Tag: Lakota Levy

The Lakota Levy of 2025 Goes Down in Flames: How the rest of the country looks ahead of the Midterms

There weren’t too many surprises in the elections of 2025, locally or nationally.  The trend of the country can best be stated in the Lakota school levy of 2025, where their $500 million proposal to tear down a bunch of buildings and replace them with new ones for really no reason told the story of voter sentiment.  While it might seem wise not to get too excited about election results ahead of the midterms, so as not to take the edge off voter engagement, because you want to inspire your side to go and vote, the races around the rest of the country told the story very well.  In areas like New York, Virginia, California, and New Jersey, the never Trumpers were trying to go it alone and win elections without Trump, and we saw where that got everyone.  Predictable losses, and as for Mamdani in the New York mayor race, that is a trend happening in a lot of mature areas where open communism has been taught through the public school system, and people have become complacent to the economic math, and susceptible to free stuff.  That was certainly the case in West Chester where I live regarding the trustee race there.  West Chester has been very successful and people turned to the hard left in what they think is compassion.  But it says more about community cycles than it does the real place voters reside, as an average.  And for that, the Lakota levy, with a very vigilant beat, says where most of the country stands, and the way they will vote in the upcoming Midterms.  As to Trump’s warning that Democrats will win if Republicans don’t learn to play hardball, he’s right.  But voters want to vote for hard-hitting winners, and the Democrats have put the loser label on their own party.

The shutdown by the Democrats tells that whole story of what they know about themselves.  It was a desperate attempt to out-leverage Trump, and they have lost in a big way there, making it Democrats who wouldn’t pay for military troops, or SNAP benefits.  The grotesque nature of giving away free things to desperate or overly comfortable people doesn’t have the appeal that it used to.  People as a whole have shown that they want MAGA Republicans, not Dick Cheney Republicans.  The more MAGA, the better, which paves a clear path for the upcoming Midterms.  In the chess game of redistricting the maps of states to pick up more seats for Republicans, or whether Democrats can do the same in California, or other places, the lesson is, people are people and Democrats can’t win if they don’t cheat.  They just don’t have the numbers.  The final votes for the Lakota levy were 60,81% against, to 39.1% for, which is a good sampling of where the entire country is on the Midterm sweep.  While the Lakota levy is a public school sample that is regional, the assumption of how Democrats might leverage their position is reflective of national politics and the general demographics.  I have said many times that if you take away the cheating, Democrats are likely only 25% of the country.  The rest of the country, 75% of whom agree on most things, just want to see things not get in their way.  Democrats in the Lakota school district assumed that more people were with them because they only speak to their social networks.  So they overestimated their chances.  They are in a state of denial, just as they were over the Schumer Shutdown, that their ability to give away free stuff would get them more votes without the help of election fraud and illegal immigration.  But that hasn’t turned out to be the case.

Welcome to the Doug Horton Lakota School Board

One of the dangers of a thriving community, such as what we have in the Lakota school system, where people from all over the country want to move to it to enjoy its success, it’s the same kind of reason that New York City has a lot of diverse people and when you break things down to a lot of choices, such as what it was for the West Chester trustee race where everyone running only obtained around 20% of the vote it captures in people the indecision that they feel when given a choice based on the spectrum of sentiment that people possess.  But when it’s a single issue where it’s either good or bad, as in the case of the Lakota levy, then the decision is a lot clearer.  People are messy, and when Democrats recruit them to their cause, they have numerous entry points of value.  But even with an infusion of people moving into a region from all over the country, which is certainly the case with the Lakota school district, it’s still the mature residents who have always been in the region that hold the cultural power of maintaining an area’s value.  And that will be the case nationally for the Midterms.  Whatever hopes that Democrats have gained through cheating the system, with illegal immigration, shut down extortion, mail-in voting fraud, any way they could utilize to close the gaps just don’t work when it forces them actually to perform.  When people are given a choice, as in the Lakota levy, there is no playing nice with the other side; people will decisively pick the winner, which is a lesson all Republicans should utilize. 

A big mouth who wants big taxes

Just as in the concessions on the redrawing of the congressional map in Ohio were promoted as a good thing for all sides involved, playing nice isn’t going to win elections.  And playing nice with Democrats in Ohio over the congressional map isn’t going to help win the Midterms.  Trump is right, and Republicans need to learn from him.  When they try to play nice, they lose, to the many ways that Democrats cheat, even if the fraud is in packing high-density areas with demographics that might be inclined to socialism, such as in New York, and even in West Chester, Ohio.  But since the number of actual Democrats isn’t a very high proportion, as shown in the very diverse community of Lakota schools, where a vast amount of the population is represented, and when given a real choice, will pick the winning message, even if it’s not the popular message, but the winning one.  That is how Trump won in 2024, and that is how the Midterms will be won, and voters will pick in favor of the Republicans, if the GOP doesn’t get into all this playing nice stuff.  The only side that benefits from playing nice is the Democrats.  They are always vulnerable because they are the minority in situations involving physical confrontations.  They win when Republicans play fair and friendly.  It’s part of their fraud mechanism.  And if there was anything to learn from this 2025 election, it’s that, where Trump was not on the ticket, Republicans lost.  Where GOP politics ran away from Trump, as they certainly did in Virginia, Republicans didn’t perform well.  Playing nice only feeds Democrats and their chances.  But not playing nice helps give voters an accurate emotional representation in GOP politics.  And that was certainly the case with the Lakota levy of Butler County.  How many times have people told me that the opposition forces need to be nicer to the bad guys?  A lot!  But the opposition forces didn’t listen, and they played hardball, as was deserved.  And the issue wasn’t even close.  That is the model for the rest of the country: play hardball, take away the cheating mechanisms of Democrats, and they can’t win.  The shutdown of the government was a desperate attempt by them to find their footing, and it didn’t work, forcing them to concessions they would rather not admit to.  And going into the midterms, that is the way that Republicans can pick up seats, not just hold their majority.  But don’t play nice; only losers do that.  When you have the means to win, do it, and don’t apologize for it.  Or feel sorry for the other side.  Because when the shoe is on the other foot, they aren’t nice, but ruthless, and they never look back. 

