Tag: Fairfield Schools

If you Vote for the Fairfield School Levy, You’re Stupid: What really causes communities to fail

I’ve said it for years, and it’s just as relevant today as it ever was, perhaps more so.  If you vote for a school levy, you’re stupid.  That’s what Darryl Parks and I always said on WLW radio when I was a frequent guest.  Many of our old interviews are still on my YouTube site, where we talked about why in a thousand different ways.  When he was the program director for Clear Channel Radio, we spent many hours discussing what had come true in public education today, well before anybody else realized it, and nobody can’t say that they weren’t told.  It was just an inconvenient truth that nobody wanted to admit to.  When they thought of public school, they thought about school jackets, class rings, homecoming dances, and the social aspects of being around other kids.  But public school designed by socialists, Marxists, and outright communists under John Dewey was never intended to teach anybody anything useful.  It was always about social controls that would last the duration of people’s lives with liberalized sentiment and submission to authority, which served the notion of big centralized governments.  And the entire system has collapsed on itself.  Finally, people have admitted that sending their kids to public schools was something they’d instead not do if they could get away with it. Suppose they could afford a private school or some other alternative.  And that is the state now where there are massive waiting lists for alternative schools to the government school option at the center of everyone’s community.  It’s taken many years, and COVID was the final straw, but people have finally admitted that the public school option is one they’d love to get away from for the benefit of their children.  Based on what we know now, if you are choosing to send your kid to public school, it’s more for your convenience than that you love them.  Nobody would choose to send a kid to a public school and, in the same sentence, mean it when you said to them, “I love you.”  Those things do not go together.

And so it goes; knowing all that, my wife and I were shopping at Bridgewater Falls in Fairfield, and we noticed all the yard signs advocating for a new tax levy for Fairfield Schools.  Fairfield is a school district neighboring Lakota, where I live, and they have been flirting with a new levy in Lakota for several years.  Public schools were designed to burden a community, so everyone has to go through a kind of divorce with their government schools where property values are perceived to be directly connected.  For years, it has been thought that people move into or out of a community based on the quality of the schools.  That’s what real estate people will tell you anyway, but that has, too, been a lazy way to manage school districts.  Government schools that are controlled by radical leftist teacher unions with consistently high wage rates in mind have no means to generate more money to pay their staff but ever-increasing burdens on their property taxes.  So the game continued; home values would increase, making more taxable revenue available for the government schools to confiscate.  That money is then used to program the next generation of children into the ways of Democrat politics, anti-God sentiments, transgender bathrooms, and racial politics, making for much of their youth, future Democrat voters.  Public schools are essentially teaching anti-family and a replacement of domestic concerns with obedience to centralized government. 

So the longer a community survives this process, the more burden and expensive those government schools become before there is a collapse, and the following community with the next shiny thing becomes the new destination, leaving the old community behind and used up.  That has been the story of several communities around Butler County, especially Fairfield, where I have much experience.  My wife and I were married and went to church there for many years when it was a destination community for many people all over the country.  I have watched this government school game for a long time, and behind it all is the communist intention to attack private ownership.  We are seeing this trend in Liberty Township, within the Lakota district now, where apartments and lower-cost living seek to attract lower-income people who don’t own so much private property.  It’s not a massive conspiracy; I know all the trustees involved.  They are nice enough guys.  But it’s in the handbook of community development, written by the same dumb people from the United Nations who designed these horrible public schools.  What could go wrong with a community entirely of apartments and people who vote but don’t own property?  Then, people who own property are squeezed out of their homes with high taxes, and before you know it, the tax rates are too high and unmanageable, and people move away once their children grow up and start lives of their own somewhere else.  In the background of all these apartments and condos is the hope that the children will stay in the community when they grow up if only affordable options exist.  But what you end up with is Democrat voters until they grow up and take on more responsibility by starting a family of their own.  So they vote for school levies, but their landlords end up having to pay the taxes, and the schools achieve one of Karl Marx’s goals: the destruction of all private property.  We have seen this cycle everywhere, and Fairfield has suffered from it.  Most of their best companies picked up and left because the taxes were too high, the same story that could be told in every community around Butler County, Ohio, for the last four or five decades.  The Lakota schools are watching if any of these levies pass so they can try independently for their own.  We have managed to keep the taxes low in Lakota because plenty of people have a hostile reaction to the prospect of higher property taxes.  However, the system was built to fail in every way, providing a tempting lure to busy parents, free babysitting while they work, and dual income lives to pay for all this mess. 

