference between the school board meeting and an episode of Ghost Hunters. With that in mind I stayed home in the comfort of my home and watched the ghosts on TV rather than waste my time at the school board meeting.

I’m happy to see the comments from Jeff Kursman and others who are now beginning to question the merit of this entire money scheming operation known as the Lakota School System. The key to meeting a balanced budget is to reduce the cost of the services, and that is to drive down the labor costs. Cutting a few teachers here and there is only a band-aid to the situation. Only by making across the board cuts to the 80% of the $160 million dollar budget can the Lakota School System meet its budget supplied generously by the community. Anything less than a contract restructuring with the Lakota labor force will be sufficient.

Karen Mantia has brought with her to the Lakota School System a strategy used at her last job of Pickerington to diminish the quality of the district in order to force parents to pass a tax increase to sustain their inflated union contracts. And to execute that objective she and the school board are willing to destroy everything that is good about Lakota to protect the wages of their union allies. That’s what these ghosts of Lakota were doing, and why I’m not interested in anything they have to say any longer. Instead, the No Lakota Levy will be shifting gears to approach our tax fighting methods without the assumption that Lakota will see the light and come to their senses by listing to our arguments. Now, we must assume that they are not even relevant, and we must find ways to remove their impact from destroying our community in an extortion ring that is evidently well underway. If this fight for more taxes were for the kids truly, then these ghosts of Lakota would not use the kids by stealing from the community’s $160 million dollar budget and take away programs while protecting employee incomes at the expense of the children.

So for now on, I will treat these employees like the ghosts they are, as irrelevant to the land of the living, and powerless to us all if they are robbed of their ability to invoke fear. Because as far as usefulness, they are lacking completely in any ability required in the real world, and are truly manifestations from the land of the dead.

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):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Firebombs at the Agnostics: The public education fantasy

I have heard the criticisms coming from the pro levy people already who proclaim that it is easy to cast dispersions from the sideline as opposed to jumping in and helping to solve problems. These critics of course are attempting to highlight their volunteerism, or paid resolve as though they were helping to solve problems as opposed to someone like me who writes about what a bunch of fools they are. “Oh Rich Hoffman, you criticize but do not offer to help. Instead you throw in firebombs when you should move into an elected position or serve on a finance committee.”

This is a blanket statement that could cover any ground from the president of the United States, to my local school board of Lakota, but nobody can help people or their jobs if their beliefs are not grounded in reality. I have covered many topics and offered plenty of advice that I would hope some of these people might use to solve their problems. Particularly regarding the Lakota School Board, which I consider a microcosm of the federal government in general, I have identified the problem and determined that my volunteerism or even paid help will not help that body of government no matter how much money or good intentions I might invest. That is why I determined on February 13, 2012 that the school system was in fact effectively dead in its current form. It is my assessment that nothing can be done to save it because the parties involved in the process are in denial of their reality, and are therefore unable to alter it. So my involvement unless they would listen 100% to my direction would ultimately lead to their doom.

As I speak hereafter about Lakota as a school district I might as well speak about virtually all school districts and government in general, because all these public entities are suffering from the same problem. They are not functioning from a grounding in the rules of reality. I don’t mean that facetiously, but quite literally. It’s a philosophical problem that infects the very nature of civilization. And without having that philosophic problem fixed, there is nothing that can help those who do not live within the realm of reality. So with that said, the reality of the situation pertaining to the Lakota School System, and public schools in general is that they have built the entire structure not for the benefit of the students, (the product) but for the employees themselves. To exhibit this point please refer to this article on The Blaze about the Buffalo teachers union contract that has perks so outrageous that it covers plastic surgery, including liposuction.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/buffalo-ny-teachers-still-getting-state-funded-cosmetic-surgery-why/

I have been in Lakota School Board meetings where the teachers union has protested any increases in their health care benefits. I’ve seen them threaten to go on strike to drive up their wages. And their behavior is exactly in line with those of the Buffalo teachers union. The reality of the situation is that the employees of these public schools are a selfish lot who wish to loot from the community the wealth of the districts.

However, like a drug dealer tries to convince themselves that their actions do not harm people, or the prostitute who pretends they do not destroy families, or the drunk that convinces themselves that they are not a menace to their families, the public education teacher tries to convince themselves that they critical members of a community and important to a child’s life. They believe that they are providing a service that cannot be done by anybody else in society and that if they do not perform their task that our country will crumble to ash.

What teachers are professing with those thoughts are wishes, not reality. Reality says that even a stay-at-home mom without a teaching degree can teach their children better than public education can. The stats prove it. But the wish from these particular public employees is that all such evidence would be wiped away so that they can sustain their fantasy–that they are as important in reality as they are in their own minds.