Rich Hoffman

We’re rebuilding the school board. Good management is the best way to defeat tax increases.

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Why Lakota Voters Should Reject the Largest School Levy in Ohio History: Vote for Ben Nguyen and listen to my Friend, Jamie Minniear on 55 KRC

In the heart of Butler County, the Lakota School District is asking voters to approve what would be the largest school tax levy in Ohio history—a staggering $506.4 million bond issue paired with a permanent improvement levy. This proposal, if passed, would cost homeowners $208 per year for every $100,000 of appraised property value, with collections beginning in 2029. While district officials claim the net increase will be closer to $93.10 per $100,000 due to retiring debt, the reality remains: this is a massive financial commitment for taxpayers, especially seniors and working families already burdened by inflation and rising costs. The levy’s purpose? To demolish nine existing schools—some only 40 years old—and build four new elementary schools, while reducing the total number of buildings from 21 to 16. But many residents, including Jamie and Todd Minniear, leaders of the No More Lakota Taxes campaign, argue that this plan is fiscally irresponsible and prioritizes construction over classroom needs.

Jamie Minniear, speaking on 55KRC with Brian Thomas, passionately advocated for Ben Nguyen, a 2025 Lakota graduate and conservative school board candidate who opposes the levy. She described Nguyen as a sharp, creative thinker with fresh ideas for education reform and a deep understanding of the district’s challenges. Nguyen’s candidacy represents a new generation of leadership—one that values fiscal discipline, educational outcomes, and community engagement over extravagant spending. Jamie emphasized that the levy is not about improving teacher pay or classroom instruction; it’s about tearing down buildings and replacing them with new ones, regardless of whether they truly need replacement. She and Brian Thomas, the host, recalled his own experience attending classes in trailers and rundown buildings, yet still receiving a quality education. Her point was clear: education doesn’t require luxury—it requires commitment, good teachers, and community support.

The Minniear-led opposition has gained traction by highlighting the lack of transparency and misleading ballot language. While the ballot shows a 5.94-mill increase, the district claims the real impact will be 2.66 mills due to debt roll-off. This discrepancy has confused voters and raised concerns about the district’s communication strategy. Moreover, the district’s plan to reconfigure grade bands, shift students between buildings, and consolidate campuses has sparked anxiety among parents who fear disruption and overcrowding. Critics argue that the district should focus on maintaining existing infrastructure, investing in teacher development, and enhancing academic programs—not launching a half-billion-dollar construction spree. The Ohio Facilities Construction Commission rated many of the buildings slated for demolition as “borderline” or “satisfactory,” further questioning the necessity of such drastic measures.

Ultimately, the levy represents a philosophical divide in the community: between those who believe more spending equals better education, and those who believe in doing more with less. Jamie Minniear and her husband Todd have galvanized a grassroots movement that champions responsible stewardship, local control, and student-centered priorities. Their campaign is not anti-education—it’s pro-accountability. They believe that rejecting this levy is the first step toward a broader conversation about what truly matters in public education. With Ben Nguyen on the ballot and a growing chorus of concerned citizens, Lakota voters have a chance to send a clear message: we support our schools, but we demand smarter solutions. On November 4, vote NO on the Lakota levy!

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota’s School Board Approves a Reckless LEA Contract: The new average teacher salary will be $73,000!

It’s a very hard thing to do, to sit in front of a person, or a group of people when you are an employer and tell someone they are not worth as much money in employment as they think they are. I would say it is one of the hardest things in the world, and most managers aren’t good at it. Yet in the private sector managers must do it every day to keep books balanced in relation to the income they are dealing with. But in government seldom if ever does an elected manager push themselves to endure the ridicule of such a situation and that’s what happened at Lakota schools on Monday April 23rd 2018. A radical teacher’s union sat in front of the school board hoping for an approval of their LEA contract which provided raises of 3.5% for the first year, 3.25 for year two and 3.25 for year three—this after they had received a 1.9% cost of living increase plus bonuses. Surely the recent teacher uprisings in Kentucky were on the minds of the board and they had no stomach for a strike—which should never happen when children are involved, yet the threat had been made by the Lakota teachers under the whispers of insurrection. Lakota had been operating with a nice budget surplus, and they are actively looking for ways to compete with other districts for a limited number of teaching positions—no doubt all that played out when the deciding vote from the conservative Todd Parnell cast in favor of the contract. Yet the massive irresponsibility that transpired could be applied to every government position in America, what was happening at Lakota was happening in every city and county and is a trend that must be stopped, otherwise everything will come to a terrible end soon.