However, changes are coming with another Trump administration; serious reforms to public education will happen by eliminating the Department of Education, which should have occurred during the Reagan administration.  But the communists fought to prevent it with the standard fear tactics, which Reagan listened to.  And so we have had this uncompetitive socialist model ever since, and Trump is poised to change it.  And to that point, the most apparent change will be that any federal dollars will follow the child, not the zip code.  That will mean that Fairfield, Lakota, Mason, and several other government schools along the outer loop of I-275 will have to fight to have children in their schools to access the funds that come with them.  And their cost structure will be challenged severely, which would be great.  Many teachers at Lakota schools make over six figures, which is a big part of their quarter of a billion-dollar yearly budget. If you have attended a school event anywhere lately, you will see many of these teachers can afford to miss a sandwich or two.  They are not specimens of excellent health, let’s just put it nicely.  The entire system is poised to fail, whether levies are approved or not.  And knowing all that, if you vote for a school levy, as I have said for several decades, you are stupid.  It’s silly to vote for any public school for more money that they are just going to waste on radical Democrat teachers.  And until we change that, it’s stupid to give them even a penny more. 

Rich Hoffman

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Vote HELL No on the Butler County Safety Levy: It’s a money grab for ineffective school board members afraid to make hard decisions

Essentially if the school safety levy fails for the combined efforts of Fairfield schools, Hamilton, New Miami, Edgewood, and Monroe—Hamilton will vote to allow teachers to arm themselves. And the other school boards will have to follow because doing nothing simply isn’t an option. Out of Butler County, Ohio’s 10 school districts five of them are looking for this safety levy to hire more employees to keep the school boards from having to make a hard decision on how best to protect schools. At the core of the argument especially among young and inexperienced parents who have been taught all their lives that guns are bad, school boards are trying to appease them with a more centralized process. This involves spending millions of dollars on additional resource officers, mental health assessments and similar employee staffing increases which of course cost more money. Yet we know now from experience that the real solution is a more decentralized process where teachers can act as first responders the moment a crisis breaks out. And the good thing about that approach is that it doesn’t cost more money.

At the heart of the problem is that the basic assumption about public education is that it should not involve guns—because the aim of the progressive education philosophy is to live in a world where guns aren’t needed, value judgments are surrendered to equal rights and the people being educated are subjects of the state. Guns do not fit that view of the world. But in no way is that vision aligned with life in the real world, it’s an idea that mostly people who think politically left of center strive for. Most parents enroll their children in a school without thinking about politics or danger, because their primary concern is that their child is safe, and they want to believe that the schools themselves are free of any turmoil. School boards love to spend money, because its easy and when collections of people are in charge of administering finances, spending money is the only real way to get along because everyone loves to spend money, especially if it is other people’s money. So this issue is particularly challenging for school board members. The only way to make panicky parents happy is to give them more safety personnel, mental health specialists, social workers and counselors—because buying those types of employees give people the illusion of safety. It gives parents the feeling that the institution itself can keep their children safe, and as school board members yielding to that fantasy is safe in itself, until there is a real problem and a deranged shooter comes into the hallways that none of the new government employees could see coming.

