Tag: government schools

Dismantaling the Department of Education: The Ohio House overrides DeWine’s veto on property taxes

Remember, I told you this was going to happen, and now it is.  However, with the July 14th ruling by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision, the court granted the Trump administration’s request to temporarily pause a federal judge’s order that required the Department of Education to reinstate nearly 1,400 employees fired as part of a reduction-in-force.  The majority ruling lifted the injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Massachusetts, who had concluded that the administration’s actions aimed to dismantle the department without congressional approval and couldn’t be done.  A lot was happening with this ruling, which is why I am so proud of the tie clip I always wear that people comment on so much. I got it at the Supreme Court when I visited there in March, ahead of all these significant rulings.  Regional district judges were not going to be able to stop the Trump administration, and the mass layoffs that would dismantle the Department of Education were going to happen, sending the management of education back to the states, where, in Ohio, we know what that means with the incoming new governor, Vivek Ramaswamy.  Many education-oriented individuals point to a decision like this and argue that we are becoming a country not committed to education.  However, it’s the exact opposite; we need to get the administrative types out of the way so that positive reform in education can happen. This is why a Governor like Ramaswamy in Ohio is so important, as he has many fresh ideas that would improve education.  And getting the Department of Education types out of the way makes all that possible.  There is a lot to be happy about, but it’s hardly a surprise.  I’ve been warning about it for years, and as of 2025, everything is right on schedule. 

I would also add on July 21st 2025 in the state of Ohio the Ohio House voted 61-28 to override Governor DeWine’s vetos on property tax measures in the 2026-2027 budgets, specifically Item 66 which eliminates the authority for political subdivisions to levy replacement property tax levies and restricts school districts levying certain types of levies such as fixed-sum emergency, substitute emergency, and combined school district income tax and fixed-sum property tax levies.  That measure is now headed to the Senate, where I fully expect it to pass, and change the way the state sees property tax in general—another benefit of the upcoming Vivek Ramaswamy administration.  Property tax is no longer the crutch for big government that it has been.  Trump’s administration is headed in a similar direction, viewing property as something precious and not forcing owners to become perpetual renters of their property through excessive taxation.  DeWine was concerned about the budget submission, specifically how property taxes are used to fund schools.  What all this means is that public school districts are going to face numerous changes, including how they collect taxes to fund union-run public schools.  It’s not just the elimination of the centralized Department of Education that is coming to them, but also in how they collect funds from local property taxes to run their progressive endeavors.  What is happening here is that education is being redefined into a marketplace value as opposed to what it has been, which has been a kind of Brave New World socialist indoctrination center that seeks to produce more Democrats as voters.  Many people believe that the previous rules have been fueling our nation’s destruction.  And across many changes, that perception is headed in a different direction.

When the Department of Education was created in 1979, it proposed using the power of the central government to protect union employees from the scrutiny of judgment while teaching children the same socialist values.  Such as taking the category of History in school and changing it to “Social Studies.”  And during this period, kids were being taught not that the creation of America was a great thing, but that it was built on the backs of enslaved people, corrupting thousands of children in the process through central government oversight, taking away from the states the ability to compete with other states for a better education system.  Because essentially, everyone was being taught the same flawed information.  Now, the priorities for education will be decided at the state level.  School Choice will become much more common, as it was well represented in Trump’s recent Big Beautiful Bill, meaning that we are moving toward a society where tax money will follow the student, not the zip code.  And that’s why this veto override in Ohio was so important, because it initiates a process of shifting away from property taxes funding all this centralized government and its growing expansion, to the point where people can no longer afford to own their property.  The public schools have, for years, not had to manage their finances well, which the teachers’ unions have been delighted with.  However, it has driven the per-pupil cost of teaching children out of the realm of reality and is too high.  This makes it impossible for the state to determine how to fund education for students, as the costs are so high and dependent on property taxes to cover the state’s funding gaps.  To achieve a truly competitive cost structure, the Department of Education must relinquish its power and be decentralized. 

What that means for public schools like Lakota, which I discuss frequently because they are in the district where I live, is that they will have to rethink everything they do.  And they will have to compete with other schools in the immediate area for the right to teach a student.  This year, in 2025, they have some costly levy requests that add up to half a billion dollars for infrastructure, the building of new schools after tearing down some of the old ones.  And for what, for teaching jobs that are changing dramatically and are being pushed by A.I. for ability.  When states like Ohio apply funding to students, rather than to the zip code institution, the fat cow that government schools have been living on will be gone.  And they are going to have to earn their dollars, which they are not used to.  This union-dominated structure was always poised to fail.  You can see it when you visit the White House; all the big unions are in the buildings just outside the front gates.  Government unions view the collection of taxes from an ever-growing government as the foundation of their existence, which means low performance standards for all involved.  However, we don’t like what these government schools have been producing, and we have been intent on changing it for the better.  And that starts with mass firings at the Department of Education by the Trump administration.  And for all the government school administrators who are tempted to cry foul, I warned you, and you should have listened. They were mad that I said such things, and now they are going to find themselves extinct. And the fault for that will be theirs, because they were told what was going to happen and did not prepare for it.   Reforms to education are necessary because what we have had has been inadequate and expensive.  And at every level, from funding to curriculum, significant changes are coming.  And schools will have to adapt, or fail to exist at all. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Teachers like Lakota’s David Ehrlich: The reason President Trump is getting rid of the Department of Education

I wouldn’t have known it unless a lot of people told me about it, but apparently, on Darbi Boddy’s Facebook page, there is some crazy teacher named David Ehrlich who thinks that I am some person named Lisa Winner and has been very mean to that person because they believe they are me.  Darbi and I have been catching up a bit. She’s still hard at work bringing awareness to the many problems of public education, but as a Lakota School Board member, she still stirs up a lot of controversy from the local government school lunatics, and this topic came up.  I told her that I haven’t been too concerned over public education issues because what I have been talking about for a couple of decades now is about to happen; Trump is about to eliminate the Department of Education and specifically send everything back to the states.  And that all public schools run by these radical left teacher unions were going to be in for a big surprise.  So I wasn’t doing much of anything on the education front until that happened.  And the teachers know something is brewing because they have been getting very aggressive as the bubbles that they live in are getting popped everywhere.  And indeed, this troubled David Ehrlich is one of the bad ones.  They always appear friendly at parent-teacher conferences, but few know what’s really going on with these people, which is common to my experience with them.  Years ago, David Ehrlich, as a Lakota teacher, was disciplined for having improper relationships with students.  And he’s still around wanting to teach kids, which is a very good example of everything that’s wrong with government schools.  They hire the wrong people to have way too much power over our children, and the system protects them from public judgment, which is why they hated Darbi Boddy so much because, as a school board member, she worked hard to expose these problems, not to cover them up.  They hated her for it, and the only means they had to change that condition was to intimidate and harass people in the reform movement so that they could continue to be diabolical menaces to our future children.  Reading David Ehrlich’s comments about me reminded me of something Pete Hegseth had said about public education, as he was on my mind because of his swearing-in to the Trump administration. 