At first glance the conditions of this Lakota teacher’s contract seem reasonable. After all, roughly 3% in raises is on par for most cost of living projections. The problem is a little deeper than that when we find out 3% of what? 3.5% of $45,000 a year would be reasonable for a public-school teacher which is essentially a glorified babysitter these days. It could easily be argued, and it should, that teachers in the modern age are doing more damage to children with liberalized educations than they help because children will have to undo all that mess at some point in their adulthoods. But for the babysitting service for busy parents, $45,000 per year to hold 26 children in a classroom environment may be worth the cost. But that’s not what we are talking about in the case of Lakota. Currently the average cost of teachers within the Lakota district is $70,000 per year. While some teachers may be worth that much money the number is likely under 5%. The other 95% of all employees at Lakota are likely worth a figure under $50,000 per year based on the value of the teaching profession to the world at large. Market value considerations should be applied, but because we are talking about government schools, no such value is ever applied. Instead, teacher unions collectively bargain to rack up huge cost impositions against property tax payers of those schools in the district of their residence and as a result, these parasitic labor unions destroy any sense of reality when it comes to labor negotiations. The only negotiating they do is demand more money as teachers, or they walk off the job leaving kids to fend for themselves while those busy parents seek some way to have someone watch their children while the teachers are demanding more money. Not a good system by any measure.

The net result of the Todd Parnell vote is that the average wage for Lakota teachers went up from $70,000 per year to $73,000 by the end of the contract and that is just reprehensible. As I have said, probably only 5% of the teachers are worth that much money. An even fewer percentage are probably worth more, but a vast majority likely aren’t even worth $50,000 and they only make that because of the radicalized collective bargaining negotiations that take place due to the government unions that have infested all these government schools. Parnell should have voted against the contract but as he looked out at all those teachers in the audience, it is hard to stand against such a tide. After all those employees don’t really care about the students because they threaten at every turn to walk off a job if they don’t get their collective bargaining. At best such tactics by the unions are terrorism and obviously Parnell as a school board member didn’t want to be responsible for setting off a labor incident at Lakota. I’ll have to give credit to Lynda O’Connor, she did hold strong on the school board, but she was the only one.

Obviously to pay for those raises Lakota is eyeing a tax levy because once you give union employees something they never go backwards and will continue to ask for more and more until the entire system is bankrupt. When Lakota does ask for the next levy I will use this incident to explain why the government school doesn’t deserve it. Very few voters can sympathize with a bunch of government employees upset about a levy passage when they make over $73,000 per year on average. That is a ridiculously high wage rate for job positions that are simply glorified babysitters. In the past when school board members like Julie Shafer have attacked me for standing against school levies what they really are mad at are the bad decisions they made in the past that required levy passage to sustain a budget—because they want to throw money at teachers and be the good guys with their peers instead of doing the hard work of management and telling those employees that they aren’t worth the money. Let those unhappy teachers go to some other district and lower the payroll of the Lakota budget. Hire fresh teachers right out of college who only make $45K per year. If they want to make more, leave and let Lakota hire some new fresh faces. That is what you do in management. But if you don’t know what you are doing with people and employees, you think that experience is worth the money. Often it isn’t. Youth and vigor are often what children need to learn new things, not some old over paid coffee sipping teacher just milking the system because the union protects their lack of ambition behind collective bargaining. I would bet that most of the teachers in the Lakota school system fall in this mediocre category, and it is the responsibility of the school board to do the hard job when they can to keep those costs down by pushing those old budget busters away.

The problem of budget busting happens when nobody wants to be the bad guy and tell employees that they aren’t worth what they think they are. Schools need to operate more like the private sector does because after all that is what we are supposed to be preparing kids for. The goal isn’t to prepare kids for some socialist indoctrination center called college any more. That scam has been fully revealed to be extremely destructive to the education process. Most kids would be better off not going to college so to keep their minds intact—and reluctantly voters are starting to admit that to themselves—as hard has it is to come to terms with. Many parents save for a long time to send their children to college with life savings that would be better spent elsewhere—so it is hard to acknowledge that colleges are only indoctrination centers and the prep work happens in public schools paid for through a socialist practice of taxing private property. Even knowing all that nobody wants the public school to fail in their community because the schools attach themselves to businesses and homes in an unhealthy way, and until that changes school board members like Todd Parnell will find themselves split. Parents don’t want to lose that free baby-sitting service while they are out in the world doing what they think is important stuff—to pay for their kids to go to college. That whole problem is far too philosophically challenging for them. But I know this, in Lakota there are a lot more residents with kids out of the schools than in them, so if Lakota wants an embarrassing bloodbath at the ballot box, I suppose that’s what they’ll get due to their poor management of tax payer resources.

Rich Hoffman
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How West Chester’s Joan Powell and Bonito Mussolini are one in the same: Understanding fascism based on real history

Whether she realizes it or not, Joan Powell’s core philosophy is very similar to Bonito Mussolini’s chief architect of fascism, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile.  There is a reason that politically left thinking people do not talk about the father of Italian fascism and attempt to use transference to distance themselves from all forms of Marxist European failures be it that of communism, socialism or fascism.  Gentile stated “everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” and he tried to implement those terms in Italy until the Allies landed and captured Mussolini.  Hitler immediately freed the fascist leader and was given parts of the German empire to rule where he immediately moved toward the socialist terms identified by Gentile.  As Dinesh D’Souza identified in The Big Lie, a book everyone should read that is in book stores right now, the story is told quite effectively of how the political left took the political platform issues that they were guilty of committing that were essentially right out of the Nazi and fascist playbook and have used their control of our education system and our media companies to erase history and attribute those traits to a bunch of slack-jawed Republicans who didn’t know how to defend themselves until Donald Trump took over the party.  If you know your history you would find that Bonito Mussolini’s political beliefs were essentially the same as Joan Powell’s.  Read her thoughts on her own website cited below.