Many of the gun rampages we have seen just this year, not to mention year’s past involved people who were considered mentally deranged in some form or another and the institutions of our society proved they were completely ineffective to stop such people from acting in a deadly way. To stop such a deranged mass murderer before the act occurs requires a decision based on judgments, and this is something that our modern institutions just don’t do, because they are so politically charged. Our modern institutions for which public schools are a part are more prone to trying to make a deranged lunatic feel more at home by attacking the normal kids into unnatural acts of compassion than in removing the threat from society by implementing a judgment that might seem unfair. So public schools are powerless to protect children from those who decide life isn’t worth living and they take to becoming mass murderers. By their reasoning, if they are going to kill themselves anyway, why not take a few people who made them feel terrible along the way pay too.

All the methods of implementing school safety as proposed by the Butler County safety levy is to deal with the aftermath of a mass shooting, not to prevent it from happening, and that is what needs to be clear about what people are voting for. There is only one way to ensure that a mass killer doesn’t gain an advantage over a student population of unarmed kids is to have teachers be the first responders to end the threat seconds after it has started, instead of minutes. That is the only way to properly protect students in a school from deranged killers which are becoming more common place these days from many influences. This idea that guns will be legislated out of existence is simply another liberal fantasy that they haven’t come to terms with yet. Guns are part of American life and children should learn to live with them, how to properly use them and what function they serve in the context of society. For instance, a serious course of study could be made of how the invention of gunpowder has changed the nature of human existence politically. Americans are living proof of that evolution, but the path to the political philosophy which created that American experiment is confirmation that no human society will retreat back into the compliance of a communist state, which as China is now and the Soviet Union used to be. Once people have tasted personal freedom, there is no way to erase it from their minds and over the last thousand years mankind has marched toward more personal freedom and much less aristocracy. Yet that is not what schools are teaching and that is also what makes them dangerous—because they are not aligned with the world around them.

For many the history of firearms and the nature of why people love them isn’t relevant to this discussion of school safety, but unfortunately for those utopian minded liberals, such an understanding is mandated for resolution on the safety issue. Is the security of a school more effective if it is more centrally controlled, or is it more effective if it is decentralized? The obvious answer of course is decentralization, we know that from lots of experience as a society. Guns are a part of world culture, they were invented out of human necessity to protect individual rights and that is why history says they are here to stay. We aren’t going to “uninvent” them. Therefore, to have a safe society we have to have a means to defend ourselves from people who may use them for malice and especially in education institutions, such instruction and awareness is paramount for tomorrow’s next generations. To defend them from harm, guns must be part of the solution, not mental health specialists, social workers, and counselors. Those are investments into what happens after a tragedy. We want to solve such problems before they become deadly.

Parents and teachers who are not comfortable with guns are going to have to adapt. Their sensitivities cannot be the contributing factors to making schools less safe due to their emotional condition toward guns. For those people I would suggest some classes on firearms, and to learn more about them aside from what they have seen in Hollywood productions over the last twenty years. Guns themselves are not dangerous, they are precision instruments which defend individual rights. If a teacher is responsible for the safety of a classroom and a crazed gunman is outside their door looking to commit mass murder against harmless, innocent people, that teacher should have the ability to end the threat right then and there. There won’t be time to call the police. A counselor or mental health specialist won’t stop a killer in the hall and talk them out of committing violence, only equal or superior firepower can do that. And that is the way of things in a free society—decentralized first responders who can slow down or stop a threat until the professionals arrive, just like in CPR. The only thing stopping this safety measure from being implemented for the good of everyone is the sensitivities of those who insist that guns not be part of a solution that only guns can solve. And not just guns, but guns in the hands of everyday people who are on the front lines and most prepared to take action when threats arise.