I can assure everyone and all the intelligence agencies in the world that I can confirm it; I have never, under any condition, ever sent a message on Facebook, never under my account or some fake one.  And I would certainly never pretend to be someone like Lisa Winner.  If I say something to somebody, I tell them directly, and I ensure they always know it comes from me.  I don’t use Facebook; I hate it.  I only have a deactivated account that I recently reactivated for a gun competition group I’m in that seems to only know how to use Facebook as a group of older adults.  So, they sometimes want to send me pictures and emails through Facebook.  Other than that, I never interact with it because I hate Mark Zuckerberg and will not use the diabolical Facebook under any conditions.  I would not know anything going on with Darbi’s Facebook page because I never log in to view anything that people are saying there.   But I liked Ehrlich’s comments about me because they let me know that what I wanted to do was working.  Like everyone who knows me, I have a management philosophy that I like to apply to my enemies: dealing with them as a ghost.  I want them to think about me all the time as the first thing they think about when they wake up and the last thing they think about when they go to bed.  And I want them to dream about me in the form of nightmares, which is the case with this David Ehrlich teacher. 

If I dealt directly with all the people who hate me, I would have time for nothing else, so being a ghost is the best method of dealing with them.  Ghosts can fly through walls and travel up and down in a building through locked doors; there is nowhere a ghost can’t go.  They can be everywhere and anywhere simultaneously, so that is a general strategy for me, and it is my goal to have these people feel so strongly about me while I am doing many other things.  I am happy to have people like that Lakota teacher hate me with such insanity, so when the large group of people who support Darbi Boddy so tenaciously let me know about David Ehrlich and others like him, it made me smile.  But it also confirmed the heart of the problem, and many people who are now mainstreamers are catching up to it, like Pete Hegseth, a television host on Fox News and now Secretary of Defense of the United States under President Trump, the new mainstream.  As Pete said recently, I have said for years, get your kids out of those dangerous government schools because people like this David Ehrlich teacher run them.  He’s just one of many thousands, and most think similarly.  They are dangerous people who want access to your children, and if you love your kids, you’ll do what you have to do to get them away from that vast danger. 

Public education has been a terrible thing and has ruined the lives of so many people.  Like Pete said, if you can create an option for your children, do it.  Sell the boat.  Sell the summer home in Florida.  Do whatever you have to do to provide for your children an option.  But don’t send them to public schools to be victims to diabolical Marxists with radical leftist ideologies so they can hide their corrupt mindsets behind polite society.  Once you peel away the kind of people attracted to public education, you often get someone like this: David Ehrlich, who “failed to observe and maintain appropriate student-teacher boundaries and engaged in behavior in the classroom that caused students to become uncomfortable.”  And that’s what everyone admitted to with a signed confession.  It’s the same pattern in public education everywhere, from superintendents, administrators, and teachers at all levels.  The more they think like Karl Marx, the more they want to hide all their other problems behind the authority of a government school position, which they believe shields them from public scrutiny, and they live their lives with unearned merit. And that’s precisely why Trump is getting rid of the Department of Education, and school choice will be the new standard.  The money is going to go to the students, not the zip code, forcing schools to compete for enrollment instead of keeping parasites like David Ehrlich on the taxpayer-funded payroll to feed off innocent children hiding behind the system that protects their troubles to keep the tax money flowing to their corrupt labor unions.  And it all has to happen because the system itself produces people dangerous to children and does nothing to make them better as people for the world of tomorrow.  So, as the Trump administration does its business that we elected him to do, don’t feel sorry for people like this Lakota teacher.  They were never the kind of people who should be anywhere near children.  And they deserve what’s about to happen.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

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

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Learning to Waste Time: Why public education doesn’t make smart people

As I always say, I wouldn’t send my kids to a public school for any amount of money.  If you have an option, you should always use it rather than send your child to such a horrible place.  I’m a big fan of homeschooling for many reasons, but one was most obvious due to several recent events involving one of my grandchildren.  My daughter always updates my wife and me on what she is teaching him, and they take frequent trips down to the Cincinnati Museum Center for education trips, so he’s what I would consider way out in front of other kids his age, which is almost 8.  In many ways, he is way ahead of many 25-year-olds.  He is brilliant, and I don’t just say that because he’s my grandchild.  But his interests are well above and beyond other kids his age.  For instance, this incident of notice was that he one day just painted a map of the known solar system, the inner and outer, and he had details in it regarding planet placement and other celestial bodies that people at NASA would struggle with.  It was very advanced and was a clear sign of a vastly deep interest in the subject of astronomy, and other sciences.  I reminded my daughter that Thomas Edison was homeschooled and if his mom had not taught him independently, he likely would have never developed the genius that he was known for.  I also told my daughter that if her son had painted a picture like that in public school, he would have gotten in trouble for it.  They wouldn’t want the other kids to feel bad for not knowing the same things, so they would have penalized my grandson for showing extraordinary ambition above and beyond. 