http://joanpowell4wc.com/

People never reveal themselves as villains, but with Joan Powell we have her history as a Lakota school board member to use as a means to gage her performance.  By her nature Joan Powell is a big union protector, which is how she got into the race in West Chester as union radicals fearful of the ultimate reality of Right to Work in Ohio was discussed in a West Chester board meeting.  The discussion  about Right to Work of course was centered on trying to entice more businesses to locate in West Chester.  In many cases the high taxes from Lakota schools are enough to scare away business investment so the current Trustees have had to get very creative in finding reasons for business to think about making considerable investments into the region.   In the world of Bonito Mussolini totalitarianism designed to bring about a true socialist state as outlined in the 1919 document Fasci di Combattimento universal suffrage was established as a value.  When Joan Powell was president of the Lakota school board she led her followers to cut busing and sports programs to hold tax payers over a barrel until she obtained her tax increase.  That is aligned with the mentality of Mussolini fascism.  They also under fascism wanted to lower the age of voting to eighteen so they could access the youth freshly taught socialism in schools to give more power to the state.  Joan Powell did this by using the The Spark magazine at Lakota to inspire the children of the school system to go into the community and vandalize dissidents to the tax increase and fully exploited them in the media for the same end—not directly of course, but she did this through her minions—people I called latté sipping prostitutes.   Now to be fair to Joan, most public schools do these things because they are government-run schools and they teach school board members these methods.  Just Joan comes from that very socialist system and has been formed to it through her 16 years as a school board member.  She may not fully understand why she knows what she knows, but based on her actions, she knows it, and her mode of philosophic reckoning is socialism—specifically Bonito Mussolini style fascism.  Additionally it was Bonito Mussolini who championed an eight-hour workday, which became the unionized model that we have all had imposed on us in the United States.  This was an attack on the mechanisms of capitalism to begin giving workers management approval over productive output which led to eventual worker participation in industrial management and essentially the nationalization of entire industries.  During the Lakota levy campaigns Joan’s levy minions attacked private businesses that did not support the tax increase publicly extorting them with bad publicity if they did not fall in line with the totalitarianism of the Lakota levy tax increase.  It wasn’t Joan and her school board that was in charge, it was the radical LEA union that put Joan in place as their mouth piece and they used her to perpetually obtain step increases year after year mandating further tax increases on private property.  Mussolini would go on to propose that there be an 85% tax on war profits and had strong anti-clerical policies including no religious instruction in the schools.  Under Joan Powell’s years as a school board president there was a strict adherence to policies against religion in the school system for fear that state money might not come to Lakota by Governor Strickland if Lakota didn’t comply.  But perverts who were teachers who sexually abused kids were given a free pass and in many cases had everything covered up in defense of the school, and not the children as individuals—all of this in perfect alignment with Italian fascism in World War II right in West Chester, Ohio in the modern-day.

It was never anything personal with Joan Powell when she and I had many public fights through the media.  But I know history and I know what I see and understand how things became that way.  Donald Trump is the opposite of fascism, Nazism, racism—and flagrant socialism.  Joan Powell is a defender of all those things and she came out in favor of Hillary Clinton (a known criminal) during the last election.  Yes they played nice music on her ad for Hillary and she proclaimed that she was afraid that Donald Trump was too angry to be president of the United States.   But why are we so angry, even hostile at people like Joan Powell?  Because they keep messing with us and seeking to apply socialism through taxation and expanding government into all aspects of our lives—progressives are afraid of hostility because they don’t want it leveled at them when we catch them in all these lies and manipulations.  They would rather keep everyone dumb and subdued than to deal with an educated voting population who knows the difference about fascism and free market capitalism which is how West Chester has obtained so much success lately, because Mark Welch and George Lang have shrunk government, taken away a tremendous amount of tax burden and made zoning much more friendly to new business lowering their cost of compliance.

When Cathy Stoker and Lee Wong were the two to one vote on the West Chester Trustee Board before Mark Welch was elected a few years ago there was a lot of abuse with the zoning board punishing some companies over political affiliation.  If it became known that a company was affiliated with the Tea Party the zoning board would harass them until they eventually went out of business.   That was certainly the case with the Grand Ol’ Pub in West Chester.  They were constantly picked on by the zoning board and that direction came from the trustees Wong and Stoker.  Meanwhile, Willie’s across the street got by freely and was actually a meeting place for pro levy Lakota people.  In that place of business Lakota coaches and teachers would bend the ear of 700 WLW personality Bill Cunningham who owned the place, to lobby against my effective on-air campaign against them.  Bill tried to stay out of it but behind the totalitarianism of the Joan Powell led school board and the radical levy supporters he was convinced to come after me and a lot of controversy was blown in my direction—and it was Joan who was the one doing the blowing.  If I had been a normal person my career might have been over and the public shaming might have destroyed me.  But I’m unique, there is no such thing as bad publicity and it caused me to sell enough books to take my family on a nice vacation that year—so thanks Joan.   On my part I used the nature of Joan Powell to my advantage because I understood who I was dealing with.  Now I’m telling voters of West Chester—this is the person who wants to run your community.  Because if she gets elected and she has slack-jawed Lee Wong there as a second vote—Joan essentially wants to do to West Chester what Mussolini did to Italy—and that isn’t an inflated statement.  It’s based on a factual analysis of her actual behavior, and that is something that should concern everyone.

