Tag: Lakota School Board

Issac Adi: The Superstar of Lakota

Issac Adi for Lakota School Board

I’ve been a fan of Issac Adi, the very bright star within the Lakota school district running for the school board. He’s talented, smart, hardworking, extremely likable. He’s just a beautiful person in all the ways anybody could hope.  But I was wondering if it was just me who thought that way.  After all, I’ve been hoping for good conservative candidates to run for the Lakota school board for years.  And when we did get them on the school board, the current board would assassinate them in radical ways to get rid of them.  However, I learned just how well-liked Issac Adi was at a recent GOP event where many top-level office holders attended to speak and celebrate the fall ahead of the upcoming election.  Usually, when these kinds of big GOP events start, current officeholders are announced for recognition, and when they called out Issac’s name, the whole crowd erupted into applause.  People knew Issac and were cheering him on for a position that may be one of the most demanding offices to penetrate with Republican representatives in the state, the Lakota school board.  Issac was doing well, and people see that he is one of the brightest hopes yet of properly managing Lakota’s school board that we’ve had in years. 

Issac Adi with Jim Jordan

The GOP has endorsed candidates before, but mainly in the past, school boards were considered non-partisan as schools were supposed to be above and beyond politics.  Schools were always supposed to be for the children, and the school board members ideally would always put kids first and their family’s needs as priorities.  I know many administrative roles in public schools, and they aren’t blatant Marxists looking to overthrow America.  But the teacher’s unions are, and they run the schools, all public schools.  And by default, when one side tries to play nice, and the other side wants to play with every dirty trick in the book to win, guess who has the advantage?  I was at a recent school board meeting with Lakota’s board, and I listened with great pain at the excuses for Covid quarantines causing work stoppages and how intrusive the masks were.  The superintendent at Lakota isn’t a crazy radical. Still, he does try to make everyone happy, and there is no other way to make anybody happy because of the teacher’s union’s demands.  They want progressive causes like mask mandates implemented, and if they don’t get their way, they will make life miserable for everyone. 

A Grand GOP Event in Monroe, Ohio

I was thinking of what a positive person Issac is after watching him getting his picture taken with Jim Jordan of Ohio.  Jordan is an international celebrity because of some of the disputes he has been involved in over the years, and oddly as it might seem for a school board candidate, but Issac looked very much at home with Jim Jordan.  It was easy to see Issac in a dispute with the LEA union without things getting to the point where everyone left that evening angry at each other.  Jordan has a skill where he is a likable person even when he’s arguing with someone.  That is a skill missing on the Lakota school board since I started paying attention to it decades ago.  Issac has the presence of a superstar, and his likability personally rubs off on everyone.  Issac would be uniquely qualified to ease tensions instead of exacerbating them when dealing with some of these problematic school business issues.  It was apparent when Issac was around high-profile politicians that he had the same skills, which is something to get excited about.

A Very Large Crowd Cheering on Isaac and other Big Names

As ugly as politics can sometimes get, that event where Issac Adi and Jim Jordan were both at was a friendly reminder of what is possible in politics.  Regarding Lakota, the teacher’s union has made doing any business with the public school such a miserable experience.  But when you take a break from the arena and take some time to have a nice meal together and enjoy a sunset, the GOP in Butler County is such a tremendous asset to the community.  Most of Butler County, where Lakota schools are located, is populated with Republicans.  The goal of the teacher’s union is to take all they can for their members and to turn more children of Republicans into Democrats, which is why they want to mask mandates, same-sex bathrooms, and start sex education in the 3rd grade.  Then they want infinite amounts of money spent on their unionized employees and impose more tax on properties to pay for it.  Only the best of any person could have the will to deal with them.  Yet it is because of events like the GOP gathering we had recently in Monroe, Ohio, that puts in place so many good officeholders, and it’s exciting to see that Issac Adi will be one of them. 

When I talk about politicians, I often talk about their shelf life, the amount of time it takes the system to grind people down from hopeful managers into spit out garbage.  Then, term limits should remove them from office, but all too often, we will get another two decades out of officeholders that stay in those positions.  But in Butler County, we’ve managed to get many good officeholders through a lot of community engagement. I’ve watched them come into the office and do great work for a long time while still having shelf life left in their lives.  Issac has quickly found a home among the GOP and has embraced it so authentically that it will only continue the great reputation that the Butler County GOP already has for a track record.  People like Jim Jordan don’t and can’t come to every event they are invited to.  Neither can Frank LaRose.  But that they come to Butler County often says so much about how important the region is on the stage of national politics.  People like Issac Adi keep that prospect fresh on everyone’s minds as the GOP grows into the future. 