Public schools are not designed to create the next Albert Einsteins and Thomas Edisons; they are prone to make the next Karen fight with a welfare recipient over a shopping cart in a Walmart parking lot.  Public schools are not designed to produce intellect.  They are designed to make stupid, compliant people, and I see this all the time in dealing with people of all kinds of educational backgrounds.  The number one thing that public schools teach children is to waste time.  They certainly aren’t trying to get kids to become the next Thomas Edison, which is what my grandson reminds me of, and because he is being homeschooled, we can see the development in him without restriction.  I think most kids are intelligent, but we teach them as a civilization to be stupid.  Our government wants them to be stupid so they cannot challenge their power.  The globalists want stupid people because smart people would never put up with their nonsense.  But the most devastating attribute of government-run schools, and education in general, is that we teach people to waste time.  That wasting time is the priority, not learning.  Being compliant and waiting for someone to give you something, rather than waking up every morning, taking life by the horns, and using it to your advantage.  My grandson gets asked a lot when he goes shopping with my daughter, “Why isn’t he in school?”  Of course, the answer from my daughter is that he finished school at 11 AM.  He started around eight and finished around 11.  Now, he has the rest of the day to do other things, like draw pictures of the solar system, including the contents of the Kuiper Belt.  They do more learning in that four-hour span than most kids get all week, or all month in public school.  And that is sad to realize.

The typical kid wakes up and waits for the bus to pick them up or their parents to drop them off at school.  They then wait for the first class to begin.  They wait for the teacher to give instructions.  They wait for the next class.  They wait in line for lunch.  They wait to go to the bathroom and recess; they wait in line for the drinking fountain.  The primary thing that our education system teaches is for people to wait for things.  So, it should be no surprise that they grow into adults waiting for their tax returns and a pizza to be delivered. They were waiting for a text from a correspondence.  Waiting, waiting, waiting.  They were not taught to do things but to wait for things, so it goes for the rest of their adult lives.  And should we be surprised that we have a society of fools who don’t understand that the election in 2020 was stolen and that our current president is completely illegally inserted?  Or that COVID was a bioweapon built in a lab in Wuhan, China, and released to allow the governments of the world to cheat in elections and knock off rival powers like the United States, not with military weapons, which they don’t have but through the Administrative State.  They exploit their natural inclination to do what the teacher tells them to because they were raised to follow orders and wait for someone to tell them what to do next.  What else does anybody think will happen when society is taught to be compliant, not to think?  And that’s why we have a lot of the problems that we do have socially.  Our education systems have massively failed our society, and almost everyone is a victim of it somehow. 

I’m proud that my kids and their kids are learning not to operate on that ridiculous hamster wheel.  I grew up with most of my friends being honor students, so I’ve always known knowledgeable people.  One guy was so intelligent that he sold his honors robes at his graduation for a small fee to someone who wasn’t very smart, but their family expected to take pictures of them in those robes at graduation.  He sold the robes, and you know what we did with the money? We went to Perkins to have a couple of hamburgers and spend the rest of the day to ourselves while everyone else ran the rat race of wasting time created for them by public education.  I feel pretty strongly about this issue, but when I see a mind alive with excitement and genuine passion for learning, it just reminds me how many other young kids are being disabled for life because the dumb adults in their lives are teaching them to be compliant to the many fools who have acquired power, and they are learning the critical lesson of wasting time.  And they will grow into future employees who waste time.  Taxpayers that waste time.  And gullible fools who believe everything a corrupt government tells them because they are too lazy to ask the obvious questions.  And more concerned with wasting time than learning something new and doing something with that knowledge.  If you trace back many of our modern problems, the source goes back to our education system and its many failures.  Homeschooled kids, at least, aren’t typically taught to accept these failures.  So even if their parents aren’t brilliant, the child isn’t learning to accept such restrictions, making them far better off than their peers for critical thinking.  But unfortunately, this is rare in the world.  I’m happy to see explosive intelligence from my grandchildren because my kids teach them not to accept silly social restrictions to advanced intellectual concepts.  What are we trying to do if we aren’t trying to make the next genius in the world?   I don’t think it’s a mass conspiracy to make the world dumb.  But I think it’s what you get when you let dumb people make up the education system.  You don’t get intelligent people.  But you get people used to wasting time and doing whatever authority figures tell them.  Which, in almost every case, cripples them for life.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Lakota School Board Shuts Down Public Comments, They Knew All Along: Her side of the story

At the Lakota school board meeting of October 10th, 2022, the board chose to shut down public comments so to avoid talking about the Matt Miller controversy in public. This is precisely why it’s important to know what the political affiliations are of your local school board members because when nonpartisan alignments are allowed, bad, liberal behavior can be hidden behind such politeness. And that is the ultimate tragedy of the Matt Miller situation at Lakota schools. Ironically, if we did not elect Darbi Boddy to the school board in 2021, and that she was attacked so quickly into her term with such viciousness, we likely wouldn’t know any of what we do of Matt Miller’s sex life. And as flawed and reckless as it has been, what has been the real quality of a very expensive superintendent? Looking back on it, it’s a real blessing that Darbi was attacked so harshly and that so many community members came to her defense. The ugliness that many of us have known was always behind Lakota schools, which actually are the cause of their runaway costs, has been revealed in the wake of the Matt Miller drama, and as bad as it has been, the district is much better off than it was in not knowing. But what was revealing when reading the police interview of Matt Miller’s ex-wife is that Lakota schools did know; they knew all along how bad their superintendent was behaving in public, and instead of solving the behavior, they decided, because they are primarily liberals, that Matt Miller’s lifestyle did not have an impact on his ability to do his job as a superintendent. And knowing that makes you wonder what kind of behavior they would find worthy of termination. 

People weren’t happy when public comments were shut down at a recent Lakota school board meeting. The choice to hide the Matt Miller controversy by the school has turned out very bad.

Well, actually, we do know that same school board moved to get rid of the newcomer, Darbi Boddy, who was unashamedly conservative simply because she was a conservative. But in so trying to destroy her, they opened up this vast public anger that probed into the life of Matt Miller and found an ex-wife who felt very bad about her marriage to the superintendent, and that guilt let out many things that the public needed to know, which were already known behind the scenes, and now the school itself has significant problems. According to the public record of the ex-wife’s interview, the elements of their divorce leaked out in 2020. The school moved to get help from a reputation swat team to clean up the matter because Miller had used his office and tools of that office to maintain a dating profile that was embarrassing and consistent with what was revealed in the two police interviews, one with him and the other with his wife at the time. In Miller’s interview, he portrayed his ex-wife as crazy and had difficulty figuring out why all this information was coming out now, as opposed to 2019, when the divorce happened. Well, according to her, it took her a while to live alone and figure out what she had gone through for the last couple of decades while married to a guy who wanted her to have sex with other men, women, and couples at least 2 or 3 times a month. She felt she needed to appease him; otherwise, he would become angry. And the impact on her over all this was clearly daunting. After reading it, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Until I got the public document for myself, I had only heard of her through the many documents, the text messages, and other material that filled a bulging folder with lots of bad sexual behavior.