Rich Hoffman

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The Lakota Technology Plan: Government creating worthless jobs for political reasons

As stated in a previous article written about the proposed Lakota levy of 2013 due to declining enrollment they are already facing a layoff of many employees—but they plan to ignore it, in favor of finding new, creative ways of employing themselves at taxpayer expense.  When a politician states that government needs to “create jobs” Lakota is the example they are referring to.  In the case of Lakota, they are inventing new ways to have more worthless staff on the payroll of property owners for the sole intention of “creating jobs.”  For the proof, let me direct your attention to the below graphic, which shows what Lakota plans to do with the levy money extracted from the public during the upcoming election.Slide 5

As seen above Lakota plans to create a whole division of new bureaucratic job positions for government workers who wouldn’t exist in the private sector.  Only in government would such a bloated proposal even be considered.  The jobs shown are unnecessary as most of the software these days has intuitive instructions already present and do not require all these employees to serve as middle meddlers of information delivery.  Only a gigantic government driven entity like Lakota would propose such a plan purely for the creation of jobs without being driven by any kind of need, but the whim of a superintendent to use the terminology to garner a levy passage.

If Mantia were to get her levy acceptance and impose on the community of Lakota taxes that would instantly turn off business investment, she would have no problem throwing nearly $1 million dollars in payroll at buying a levy, because her end game is the distribution of the remaining $12 million to the teachers and administration at Lakota who are seeking a minimum raise of $117.50 per month.  As a reminder Mantia also plans to toss $350,000 toward Sheriff Jones to buy his support of the Lakota levy by hiring a few token cops to patrol the hallways of Lakota looking for crazed gunmen intent on shooting rampages—a situation that would be solved with the simple acceptance of the Second Amendment.  Government with its rules makes society more dangerous forcing tax payers to hire police to protect them from harms which could easily be eliminated with a .500 magnum carried by a parent dropping their child off at school.  But that is a story for another time.  Presently, the Lakota Technology Plan is simply the birth of a new bureaucracy which is typical in unionized establishments where jobs and processes are created solely for the benefit of the needless jobs.

Most of the proposed technology intended under the Lakota Technology Plan could be taught to the teachers by the average 8th grader who could figure out and utilize most software applications within five minutes of exposure due to the intuitive nature of modern technology whose intended end users are those same youthful students.  The teachers of technology as unionized employees are by their very nature inefficient in their overly specialized fields of endeavor, and often find their minds limited to learning because of it.  It is these types of people who are supposedly going to teach the teachers who will then teach the students, who could easily teach the “instructional specialists” at the start of the process.  The entire scam is designed not to teach the children—but to give the adult teachers some kind of something to do—just to keep them employed at Lakota—to “create a job.”

What fails at Lakota in this case is the needed question of whether or not the jobs should even exist.  Superintendent Mantia simply proposed the creation of the “Lakota Technology Plan” to toss $1 million dollars of payroll toward the sacrificial cause of passing a school levy to obtain the other $12 million she needs to throw at the LEA union.  Likely, the staff employed under the plan will spend most of their day trying to figure out whether or not they want to go to Chipotle, Wendy’s, or Penera Bread for lunch.  That process will start right around 9:30 in the morning once they’ve updated their Facebook accounts and looked at what all their friends are posting.  Once they figure out where they are going for lunch, then they have to figure out who is going to get it.  That will take an additional hour and a half because in so doing, the gossip about their friends, family and neighbors will ensue.  During lunch they will eat their food and browse the internet shopping on eBay and Amazon.com.  After lunch they will have their eye on the clock for the end of the day and will look online at the television shows they plan to watch when they get home.  While doing that, they will read the latest Hollywood gossip from the various entertainment sites talking about who is sleeping with whom, and what the Kardashions are doing lately.  Rumor has it that Bruce Jenner—the Kardashions father—wants to be a woman.  That will evoke talk that will carry these employees through to the end of the day.  Out of a 40 hour work week, these employees might do 2.5 hours of actual productive work, and they will be paid around $65K per year to do it by Lakota—if the levy passes.

Nobody will manage these people because nobody will care.  Mantia certainly won’t be busting into their department unannounced to catch them on the internet playing around all day because she won’t care—she will have already gotten what she needed out of them—money to cover the cost of the LEA contract.  For all she cares, those Lakota Technology Plan employees can take the rest of the year off with pay, because they served her purpose.  Now, of course I can’t know exactly what is going on in Mantia’s mind and without question when pressed she will deny these things.  But I see through it, and she knows I do.  I know her.  I also know management, I know labor behavior practices, and I understand politics all too well, and my scenario whether it is the intended result or not, will be the reality.  It will be the result of her $1 million dollars in proposed payroll.  The direct benefactors will Chipotle, Wendy’s, Penera Bread, eBay, and Amazon.com.  The suckers will be the Lakota tax payers if they do anything other than vote NO on the proposed levy.   But children will not be taught anything about technology by these new employees—if anything it will be the other way around.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

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The Lakota Levy of 2017: After they try the 2013 attempt