Best of all, Issac is not a phony, and there isn’t any temptation of him becoming one.  That is another trait of Butler County office holders that is a recent trend.  I wouldn’t have been able to say the same thing ten years ago, but I can say it today.  I can’t think of many politicians in Butler County who are phonies, and I would attribute that top to bottom to the structure of the Republican Party.  From the donors to the ground walkers.  When everyone gets together as we did on that night Issac Adi and Jim Jordan took a picture together, the world is easy to see that it’s worth fighting for.  And when so many good people get together in one place, the problems are much easier to see in all their purity.  Once the conflict with a teacher’s union starts making things murky, at least we can know that people like Issac won’t be pushed off by themselves to be ridiculed by the union activists.  He has a support system that is a relatively new thing and combined with his great personality; he will help make that Lakota school board something special instead of the monstrosity it is today.  But it all starts with a rising new star, and for all our benefit, Issac Adi is there, shooting across the sky, and I look forward to what the future that comes from him shows to the world. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfigher’s Guide to Business
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The LEA Union at Lakota Goes Too Far: Trying to screen school board candidates to protect their stranglehold on the district

Labor Unions think they are Management, they aren’t

It’s safe to say it now; it’s no longer a conspiracy theory, as it used to be when I first started talking about it years ago.  Teacher unions formed under the John Dewey public education system have been communist recruitment centers meant to re-shape the minds of our children into diabolical menaces against American values, life, liberty, and capitalism.  In my school district of Lakota, the LEA labor union has been a treacherous disaster for decades, imposing on the community, which tends to be conservative, a lot of liberal ideology that people aren’t comfortable with.  Many of the kids who have been through the Lakota school system and are now adults can easily see the damage.  Parents tell me all the time the sad stories of their precious little kids who were so sweet and wonderful, who turned into delectable losers through their high school and college years.   By the time the kids get into their 20s and 30s, they end up as unrecognizable communists of anti-American sentiment.  And where did it all start?  Well, in Lakota, there is a group of mad moms led by Sandy Wheatley, an old name to me but likely new to unsuspecting parents new to the school district.  She used to lead the local teacher’s union at Lakota and still has been one of the “sweat bees” always aggravating Lakota school business in the ways you can see in this article.  All the trouble starts with people like her.  In truth, all labor unions were born out of the push for communism during the mid-1800s when Marx published his destructive concepts that have stifled the world in many ways we see today.  But it’s one thing to look at it happening and have feelings about it, but quite another for it to happen in our backyards and not be expected to do anything about it.  I’ve never felt compelled not to do something about it.  I think we should fight these losers everywhere they show themselves because now many can see what I’ve been saying for years.  Teacher unions have not just been bad for our public education system, wasting millions of our taxpayer dollars over the years as an actual imposition. They are additionally harmful to our flag and country and must once and for all be considered domestic terrorists and threats to our children’s very lives.  Because they are.

Recently I have told many stories about a group of school board challengers endorsed by the Republican Party of Butler County, Ohio, running this year to replace three seats on the Lakota school board.  They are great candidates functioning on their own for good reasons which they have determined for themselves.  But I’ve been around for a while and understand the impediments that get in the way of good people intending to do a good job where good jobs are needed, and old labor union presidents like Sandy Wheatley don’t want to see a good job done in public schools.  They function from a different idea of what “good” is.  You and I, dear reader, might call “good” a well-balanced kid who can read, write, think, and grow up to get married, have good kids, a job, run a good household, and come over to a happy family gathering on Christmas for some quality exchanges.  For the communist labor union types, “good” is to turn the kids into servants of the state, do drugs, experiment sexually, collect unemployment, and vote Democrat.  And when it comes time for Christmas dinner, to send those children into those nice American homes filled with nice American families and to torpedo them all from the inside out with disappointment, anxiety, and malice.  Yet many people have always thought that my statements about the teacher’s union were overstated and purely political.  Because I have been more involved in these school board candidates this time around, I have seen how the labor union at Lakota behaves from a different point of view, and that view has been ugly.

One of these school board challengers asked me the other day about the questionnaire shown in this article, along with correspondence showing some Facebook postings from old Sandy Wheatley herself disparaging members of the current school board and the challengers in ways meant to impact the vote the way labor unions all over America intend.  These documents show the intent of the LEA teacher’s union at Lakota in a very honest way that voters should know about.  I found the questionnaire sent to this particular school board challenger to be reprehensible.  As I explained to them, they want to do a nice job for the district, and all this labor union radicalism can be a bit scary, that as a member of the school board, they are the management.  The labor does not get to interview the management. The other way around is the first problem with managing all public schools, especially at Lakota.  These labor union types felt it was appropriate to gather information on incoming school board members at Lakota.  Just read the questions for yourself.  What is being proposed by this questionnaire is that the labor union wants to know how progressive the candidates are.  Will they support the current progressive political agenda such as gay rights in the schools or uncontrollable spending with perpetual tax increases on private property through school levies.  How the candidates’ answer will determine the level of activism the union will perform against those candidates.  The LEA wants people like what they have molded on the current school board, lapdogs of union appeasement from Julie Shaffer, Kelly Casper, Michael Pearl, and the Brad Lovell replacement, Douglas Horton.  As you can see from Sandy’s direct comments on Facebook, they hate Lynda O’Conner because Lynda has tried to do the job a school board is always supposed to do, represent the community who elected her into place.  While the rest want to get along with the communist teacher’s union so bad things won’t be said about them.