Of course, in her report, there was a lot of information in the context of the most controversial aspect of the drama, the conversation of pillow talk regarding the drugging, molestation, and videotaping of three kids who attend Lakota schools. When he tells it, it sounds like a sexual fantasy that she had which he obliged in. When she told it, it sounded like a scheme to keep her from divorcing him by talking her into doing something outrageous so that he’d have a video of her doing it, and he could threaten her to stay with him now that their kids were grown. But that the discussion took place, there is clearly no doubt. His value for the relationship looks to have been easier for him to have sex with other males because of her than without her, which can be concluded by reading his Craigslist advertisements of her to unknown characters for such engagements. So, he wanted to keep a good thing going, and getting her to do something outrageous was a way to accomplish that task, which isn’t uncommon. That is at least the conclusion of her many friends who have stepped forward in defense of the ex-wife whom they have developed great sympathy for. Having dirt on people is a primary way to get others to do what might not be in their best interest. And ultimately, it’s also why so many people stay silent on these kinds of matters because they can’t afford to have a moral judgment. After all, they, too, have been compromised at some point in time. After reading both reports several times, I tend to believe her side of the story much more than his. She says this, and another event was what broke her and caused her to leave him without many resources for herself to live off of. She is the one who took all the pain to make a change, so she is much more invested in the correct answer than he is. And that certainly comes out in her version of the story. 

As salacious as all these details are, the worst part of the story has been what the Lakota school board knew and when they knew it. And to what rationalization they had about the matter when they knew they had an obligation to public transparency. By the time we came out of the Covid lockdowns and we elected new board members, replacing a few who clearly made bad decisions on the Matt Miller case, the volcano was destined to blow. Such an overtly sexual lifestyle could not be contained, and the liberals’ expectation was no different than their defense of Bill Clinton (it’s just about sex, he can still do his job.)  And just like that, the assumption was that the community would not or that their opinions would be accepted because they were too conservative and out of touch with the progressive Lakota school system. And that we were all supposed just to accept this level of bad behavior while paying an extraordinary amount of money for each house in the district to the school without any expectation of performance. Since Matt Miller came to the district in 2017, there has been a steady decline in the quality of education as measured by state sources, and now we know that for him, it was mainly a cosmetic role. His Ashley Madison and Craigslist dating accounts show quite a commitment to the kind of sex that conservatives find reprehensible and anti-family in the extreme. Yet the community members were supposed to bring their concerns about their own children to him for consideration. And that topics of transexual bathrooms were to be judged by him? That PRIDE flags in the halls were normal? When you see his lifestyle, it’s clear why they hated Darbi the moment she was elected. And why they were so threatened when she showed up at a couple of schools in April to record evidence of sexual grooming at Lakota schools, which everyone said wasn’t happening, including Matt Miller. But then again, he also said that he never thought about drugging, molesting, and videotaping three kids, except that one time. And in this case, as bad as it is, the cover-up is even worse than the initial act. The school board has known all along, and they covered it up for fear that people might learn about it. Can you imagine what else they have been covering up from us? Can we trust anything they say? I’d say no. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Democrats Need to be Destroyed: Compromising with evil isn’t an option, not at Lakota, not in Washington DC nor in Davos

Here is the basic assumption, a warning shot across the bow to all who still hope and pray that liberalism in any form will make a final stand and win out the day. The best thing that can happen in the United States is that the Democrat Party is completely destroyed and that the two-party system that emerges in their ashes is a split between the conservatives, the RINOs on the one hand, and the MAGA Republicans on the other. That is where most of the political sentiment is in America and the true indicator of where the public wants things. Now, the Liberal World Order, the media, the education institutions, the corporate alliances, and all like-minded figureheads who have learned to game that Liberal World Order for their own benefit are in a panic because they see it turning to dust on the nightly news. On Fox News, for instance, there are pleas from moderate Democrats to return to a bipartisan sentiment where both sides can work together for the “good of the people.” What is missed in these discussions is whether that other side should even exist. Democrats do not represent American values and ideas. They are Marxists and anti-American in their intentions. They work against the Constitution and only seem to like it when they want to use free speech or some other right to undo everything that America is. Liberals don’t even belong on the political spectrum of America. They are more at home in Europe, where they originated from. They are the political party of globalism and have built all their political platforms around it. They try to hide that fact behind an American flag hoping that nobody sees what they are doing. But we live in a country where the FBI raided Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, and took his cell phone for no reason other than harassment. The same organization that just raided a former president’s home had a hired Russian spy on the payroll to set up that presidential administration to suppress the populist political movement that was gaining steam to preserve this dying Liberal World Order out of desperation. 

But locally, you can see it even sharper, this panic from Democrats who hope they can hide behind a complicit media and ride their evil deeds of sin and mayhem into a horizon of darkness that only the Devil would find sanctimonious. You could hear it at the Lakota school board meeting on September 12th, 2022. Are we a Christian nation? Yes, we are. We are the nation built from the values of the Ten Commandments brought down out of Mt. Sinai and given to a people that started several major religions, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, which most of the world considers themselves to be. Other factions at work want to erase all that and resurrect religious perspective as a global religion centered on oriental ideas, which is what Climate Change is all about. But in essence, when people at the school board tried to use separation of church and state to argue that public schools should be havens of evil, secular in nature, the only people nodding their heads apparently were small Facebook groups like the Conservatives for Lakota who were nodding in the affirmative. Every community has people like this, especially attached to public schools, who want to believe, like Joe Manchin and Mitch McConnel, that all sides can come together and work in a bipartisan way for the good of all. But they forget that one of those sides represents sheer evil, the destruction of America, and the ability to sin infinitely, often, and without recourse. And real conservative people aren’t signing up for that no matter how much Fox News begs for people to do so, or the FBI raids people’s homes to scare them into submission, or Skippy from Conservatives for Lakota pleads online to his fellow liberal friends that the Matt Miller trouble at the superintendent position is just a political situation that doesn’t involve the safety of kids. 