Lakota is currently trying to pass a 2013 tax increase so it probably will come as a shock that the school will be planning a 2017 levy attempt as soon as they can.  In the chart shown in the following video, I use another “bullwhip economic” trick to demonstrate how targeted cuts to the Lakota school district could maintain the profitable trend they have shown over the last couple of years.  Yet, the school apparently resents greatly their operation of maintaining a budget surplus and has very immediate intentions of escalating their spending as soon as they receive levy passage.  In the following chart, the red line represents the tax revenue that the Lakota communities of Liberty Township and West Chester Twp provide to the school.  The blue line is the budget for Lakota.  Watching this video it will be clear that the recent levy defeats have forced Lakota to bring their costs in line with the tax revenue supplied.  As explained, the teacher’s contract the district has with the Lakota Education Association has maintained a wage freeze lasting through 2014.  This is why the district has operated in a surplus.  However, it is also clear that the intention of the levy of 2013 is to throw money at the new teacher’s contract because the blue line spikes up dramatically and predictably until 2017.  The green line is the amount of funding the school intends to inject into their financial dynamics upon levy passage in 2013.  As it becomes terribly obvious, the green line and blue line intersect during the year 2017 meaning that Lakota will have to pursue another tax increase at that time.

It is terribly obvious that Lakota has been forced by the voting community to live within their budget with levy failures, which is good.  Yet they have been promising that the summer of 2014 would reap a payday to school employees because the blue line spikes sharply upward countering all the positive gains that have been made since 2010 to the present.  It was always my intention to bring Lakota’s operating costs in line with community revenue without raising taxes and this chart shows how well the effort has worked.  The NO votes have been the most useful tool in forcing the school district to operate the way they should have always functioned, with a keen focus on their expenditures and operating with a slight surplus.  But they seem to not have learned their lesson and have been promising their employees large raises in 2014.  Their spending projections reflect this as the numbers making up the data on the chart are generated by Lakota’s own statistics.  There is a reason they must disclose all their information to the tax paying public—it is for just this type of analysis.Historical & Projected Revenues & Expenditures

Lakota has been able to maintain a positive balance by making the forced targeted cuts due to the levy failures, which is also reflected on the chart, which is why I find my “bullwhip economic” demonstrations to be so effective.  It’s my own unique way of explaining such dry material that has a tendency to bore people to death when they are forced to attend the kind of meetings it takes to ascertain the data that makes up such charts.  So I like to put a little metaphorical zip on the information to present it in an entertaining way, otherwise the information goes in one ear and out the other.  But relevant to the Lakota levy of 2013 and all future levies, the information couldn’t be clearer.  The data speaks for itself.  Lakota plans to go on a spending binge in 2014 like pent-up sailors who have been at sea for many months approaching a whore house.  The projected numbers that make up the blue line can be obtained from Lakota’s treasurer or anybody involved in the financing structure at the school.

In October of 2013 Lakota will have to produce a new five-year forecast which will involve many of the same numbers seen in the chart discussed during the video.  However one thing that has not been yet included in Lakota’s blue line forecast is the grim reality that I have covered extensively which is that Lakota is set to lose another two thousands students between the present time and the year 2022.  This will force the layoff of around 80 teachers.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  It will be interesting to see if Lakota includes these declining enrollment numbers into their projections, which they will have to address at some point in time.  But for their pro-tax levy attempts, they will hope to bury that information deep in their forecast because it will clearly show that they do not need more money.  Instead of the blue line projecting upward, it needs to be in a further decline from where it currently resides.

The frustration, anger, and in-trench warfare that sometimes goes on behind the scenes with the pro levy crowd is predicated directly off their lack of desire to acknowledge the facts driven off numbers shown so clearly in charts like the example I used in the video.  I call them “levy addicts, “levy zombies,” and more derogatory “latte sipping prostitutes,” because of their destructive desire to hurt an entire community with corrosive taxation as they belong to a group of people who desire to throw large wages at employees who aren’t needed, but for emotional reasons.   The desire to increase taxes for the solitary reason of injecting money into a group of employees that have a perceived value which is too high, or are not needed is simply stupid.  Many times the only reason is because the levy supporters are friends with those employees, or hope that by throwing money at the school, the money will off-set their terrible parenting skills.  They hope the school will give their children what they can’t because they are plagued with so much self-doubt as individual people; they have nothing to offer their children but social connections and a big mouth that advocates bigger and better schools to teach them in.  The root cause of the problem is that those levy advocates do not have faith in their own parenting and hope that they can hide the fact behind their chants for higher taxes, and more community spirit, and they have no restraint in demanding the community fund perpetual increases in the blue line based strictly on emotional neuroses.

It is a shame that so many young reporters who work for the local papers cannot see the benefit of the numbers shown in charts like this example, because many of them are children themselves.  This is why they support school levies.  If they are under the age of 35, they are likely still new to the ways of the world and do not understand how things connect, so they make their decisions based on pure emotion—on the backs of children who are used by the levy addicts to hide the reality of the blue number—the desire to throw money at district labor based on an anti-trust criteria. (Click Here to Review)  Then of course many people find such information daunting, and beyond their grasp.  So rather than do the hard work of analyzing data, they choose to subscribe to the emotional position of the levy addicts.  That is why the Lakota administrators are working blindly toward a 2013 tax increase knowing full well that another attempt will have to be made in 2017, because they do not target cuts unless forced to with levy failures.  Beyond 2017 there is no question that there will be more levy attempts and that within 15 years of this current time Lakota plans to add at least 10 more mills of levy to the current rate of 33, pushing the rate of taxation to a level over 40 mills, which is very unattractive to long-term real-estate investment or business growth.  That is why it is reckless, and devastating to a community to insinuate uncontrolled taxation, which is what Lakota is guilty of.