For many, obviously the case with the school boards of the participating schools, the responsibility for such security in their minds fall on the professionals we hire in society to deal with these kinds of things. But it is that over-reliance on institutional safety that many of these mass killers exploit to instigate their wrath. Guns are not a particularly American idea, but the personal use of them is, which means that in order to have a properly safe society that is living in harmony with the invention of guns, that personal participation of guns is something we should use to solve the gun violence problem. The solution is in decentralization within our institutions so to make them safer. More centralization will give us the opposite, the likelihood of more violence. If we really want to solve the problem of mass shootings, especially in public schools, and especially in Butler County which is the focus of this unique tax increase for the five-schools mentioned, then we need to allow teachers to be that layer of security. Throwing more money at more centralized control will do nothing but waste money, which the school boards participating in this horrendous tax and spend approach should have already had in their budgets to begin with. Ultimately what the school boards are asking for in this levy request is for Butler County voters to bail them out of having to make a hard decision—whether or not to cut some expenses out of their budget to hire more safety personnel, which is what they should be doing. Or in having to make a decision in arming teachers which would hurt the sensibilities of some neurotic parents who need an education of their own to get up to speed with the modern world. But nothing about the Butler County safety levy will make schools safer from a potential shooter who might want to attack schools and the children within it.

If I had loved ones in these schools, which I personally do, and a lunatic comes to that school with a gun to shoot up the innocent, I expect a teacher or administrator to be carrying a gun and to stop that situation before mass carnage occurs. There isn’t time to call for help when something like that happens. The situation must be dealt with right then and there. I don’t need a counselor to talk me through the grieving process after a bunch of kids have been killed. I don’t need a mental health professional to rationalize the mind of the killer before the smoke has left the scene of the crime. I just need the threat neutralized and that loved one home safe every day. And just having teachers carrying guns concealed during their professional business makes the chances of a safe day at school much more of a reality.
Vote not only NO on the Butler County Safety Levy, but………………………….HELL NO!

Rich Hoffman

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I Stand With Sheriff Jones–ARM THE TEACHERS: HELL NO on the 1.5-mill Butler County school security levy

Of course, people want to know what I think of the 1.5-mill levy that five Butler County schools are trying to pass together to boost school security. The five schools are Hamilton, Fairfield, Monroe, Edgewood and New Miami, and if the levy passes they intend to increase their school entry security, and hire mental health employees to help in what they think will help make schools safer. It’s a ten-year deal which effectively avoids the entire problem. As a long-term anti-levy advocate for public schools I am on the record at Lakota as saying if they allowed a policy of arming their teachers that I would support a levy to increase teacher compensation and help them purchase firearms. As anti-tax as I am, I support the Betsy DeVos federal purchase of firearms to help teachers get their hands on them so obviously this issue means a great deal to me. I think firearms on a teacher makes schools much safer and ultimately prepares children for the kind of world they are going to have to live in as adults. The Hamilton school board actually yielded rightly to Sheriff Jones and his billboards by voting to support arming teachers, then under great pressure and in hoping that this levy would pass, they backtracked to await the results of this election. That pulled Jones off the fence of neutrality on this particular levy to speak against it. And on that issue Sheriff Jones and I might as well be identical twins. I am with him in saying what I have said many, many times in the past. This school levy is a money grab by these school districts who are very intent to ignore the problem of school shootings and are attempting to yield to the pressure of the teacher unions and their anti-gun progressive political philosophy against the nature of this threat.

https://www.journal-news.com/news/butler-county-sheriff-calls-school-security-levy-districts-money-grab/PjwIrmBL109j8U0jctoA1O/

Guns and how people think of them has largely been shaped by our public education system and ultimately the liberalism of modern politics. That essential vantage point is that guns are dangerous and just looking at one is a kind of taboo and that is a far cry from how things have traditionally been in this country. As an example, obtaining a gun in America was like getting the first responsibilities into adulthood, which is the central premise to the movie that comes out every year on all our televisions during the Holiday season, A Christmas Story. Getting a gun and learning to use it responsibly was the first access that many had in their journey toward adulthood. But since that movie and the period it covers, American youth have lost that basic stepping stone into adulthood and public schools have attempted to steer minds away from such individualized ritual into accepting more state control, which is what you hear from virtually every school official as pressure mounts to arm teachers. The positions of government schools are to rely on centralized authority as opposed to individualized first responders.