Some dude named Skippy, or some name like that from the Conservatives for Lakota Facebook group, has the ear of the board, and they think they are, as they advertise, “conservative.” Still, I just learned about their group recently due to the trouble at Lakota, and people showed me the kinds of things that those people said. It’s clear why school board members think they represent conservative opinions if they only look at the type of people who attend school board meetings and generally support the concept of public schools. If school boards are listening to Skippy and his friends, then, of course, they are going to be shocked when they find out that a majority of the residents of Lakota still support the new school board member Darbi Boddy; they consider themselves Christians fighting to preserve a Christian nation and they are angry at all liberal attempts to destroy the world they live in, whether the topic is education, taxes, globalism, fiscal policy, and the basic concept of family building. I go to a lot of GOP events, and I meet all kinds of people. And I can’t say I’ve seen any of these Conservatives for Lakota anywhere. From what I read of their Facebook musings, they are RINOs at best, likely just Democrats in disguise, and the school board hopes that the mask will remain because they all tend toward liberalism in some way or another. The dispute on the Lakota school board presently at its essence is that the community is much more conservative than any of the school board members and that Darbi Boddy is the only member who has fully embraced that representation, which Democrats and RINOs hate with everything they have in them. They don’t even want to know that people who would support school board members like Darbi exist, and when she’s sitting there with a seat at the table, it terrifies them, just like Trump terrified the Liberal World Order when he was in the White House, and still has political power over the Republican Party in America. And in that microcosm of local politics, we see the national macrocosm that is unfolding on the world stage, where populism is defeating liberalism everywhere, and the mechanisms of authority are desperately trying to intimidate their existence into the future, if only by a day or two. 

The argument over Matt Miller’s social life isn’t so much as to whether children are in danger or not, which is very much a thing of its own. The real debate is whether or not his liberal lifestyle is one that the true Christian conservatives of Lakota can put up with. In the past, a compromise was expected, but people have grown tired of compromising with the Devil and have in mind to defeat evil in a Biblical sense. They are tired of evil in their lives and want to fight back politically or more if needed. They see it on the national, international, then local levels.   They may not be able to do much about evil in Europe or the Desecrators of Davos. Remember, the number one book in the country right now is Alex Jones’ The Great Reset, who is on his second harassment trial in the same number of months trying hard to destroy him and his company Infowars. The New York Times actually has tried to suppress that information from their Best Seller’s list because they want more than anything to return to that world of Skippy and the Conservatives for Lakota RINO position, or the Joe Manchin, Rob Portman “work together” RINOs on the Hill are trying to get back to. But many people, I would say most conservative Republicans, are done with the compromises with evil and want to fight back. They don’t want school superintendents who do not uphold Christian moral standards. They do not want to empower evil in politics with happy talk and handshakes. And they are not about to put up with abuses of authority within the FBI or the local sheriff who are willing to use force to punish political rivals and destroy populism if they can and use their badge to fight for the Liberal World Order and its preservation. Those things are all on the chopping block now that people can see who is doing what, to whom, and for what reasons. And if evil is attached to the judgment from the perspective of a very Christian nation, then a fight is bound to happen. And singing campfire songs of unity and hoping things will return to how they were isn’t in the future. 

If you would like to help restore integrity to the Lakota school system, click the picture below and add your name to the petition. We are very much in a spiritual war, and its time to show up to meet the needs of what’s right and good in the world.

Rich Hoffman

Click to visit Protect Lakota Kids .Com

The Seven Liberal Arts: By teaching people to think inside a box, the criminals could get away with committing the real crimes outside it

One thing that is very obvious after Covid and the election fraud problems from the 2020 election is that we see that there are people like Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, and many other maniacal characters who are willing to take advantage of people as the book How to Lie with Statistics establishes. When you control the measure people use to apply to the world around them, you ultimately contain what they think and do. Most of the world was defenseless to see what a very small few of the controlling elite were doing, criminally, because their educations in life prevented them from seeing the big picture. I do not doubt that from a medieval perspective, where few people could even read the Bible, the Seven Liberal Arts that Plato envisioned, and the Freemasonry movement, which was one of the first genuinely global organizations in the history of the world, seemed like a great idea. By teaching people in public education grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry, Masons coming out of Europe thought that they could create a utopia for people to live in and everything would be fantastic. And when John Dewey and his progressive, Marxist friends, inspired by books like Looking Backward and other socialist utopia concepts, breathed to life behind Freemasonry, they thought they were doing a good thing. And for more than a century now in the United States, we have treated education around those seven liberal arts, with physical fitness now added to the mix and merging some of the other topics to keep the number at seven, as something sacred, than the actuality of the danger they always were. Because of the limits of a liberal education, people were defenseless in 2020 to properly deal with the aggressive political tactics of the Liberal World Order, which sought openly to take advantage of those limits and make a move to control all the political mechanisms of mankind.