So the tax increases will not end in 2013.  They will continue until the school is forced to cut their costs the proper way with controlled cuts made without emotion.  Since Lakota will not regulate themselves, they must be forced to with failed levies.  The Levy Zombies do not run the community.  They are often young people between the ages of 25 and 35 and are functioning from personal insecurities.  It is dangerous to allow them to dictate budgets, which is why Lakota believes that nobody will ever challenge their blue line projections well into 2017.  The same logic left unchecked will pillage the Lakota community until there is nothing left but a high tax zone of residents and empty business establishments driven away by the bottomless pit hunger of the levy addicts.  Against those specimens targeted cuts is the only defense and I use bullwhip economics to highlight the point.  But aside from the spectacle of my whip tricks the situation is actually quite serious, Lakota is a parasitic organization that is selling itself as the savior of community value when it is practicing the opposite effect.  Under the Lakota plan seen on the chart, the financial imposition that public school will place on the community will be devastating and end the thriving business culture that currently exists.  Anyone who supports a school levy is crazy, especially when given the facts that show the proof.  The best thing anybody could do for Lakota and the community that surrounds the school is to vote “NO” on the levy and force Lakota to live within its means, instead of their projected path of deficit spending toward a future resulting in economic collapse.  The data tells the story.  All anybody need do is look at the data to reach the same conclusion.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Lakota School Levy and the Infamy of Bad Decisions.

I have said a lot about education, and the danger of institutional behavior.  But this is not intended to further analyze that issue.  This is to cover the Lakota School Levy which is on its second attempt in 6 months and promises to be a particularly bloody fight this time around. 

So let me set the stage:

The teachers have just agreed to a pay freeze under a union contract that took months to arrive at.  The districts developers are looking at a tanked economy where many, many properties are left without tenants to support the tax requirements.  The public in general are also feeling the heat of the recession, which after the smoke clears in historical context, is probably a legitimate depression, and many are barely hanging on to their homes as they are victims of the housing bubble.  Lakota has been around a while, so there are a large number of senior citizens in the district that are on fixed incomes and without children in the district, and their charity is strained to a breaking point.  There is a governor in Strickland that is a big government guy, who is tight with labor unions as his base support, and is very close to the president of the United States, who shares much in common with Ohio’s governor.  To both men, Ohio is a battle ground state where much is at stake politically and the nation is watching closely.  And in that context, Lakota is the 7th largest school system in the state.  It is Ohio’s largest “Excellent” district nine years running with distinction two years in a row. 

I contemplated this heavily while practicing in my back yard.

And it really is that simple if you take the emotion away.

The opponents of the levy have joined together, with myself being in that category.  We’re against it for all different reasons.  Mine are that I see the school system displaying the same types of problems we have in government, where accountability is hard to come by, and everything is fixed by spending more money.  And the school government is so big; it’s folding over its own weight financially.         

The Pro Levy people are typically residents that have children in the school system, and many of them moved to the district because of the schools.  And they are threatening to move if the levy fails to a district that supports levies.  The rest of the supporters are employees of the school system in some way and of course they are concerned about the passage of the levy for their own financial stability. 

I listen to the values of the school system and the things they are proud of, like a 90% college attendance rate, a graduation rate of 94.7%.  A student attendance rate of 96.5%.  During 2009-2010 there were 11 National Merit Semi-Finalists.  There was 1 Presidential Scholar in 2008.  They operate at a spending rate per pupil of $9,503 while the State average is $10,253, so on paper, everything sounds profitable. 

But to my thinking, all those statistics are a smoke screen.  All the attendance stats are to the credit of the parents, who obviously care enough about their children to buy a home in a great school district, so naturally, those kids will go to college, attendance will be great, and there will be national honors in a group that has parents that takes education seriously.  And while it is commendable that the school district does operate under the average, it does not question whether or not $9,000 per child actually translates to true excellence.  It doesn’t take much to poke holes in the aspects of their public service that they take pride in; because most of the merit is simply items they are taking credit for.  In fact, I think it is cowardly, to ride on the back of exceptional students, and caring parents, in order to secure funding for an institutional giant that serves as a catalyst for a powerful union. 

That is the beginning of the problem.  Over the years, the Lakota Education Association has grown in power and influence, and this of course leads to the overall problem of political backing of the National Teachers Union which is an organization that I don’t wish to endorse, because the money given to this organization often goes to political agenda’s that I do not support.  Judy Buschle, who just recently announced she was stepping down as the LEA President, has served as the Ohio Education Association board of directors and the National Education Association Resolutions Committee and is a particularly powerful influence locally, and has successfully negotiated many contracts with a bewildered Lakota board of education committee and lap dog superintendants obviously intimidated by the power of the LEA.  In fact, Buschle has been so successful, that the average wage for a teacher at Lakota is $59,000 without any further benefits considered.  And I make that assessment by attending a school board meeting.   I did so after the last levy failure to see if my opinion of the whole situation had been wrong.  I left that June meeting utterly disgusted.  The board was completely outmatched by the union presence.  Don’t believe me, watch the tape.  They film it and have it available for you to judge.  The union people including Mrs. Buschle sat right behind me and were absolutely disrespectful during the meeting.  It was so bad that a parent took the podium and shouted down the union people, blaming them for the anger from the community as to why the levy failed in May.  I left that meeting realizing that everyone in the administration was over their head with the size of the problems they were trying to solve, and the union controlled everything.  So there wasn’t anything they could tell me that would earn my vote until they made serious changes to their leadership structure and outside influence.   