This is called the Tinker Bell complex. These poor fools have been raised to believe that if they just wish upon a star, or rub Aladdin’s magic lamp that they will be granted wishes, and they wish to these invisible gods beyond reality to be important in the scheme of society. They believe that because they dream it in their small minds that reality can be bent to their wishes.

This is why they hate me, because they cannot argue against the facts that I’ve given them. They see my spreadsheets which point out reality and they react as though I just threw Holy Water on their demon infested souls. They whither in pain and protest and attempt to call me names and discredit my facts rooted in reality. They are like the small child who has just been told that the Little Mermaid is just a cartoon–that Ariel is not real. Or the Fairy Godmother will not turn their pumpkin into a magic carriage, because these are the actions of fantasy, of dreams, and wishes.

It might be fun to dream and make wishes. It might bring comfort to the mind to see a falling star and make a wish that something in our lives might be made better by asking the mysteries of the universe to help us with a problem. Or a birthday cake with lit candles where a wish is made before blowing them out. Our culture is built on wishes and pleadings to entities that exist outside of reality and this is part of our modern social problem. Too often people would resort to magic and wishes rather than hard work and wisdom, and this is the source of much social misery. So the public employee teachers are in good company, but their status in life is merely a wish outside the boundaries of reality. They wish themselves to be valuable and worth $63,000 a year because their unions have told them they have a value equitable to such a value. But the reality is that the average wage mentioned is about $20,000 more than the true market value. That entire amount of $63K per year is artificially propped up by hopes, dreams and wishes.

I know one of the daughters of a former union president locally and every time I see her she looks like she has a dead cat on her head which is intended to be fashionable, but in reality just looks ridiculous. She obviously gets her nails done frequently and is a continuous visitor to the hair salon. She always wears the latest fashion and is quite the socialite. Now none of those things are necessarily bad, but every time I see her I think of what she would have been if her mother had not been the union president who would twist the arm of a school board for everything they had in them. I’m sure this cat headed lady has a master’s degree and all the “qualifications” that the labor union deems important, but what is her real value? Is it $63K per year or $83K per year? Well, by my assessment of her talent and role in a school district I’d say it’s no more than $50K per year. She’s too young to make more than that off any pay scale and could have only arrived at a large salary by obtaining yearly increases exceeding 5% to 7% a year beginning with a very excessive starting point. Because of this inflated value this person gets to pretend they have true value and when she gets her hair done, and her other cosmetic work, she is functioning from a fantasy outside of realty. She did not earn her wealth. She stole it. Her mother stole it. Her mother stole it for all her union members, not just the daughter. The money wasn’t earned. It was gained through manipulation, extortion, and coercion by creating the illusion that all this activity somehow benefited children with the campaign slogan, “it’s for the children.” But in reality children have nothing to do with the actions or desires. The reality is that the members of the union, including the cat haired lady become wealthy off tax dollars without providing a service of real value. The real product was fear of what the world would be like without their service. Not the actual teaching of children.

This behavior is in no way exclusive to the cat haired woman or her mother. They are just playing the game of well wishers. They wish in their minds that their efforts in public education might actually be valuable, but the reality says teachers who make much less and with less experience could do the same work for equal outcome. The reality says that it is the participation of parents and the quality of them that makes all the difference in a child’s life. It is not the teacher no matter what the pay scale.

In order to fix the problem these participants have to stop wishing the world is one way when in fact it is another. Until that action takes place nothing I can do will help these poor people. They will continue to be lost in their own fantasies because they refuse to see the truth. I can place the facts right in front of their faces, but they will not see them because they are more attracted to the fantasies of their minds rather than the reality of their lives. The public employee teachers seek to cover the gap between their fantasy and actual realty with looted wealth and that is simply not acceptable. I am happy to help these poor people with their problems, but like an alcoholic, they cannot be helped till they realize that their wishes do not determine realty. And their wish is that they are indispensably important to the culture of public education. But the facts do not support this, and I am personally finished with trying to ease their minds back into reality. It is their task to get with the program, not society’s, and it’s not our burden to throw money at their fantasies in order to make them happy, so until they are prepared for the truth, they cannot be helped, and my time is too valuable to waste on looters of reality, so I will continue with the firebombs until they finally get the point. At that time when they ask, I will solve all their problems in about one month and at half the cost. But I will not be lured into playing their game their way in a land of illusion and fantastic wishes.

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):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

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.

Read more: http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/region_north_cincinnati/west_chester/lakota-west-freshman-school-student-commits-suicide#ixzz1mV4Yv6cX

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/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
 

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/