I’ve never thought our education system, from pre-K to K through 12, or college and the post-graduate courses were enough for a properly balanced mind. I would suggest that the free education governments provide people is worth as much as you pay; free means its garbage. Aside from the ridiculous social concept of stealing the money for this monstrosity from property owners, a Marxist concept if there ever was one by Dewey and the gang of late 19th century progressives, the idea of a free education looks noble on paper. Yet, it has created drones of people unable to think for themselves. It has opened the door for tyrants, who know precisely how to cheat the system they created to serve the Liberal World Order, to rule over the masses based on the limits of their educations. People have been purposely taught to be stupid by those who want to rule the world. That is a concept that Plato never worked out in his Republic, and his student, Aristotle, was much keener on. Intelligence has to fight for its right to survive because there will always be aggressors who want to take advantage of the limits a society proposes to the world, based on everyone knowing essentially the same thing. Once you know the limits of a person’s understanding, you can do as Bill Gates does, and that’s Lie with Statistics. Control the information people see, so they never get the big picture because they don’t have the mind to see it.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for many decades, really, since I read the great book by Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County, a region of the country I was able to visit last year. And in those vast fields of Iowa, while sipping a Mello Yello in the early morning mist and looking west before the rest of my family awoke for the day, I was thinking about fashion and who decides what fashions will be popular, as the author of that book contemplated quite effectively. Who decides that blue jeans will be the fashion people will wear? Or what haircuts will people like? Or even what kinds of music will shape our society? When you start asking those kinds of questions, it all points back to the Masonic Seven Liberal Arts limits and how people who understand how to exploit what people know by looking like some mysterious high priest of esoteric knowledge suddenly tell people that mullets are coming back in style. It has been interesting over this last year to watch people come out of Covid, and suddenly, people are questioning the validity of their public education in ways they never have before, just as that Liberal World Order is trying to sell the world on the new religion of climate change and why gas prices must be high because of a war with Ukraine and that people need to give up their gas-powered cars in favor of an electric one that California can’t even support on their weak, self-imposed power grid. With people starting to educate themselves outside of what the Seven Liberal Arts instructed them, they are beginning to gain the ability to call BS on what they are being told by the media, also controlled by the limits of the Seven Liberal Arts, because they all had the identical educations and the limitations that went with them. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the whole plan was sinister from the start. I think the Masons, Greek, Egyptian, and Atlantian cultures that have created the foundations of the Seven Liberal Arts concept had good intentions. But as we know, the path to Hell is always paved with good intentions, and there were plenty of crazy, evil people who would seek to take advantage of the limits of liberal education in public schools for their own version of world domination. By teaching people to think in a box, and the crimes of humanity being conducted outside the box, then most of mankind would be vulnerable to those crimes because they would never see them coming or going. They would only feel the effects, which was essentially how the crime of Covid was perpetrated upon the entire earth to commit election fraud in the United States by hostile actors hiding in the shadows for a global overthrow and to solidify the power of the Liberal World Order, the Administrative State of perpetual government expansion. They never thought they would get caught because they assumed people had been taught not to see the crime. But with mass media and decentralized education going beyond the Seven Liberal Arts, there were enough people who could think outside of the box to disrupt what was going on inside that box that mass society was taught to stay inside. And the criminals were exposed and awaiting punishment. But first, people had to see for themselves what had been attempted, which is where we are today. Yet, it doesn’t take the edge off the fact that very few attempted the crimes to rule the great many. Bill Gates was one of them; he attempted to Lie with Statistics to take advantage of the limits of the Several Liberal Arts and impose on the world his new religion of Climate Change and all the evils that went with it. So long as people were as dumb as their liberal public educations had taught them to be, people might have gotten away with it. But of course, they didn’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Public Education is Over: It’s a nationwide change that isn’t going away

It’s not just the actions at Lakota schools in Northern Cincinnati that brought me to where I am now. I have spoken to dozens and dozens of people over the last few weeks regarding the Darbi Boddy school board drama, and I feel really sorry for the people who have been hoping that public education could be saved somehow. But as I have said to all those people and more, I just don’t see the controversy at Lakota. I see personality problems, but as I’ve said, whenever you get a clash of change agencies crashing into a very static institution, things are bound to get pushy. I never thought otherwise of the school board at Lakota. Instead, there are national trends that are forming in the background that are very much part of the Lakota story. What is about to happen at Lakota, with major resignations coming up due to the pressure of the changes, is going to happen in all public schools. I hoped to be wrong about it and hoped that with a decent school board, some form of public education for the people who do love it might last. But it’s quite clear to me that public education is impossibly broken and that the role of a modern school board is to manage the decline. Long gone are the days when Friday Night Football would rally behind the great local quarterback who threw 400 yards and four touchdowns to unite the community behind the sports page on a Saturday morning. And college recruits were in the stands handing out scholarships like Halloween candy. No, those days are over, forever. The people I have talked to as fall out from the controversies at Lakota are all well-intentioned. But they do not see the obvious because it’s simply too painful for them. They do love public education, and they really don’t have the heart for what’s coming.

Of course, you do want to know what’s coming and why now is such a pinnacle time. Well, institutions are collapsing along with the economy, which is overall the net result of over a century of failed progressive philosophy. They have gone all in, and the public has not been with them. All this became exposed during Covid, the progressive teacher unions, and the highly paid superintendent class that sort of functioned as a barrier between the radicals and the elected school board members. Once the rhythm was broken in the public education cycle, and people learned to live without it, there was no way ever to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. At best, public schools were going to be fragments of their former selves. But then parents learned just how radical the government schools really were. It used to be that many people, including Glenn Beck, were put off by my position on public education at the height of the Tea Party movement.    I was saying that public education was doomed to fail back in 2012 and 2013 when Beck and I had a mutual friend, Doc Thompson, who was trying to broker talk between us to do some radio work on The Blaze, as I used to do on Clear Channel Radio. I was too much of a rock thrower for Glenn Beck at that time of his life, and all avenues between The Blaze and me were cut after President Trump was elected. Soon after, Doc Thompson was mysteriously killed by a train while working directly for Beck in Texas. I was indifferent to Beck. He was a never-Trumper then, and of course, I was all about Trump, so there hasn’t been an opportunity to reconcile. Well, I had Beck’s show on in the background the other day, and he was telling everyone what I said a decade ago, “take your kids out of public schools; they are dangerous for your children. Do it now!” Just ten years ago, it was fringe when I said such things. Now it’s a mainstreamer conservative talk show host with many millions of people listening to him daily saying it. Times have changed a lot, and people are finally starting to listen. 

As I said during the Trump administration, if Covid hadn’t been set loose to destroy the fourth year of the president and hopes for re-election by destroying the American economy, the Department of Education was poised to be dismantled. States were preparing to apply a new funding model to the public school systems, where the money follows the child, not to the school. This would force the unionized institutions to compete for effectiveness. Lakota certainly wasn’t happy about that, and in many ways, Covid saved them from that eventuality. With Joe Biden in the White House, public education won’t see changes, but that’s not saying much. Biden, as of this writing, is at 28% approval. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules has shown serious proof of direct election fraud funded by Facebook, and institutional politics is trying desperately to keep it all undercover.

Meanwhile, more and more mad moms are getting elected to school boards, moms like Darbi Boddy at Lakota. Even if the school board convinced her to resign, there are hundreds just like her who are winning seats all over the country, and all want the same thing. They want to protect their kids from what they have come to see as an institutional menace to their children where school boards stand between them to keep the peace, to keep those Friday night football games something the community continues to do. But that all came to a crashing end with Covid, and parents found other things to do. 