If you’re like me, a person that loves traditional American values, small government, and is suspicious of institutional influence, it is not an option to indirectly supply money to an organization that will then support a governor like Ted Strickland, or a President like Obama.  Even if I did want to give money to the school, because I don’t want my money indirectly converted to union support for a politician that will then in turn come after the way of life that I personally value.  The presence of the powerful union creates a barrier between a person like me, and the school system that I value because I disagree with the philosophy of that union and the politics they represent.  They certainly have a right to exist, but not from the funding of my tax dollars.    

The indirect nature of course comes from the union dues of the teachers, which are paid with our tax dollars.  And because their contracts make them very secure, and keep the highest paid workers the longest, letting go of the teachers with less tenure when they must, those union dues are then funneled to political activity.  Not the kids.  Nothing against Mrs. Buschle, but my political affiliation is much different than her’s, and I don’t wish to support her activity with my money.  So for me, that is the number one reason for not voting for the levy.  No matter how many presentations they present to plead to the public, they still have a costly union that stands between the school system and the public.  As long as that exists, it prevents my full support in a school system.

This isn’t new for me.  I’ve been against union activity for many, many years.  I worked for one once, and it was very contentious and filled with many stories that will be told around water coolers for years.  Many of those stories involve conflict.  I have no tolerance for thug like behavior that comes from pack mentality that often comes out in strikes and threatened union stewards.  I personally blame that type of organization for making America less competitive and responding slowly to changing economic conditions which have resulted in exporting jobs to China, and India.  And such an organization even locally migrates influence up the ladder to large global affiliations that conduct political movement that by-passes our ability to vote.  I can see a time when unions did some good, but as they’ve evolved, they just kept growing to where they became as bad as the companies they originally sought to protect people from.    

But many dissenters to the levy are voting strictly on cost.  They may have been generous in the past, but can no longer say yes because now they are hanging on in a tough economy.  And while many would love to pay the levy, they simply can’t because the taxes are just too high.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a business, or a residential property, the taxes have reached a place where too much is just too much. 

In response the school system is doing the predictable thing; they are making threats, by passing out on the first day of school literature for kids to send home to their parents lobbying for the levy.  Such literature professes that the school system will have to cut an additional $12 million to the $13 million that have been made already.  There will be increases in class size, cuts to two thirds of the athletic budget including elimination of junior high athletics, the termination of 130+ additional teachers and staff, and many other issues.  Superintendent Mike Taylor made the comment that people can’t expect to see the same good school system if all these cuts are made. 

The reality is that the State and Lakota are pointing to one another.  The state needs Lakota and its success.  And Lakota blames the state for unfunded mandates as a rationale for funding.  And they count on the naïveté of the public to not look closely at the shell game.  The confusion has essentially created a revenue stream that is very lucrative to those who work in education.  And because of the union contract, most of the district’s funding is locked up.  So they can only be minimally efficient. 

Stories like we’ve heard of Butler Country Auditor Roger Reynolds who just refunded $502,186 back to the community, won’t happen in Lakota.  In fact, Lakota is getting back $120,600 from Roger’s office.  Roger achieved this savings by reducing overhead and administrative costs by 35% or otherwise $2.1 million since he took office in 2008.  When Lakota cuts, they say we are losing services.  When Roger does it, he is giving money back to the community.  That’s the philosophic difference.  The cuts Mr. Reynolds did were true, efficient cuts and quite extraordinary taking into account that the size of the Auditor’s office doesn’t come close to the enormous size of the Lakota school system.  The cuts Lakota did are cosmetic cuts that should have been done all along. 

For my support, Lakota would have to separate itself from a teachers union.  There is nothing about that relationship that I feel good about.  I simply don’t want my hard earned money going to union support that will be used against me politically.  That would be foolish.  But I suspect that the rest of the community would require a business manager that could come into the school system and dramatically cut costs in a way that Jack Welsh did for GE, and similar personalities have done when costs migrate to unsustainable levels in large organizations.  The community just doesn’t have the money to support levies the way they have in the past, and now we’ve reached a diminishing return.  The growth was caused by aggressive development, and the school system grew because the people moving to the district came here for the schools.  The funding problem comes from the fact that wages migrated out of a zone that a community can fund, and the school system, and the rest of public education is guilty as well, did not stay within a reasonable budget, but allowed things to get out of control.  Dramatic restructuring of their funding practices and revenue stream will have to be implemented, and they’ll have to do it while still performing at a high level.  And the state of Ohio has to properly fund our schools, because we also pay taxes to the state and expect that money to be used where we need it.  And our schools need it.    

If the levy fails, and the pro levy people leave, like they threaten I know the district will survive.  I lived in the district back in the days when Lakota was rural.  Lakota was a good school then, and it will always be, because a school reflects the community, and the community has good people in it.  If the new comers move out, they’ll just overload another district the way they have Lakota, in search of quick and easy answers which never come.

It is naive to even consider that throwing money at Lakota’s problem will solve anything. The solution to the problem will be tough, but starts with understanding that the school system is not the community.  The community will always be good if the people in it are excellent.  It is only natural that kids that come from good people will make a school system good too. 
But the teachers and administrators don’t make good kids or good people.  Parents do that.  Don’t let them take credit for the things you’ve done as a parent.

Rich Hoffman

www.overmanwarrior.com