Hoping to ride public emotion away from making that critical decision to individualize security in the hands of first responder teachers this Butler County school levy is one last leap to keeping that centralized authority model alive in the context of the core philosophy of public education. That assumption is a progressive belief that guns should be removed from society and that children should grow up into adults and not have their minds on guns at all—so that an eventual federal ban will occur by those future voters. By allowing guns to be part of the solution, the fear is that this new generation of young people will grow up once again accepting that guns are a critical part of American society, which of course they always have been.

I have come to think of guns as more of a philosophy than an imminent threat. Personal firearm ownership is a declaration of independence in a lot of ways and a commitment as a first responder to law enforcement. Gun ownership is not a threat to law enforcement, it is a great assistance if done properly and it is that reality for which Sheriff Jones and President Trump support arming teachers in schools to put the whole school security issue to bed for good, before more people get hurt.

We have all talked about doing something after the most recent rash of school shootings, but the real answer is to decentralize the process and give teachers the ability to be those critical first responders when danger happens. The philosophy of guns is that by owning them, we make each owner an extension of law and order rather than hiding under a desk or behind a door while we wait five to ten minutes for the police to arrive. The fantasy that many progressive people have, which many school board members are dedicated to, is that guns will be removed from American society at some point and they think by resisting a move to the other direction that they are facilitating that inevitability. But I would point out correctly that the trajectory of gun legislation is not getting more restrictive, it is getting less so. If you track gun laws back to 1992 it will become apparent that the Second Amendment has been strengthened even under the most rigorous debate, because as an invention of individual protections, guns are at the core of everything our American society stands for. And schools should be part of that instruction, working with the NRA and even gun manufacturers to facilitate great understanding of what guns are all about and how to properly use them so that young people grow up to be good gun owners in the future. Denying this reality is where all these school board members are going wrong, because they are missing the essence of educating young people in modern-day America. Taking a political stand is reckless when the evidence shows that the world is wrong on this issue. We need more guns and gun ownership, not less to make a society built on justice, honesty, and valor.

The five schools mentioned are avoiding the inevitable. They are hoping to take this money grab to appease the unionized teachers but to act as an insurance policy if something does go wrong, because they can at least say then that they tried. But we are looking for more than trying, I certainly expect there to never be a school shooting in my county schools. And if someone tries, then I expect some first responder to put down the threat right then and there and get the students back to class learning valuable things, not sitting around crying about how emotional everyone is. There shouldn’t be a need for more mental health experts in schools because the message would be quite clear, if danger erupts, the teachers are armed. And that the way to better mental health is in conducting lives in a more individualized responsible manner. In their most basic form, firearms teach their users to be more responsible people which translates to every action a person participates in. So, the benefits are many in arming teachers in public schools.

That leaves the point of this article as to whether or not the Butler County school security tax should be passed, to be answered. And I say HELL NO! It’s a chicken approach to a hard problem and for the schools themselves it is just as Sheriff Jones articulated, it’s a money grab. I hate tax increases and I think the schools cost way too much money currently, and kids don’t learn nearly enough of what they need. I would argue that the entire government school system needs to be rethought. But I stand by my previous statements on approving levies if school boards adopt arming teachers. I sympathize with the tremendous intellectual challenge it takes for them to make the switch in thinking from a centralized safety response to a more individualized one. So I’m willing to sweeten the pot for them to bring them to the right side of the argument. I personally think everyone should learn to shoot a gun. There is nothing like going to a range and respecting the people around you who are all armed with deadly weapons because it teaches the process of being safe and conducting yourself responsibly. Those basic procedural respects are missing from today’s youth and I think they would do well to get it from their teachers in school. But better yet, it is best for kids to know that their schools are truly safe because any teacher could be armed and if danger breaks out, someone is there to respond in seconds rather than minutes. And that has a direct impact on whether there is a body count or not.

Rich Hoffman

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