In the last election, I supported school board members to help bring solutions, people I knew who liked public education more than I did. So a part of me really wanted to be wrong. I knew I wasn’t, but I wanted to be. As they are now, public schools will not survive the transition to a system where the money travels with the student, which will eventually happen. That gives the school boards the task of keeping that managed decline as good as possible so that the failure of public schools does not destroy entire communities. The communities around Lakota have much more going on than being destroyed by a school. Add to the high gas prices, the sudden shortages of items that people used to take for granted, and a political system at the federal level that people didn’t support to begin with; all the old progressive institutions are going to fail, just as the Biden administration is failing. Now that they have their dream candidate in the White House with both houses of Congress under their control, they went too far. They used Covid to grab for powers that terrified many parents who had been on the fence for their entire lives only to come face to face with their greatest fears, the pincushion, rainbow-haired LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ teachers who wanted to turn their tomboy daughters into a Tom and to cram it down their throats and demand that they like it. Well, people are tired of government ramming things down their throats, and they will take it out on their local communities, specifically their public schools. If they can’t get to Joe Biden, they’ll get to the local school board, who they see as just as much of a menace. And more and more, the moderates will be pushed off and replaced by mad moms seeking to protect their children the way angry mommas do. And there is no putting that anger back in the bottle now that people have admitted it to themselves. Public education is over. What we are seeing now is just the beginning. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Government Schools are Like Dirty Public Toilets: If you gotta go, you go

Public Schools are like Public Toilets

I often say about public education that it’s like using a Porta-Potty at an outdoor concert full of drunks after waiting for an hour in a long line in the hot summer sun as opposed to a nice private bathroom in your master bedroom.  I mean, if you gotta go, you use the damn thing.  But optimally, you want the nice one off your bedroom.  Public education is garbage and has been really since its inception.  I try to help make the public school in my district better by electing good people into office. Still, so long as the progressive labor unions run the government schools and a corrupt communist-oriented Department of Education sets the policy, there isn’t much hope for public schools.  And that’s the real point from the government and why the governor race in Virginia is competitive.  Parents after Covid have heard the quiet stuff out loud, and it has scared them.  Your children are not your children, they are possessions of the state, and with that simple revelation, Terry McAuliffe uttered that which was never meant to be said in public.  The true intentions of the entire progressive movement, the micromanagement of every aspect of our lives, and the theft of our children to turn them into communist insurgents.  Thankfully this year, and this 2021 election, we have options.  But the damage is decades old and is nothing new to me. 

I started this blog site over a decade ago to cover the stories our local newspapers wouldn’t cover about gross sexual acts teachers routinely committed against the students of my home district of Lakota.  This latest terror in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a guy dressed up as a girl raped two girls brutally in a bathroom, is not unusual in public education. What’s unique about this one is that it involved the trans bathroom controversy, which is going on in most public schools.  The issue is hot in Lakota, which is in northern Cincinnati.  A majority of the current school board members supported it, which is why there are so many candidates seeking to knock them out during this election.  But this has been going on all over the United States because it comes from the Department of Education essentially and the talking points of the teacher’s unions who are entirely in support of all the Democrat Party platforms.  The trans condition is a new wrinkle to the old problem of school boards covering up this bad behavior from the parents to keep all this bad behavior undercover.  Newspapers and local television will cover the football games and all the feel-good stories but ignore all the vile sex abuse in just about every corner.  A quick search of my blog site will list hundreds of stories that I have covered, and those are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more that goes on that nobody will ever find out about. 

I ran into a lot of trouble with Lakota when I covered a grade school teacher taking naked pictures and sexually abusing students in the classroom.  This was ten years ago, and the school board very much wanted to cover up the whole case.  They thought that I was hurting real estate values in our community by slamming the school by me covering it.  They worried that people wouldn’t move to the neighborhood because everyone knew that schools were the only reason people bought homes.  Most adults in my community didn’t want to hear about the sexual molestation of children by school employees because it might hurt property values.  So the coverups continued.  Ten years later, one of the people running for this year’s school board is Vanessa Wells, who had her daughter threatened with murder in Lakota.  Of course, the school board tried to cover it up and attempted to suppress the story, which was a considerable court case.  Vanessa became tired of being a victim, so she put her name in the ring to become a school board member.  Truthfully, the way to solve the problem is to elect good school board members. Still, until recently, until some of these stories started being talked about because parents realized during Covid shutdowns what was going on in the schools, nobody wanted to discuss it.  Parents were happy to get the free babysitting service, and they didn’t want to know the bad stuff.  People voted for big progressive school board people, and the unions ran all over them.  In that way, government schools became like that public toilet that nobody cleaned, and people pissed all over, then expected good results.  

I’m happy to hear that more and more parents are homeschooling their children.  My kids are homeschooling their kids, and the resources I see there are amazing for them.  When my kids were young, my wife and I homeschooled them at various times.  One issue was when the school demanded we give our kids sex education in the 4th grade.  We had to pull our kids out of school because the political pressure was so great that it became impossible to send them to school.  My kids both spent their senior years of high school in Europe, where they were learning about life in real-time, not just reading about it in some art class where their classmates were plotting all the ways they would get drunk on a Friday night at a football game.  I learned firsthand that public schools were a waste of time and were evil in their social intentions, so I’m not surprised at all at the news stories now. I’m happy that so many people have finally caught on to what I’ve been saying for three decades.  The straw that finally broke the back of public education was the overstep of progressive politics, first with Covid, then by driving the transexual issues of unisex bathrooms. 

I am encouraged by each election, as they are all opportunities for positive changes back to tradition.  But the brand of government schools is forever damaged.  A few years ago, if I had said that public schools were equivalent to a dirty public toilet, many people would come to their defense.  But not today.  Now, most people are just saying, “yeah, you’re right.” Public schools and their government overlords and labor unions have done it to themselves.  But none more than Terry McAuliffe letting the cat out of the bag at a debate with his challenger in Virginia for the governor race.  It’s true; public schools have always sought to steal our children, to use them, to abuse them, to turn them into Anti-American activists. It’s the system itself that is at fault.  It was broken from the start, and the school board’s job was not to manage the district and the money but to lay cover for all the crimes because the value of the school to the community was much more important than the kids themselves.  So great evils were perpetuated, and the expectation was to always cover it up from the parents so they’d keep paying for the higher taxes and keep running on the treadmill to fuel the whole enterprise, never questioning anything.  But times have changed, and I think it’s for the better, as ugly as it is.  It’s about time that everyone admits what the problem has always been.  Public schools are dirty and messy, and if you love your child, you would never send them there.  Ever.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Ray Murray Thinks it will take 38 Years to Spend Lakota’s $100 Million Surplus: Why people like he and Julie Shaffer should never be in charge of a budget

$100 million is a lot of money to liberals who only see future pay increases for subpar work leading to easy labor union contract negotiations. And clearly one school board member, Julie Shaffer displayed at a recent meet the candidate’s night at the VOA Miami University Campus Lecture Hall how little she knows about money. Her partner in such a perspective was Ray Murray, the former school board member coming back for more and local pastor pontificated that we wouldn’t—couldn’t spend that much money of a surplus for 38 years, so to his utterances why not give it all away. Now you can see dear reader why it’s dangerous to elect these kinds of people into a management of our tax money. Instead of respecting that money and understanding that the surplus wasn’t really one at all, but a debt leverage problem that needed attention, they tried to paint the fiscal conservative on the board, Lynda O’Connor as a Chicken Little for pointing out that deficit spending is not a healthy condition. No wonder the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get Ray and Julie back on the board and managing their contracts a few years out. They already have that money spent whereas Lynda and the newcomer James Hahn understand that $100 million is not that much money, especially when you look at the overall budget needs.

I did get to talk to Matt Miller the Lakota superintendent and the very good treasurer Jenni Logan, recognized throughout the state of Ohio as the very best in her field, and they assured me that they were going to tackle the deficit spending problem. Sure, it’s fun to spend money like there’s no tomorrow, but smart people like Jenni, and Lynda understand that $100 million as a surplus isn’t much when the operating budget is around $160 million per year, where the only product is educating students, (or babysitting them) and they aren’t doing a very good job at that either, getting a recent poor report card from the state that shows money does not improve results. The teachers need to work harder and worry less about transgender bathroom policies.

I was encouraged to see many friends from the business community not sitting this election out, they are not impressed with the $100 million surplus either. They are wondering why Lakota can’t lower their tax burden if they are operating at such a surplus and not considering spending pauses so that they could continue to build up elements of our community that really matter, jobs and recreation that make a community what it really is, and not just a cesspool of employment for a liberalized labor union trying to program our children into future Democrats. Had they not been there this election might have a different tone, but even the spending addict Julie Shaffer had to watch her mouth so not to sound “too” Democrat in such a conservative district even with pro spending liberals showing out in full force to support future contract negotiations. The smart people want to see James Hahn elected instead of Ray or Julie because that would put a third conservative on the board and would help manage that surplus responsibly. But if left to Ray and Julie, to Lynda’s point, the money will all be gone in around 5 years. Jenni gets it. But Matt didn’t look so happy to see me, and not so excited about focusing on the deficit spending aspect. Elections have consequences and a lot of people are waiting to see how this one turns out.

The best thing to do with the money would be to lessen the burden on future taxpayers to inspire more investment and continued growth. What is lost on Ray and Julie as to the role of the school board in the community is that they not only have to manage the quality of the school, but the cost and to understand the balance between the two. The way it has been, which has sickened me to my core, is that school districts leverage their power to tax against future investment. If you want to play in their school district then they expect you to pay, which is something I will be covering much more in subsequent articles. I can understand the tension in the room at that candidate’s forum. I understand idealistic people with a bloodthirsty zeal to support their school system without understanding how the cheese is made behind the scenes. It’s much easier to just focus on kids and transgender bathrooms, whether or not busing is available and the quality of the sports program. But the question remains, what makes a school district good, is the businesses that attract jobs and good quality applicants who need housing, places to eat, and shop. Or is it the schools that we pour millions and millions of dollars into that just go to overpriced teachers teaching our children radical leftist political activism only to have those kids grow up and to move away. I would say it’s the businesses that come first then the schools that reflect the quality of a well-managed community. And that is something no school system wants to admit to, because it would destroy their extortion racket that they have politically on a community, and financially.

There is a reason so many real estate people are involved with pro levy endeavors, or government labor union types. It’s because behind the scenes schools leverage themselves into the business community with subtle threats directly attached to their ability to tax. Pay or be destroyed, or don’t do business altogether. Being in pro education anything groups like I was last night the people are not the risk takers who go out and obtain financing for some next new great thing, they are just average people who want to feel what they are doing by investing in Lakota will make their kids like them when they grow up. They want to think that the education system will fix all their deficiencies as people. That is certainly the case of Julie Shaffer and her past protégé Joan Powell who were part of those upside-down deficit spending habits that almost destroyed Lakota and the community it sits in. The reason there is a $100 million surplus now is because so many kids grew up and away and new kids did not replace them, so Lakota has declining enrollment that will continue into the future, and that took the pressure off our budget tremendously, but the deficit spending has continued and will so long as there is a three vote majority against proper budget management.

As Julie said trying to defer blame from herself, school boards don’t pass levies, they don’t demand further tax increases. They leave it up to the voters. But what school boards do however is mismanage the money we give them. They cave into labor union demands for ever increasing rates of pay that is not connected to any performance standards. And when Julie won’t take her part of the blame for the deficit spending and when Ray, who was there all along thinks it is party time at Lakota, that they have 38 years to spend that $100 million surplus, well there is the problem. We have a chance to fix it with this election, but people are going to have to show up to vote. If they don’t then the same deficit spenders will be in place, the labor unions will love it because Julie and Ray would gladly approve a contract negotiation because they don’t have the guts to deal with a strike or bad press for standing up for the taxpayers. And they will lead the charge against the business community to twist their arms into silent approval or else boycotts from the radical union members will come after their brand with a fury. And none of those questions were asked at the candidate forum because as we all know, it’s something that people just don’t talk about. But it is every bit the core of the problem.

Rich Hoffman

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