People never wanted to face the facts of the origin of the labor movement, especially when it came to their kids.  Parents wanted to like their teachers; many of them started with good intentions.  Everyone always does, including Sandy Wheatley and the union thugs sucking the life out of the Lakota school system.  Even in the human body, viruses want to live.  Cancer wants to live by being a parasite of the host.  Everyone from their perspective wants to live.  But good is determined by logic, and that is why we elect school board members to insert reason into the management of children in a school and the millions of dollars it takes to teach them with free education.  But the quality of that education has always been under attack by teacher unions who want far more than just a job in a school district.  They want to act as parasites to our children and the property we own and maintain to fund their menace.  Attacking private property is one of the communist goals as they were adopted directly from Karl Marx and John Dewey was quite aware of it from the beginning.  It was a mountain of corruption from the start, and it shows in the products of public education, most of us, our children, and the state of our nation now.  And based on these documents shown here, you can see what is going on in your local teacher’s union.  These aren’t unique to Lakota.  But they do require action from voters who have a mind to fix the situation.  In Lakota, during 2021, voters will finally have a chance to do something about all this nonsense.  But really, this is a nationwide problem, and it needs to be addressed in America once and for all.  Otherwise, we won’t have a country, making all teacher union members very, very happy.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Vote for Darbi Boddy to Lakota School Board: Sandy Wheatley and Old Joan Powell are terrified she’ll win

A Great Young Lady to Run for the Lakota School Board

For much of the last year, some of us from the old No Lakota Levy group have been looking for a way to replace the school board at Lakota with fresh new faces.   We heard from the school board that they had wasted all the surplus money from declining enrollment and that Brad Lovell was pushing for a property tax increase in either 2021 or 2022.  So rather than get the gang back together to throw money at fighting an eventual tax increase because the school board couldn’t manage their money, we started having meetings looking for school board replacements. These people would be interested in becoming a school board member but weren’t sure how to get there.  This year, in 2021, three school board seats are coming up, all flat-line liberals.  And I’m happy to hear that we now have three Republican-endorsed candidates to challenge them.  Butler County will see that they are voting for conservatives instead of the usual closet liberals. The latter is always the teacher unions’ pick to grease the skids for the next contract negotiation for mandatory pay increases, which Lakota doesn’t need. I’ve written articles on two of those three Republican-endorsed candidates.  But there is one that I’m happy to announce who received her endorsement at the end of August, Darbi Boddy.  I first met Darby at one of those early meetings, and since then, she has impressed me with her diligent work ethic.  She is sharp and is running for all the right reasons, and I can say that she would be great on the Lakota school board.  Instead of just fighting the current school board’s bad decisions, Darbi will be part of the solution with a few more votes.

Darbi Boddy and Her Very Nice Family

One of the big tricks is that the school board candidates have been sold to us as non-partisan.  That has essentially allowed Democrats or people who call themselves Republicans to get elected in Butler County.  But they vote and manage as liberals, which is why Lakota has been a mess for so many years.  No matter how much money we have given them, they have wasted it as all significant government types do.  It’s one thing to get angry at how the rest of the world is, but school boards are local and are some of the parts of our government that we are supposed to have the most control over.  But when you can’t even get a school board to do the right thing, you know government is hopeless.  However, this year we finally have a choice. We’ve tried before to get conservatives elected, and when we do, it’s been one here, one there.  Then they get attacked because they are outnumbered, and it’s just been an absolute disaster.

For the old No Lakota Levy folks, it’s all about money.  We all have grown children, and we don’t want Lakota asking for money over their bad decisions.  We want the local community who want the free babysitting service to do well, have nice kids and have an overall asset to our neighborhoods.  But there comes a price where that sentiment expires.  Lakota hasn’t been asking for money since 2013, when they finally passed their last levy after we fought them on it for four years, and it was sometimes bloody.  My policy was to leave Lakota alone for the most part so long as they weren’t asking for money.  But now, in 2021, Brad and the gang have spent their surplus.  Now it’s time to deal with it.  The best way to do that is with a management change of the board now that a majority of the board is up for re-election. 

Darbi Boddy on Channel 5 News

I know all the candidates running as Republicans very well.  And one thing about Darbi Boddy specifically is that she works hard.  In almost every event I have been to over the last several months, she has been there shaking hands and introducing herself. I’ve seen her pressed under contentious conditions, and she has conducted herself exceptionally well.  She has always been cool and intelligent, and the more I have come to know her, the bigger a fan I have become.  I will say I am voting for her without hesitation.  She is conservative in every way I can see; she is the opposite of our current school board.  And in speaking with her, I am sure she can help manage the budget, which is very generous for what we already give Lakota.  All this Critical Race Theory nonsense starting in Columbus by the DeWine administration will be overturned at Lakota by Darbi.  She is also solid on the transexual issues that have been trying to creep in through the current board members, especially with the pick your sex bathrooms that progressive politics has been trying to sell us with old radical progressive activists like Sandy Wheatley and Joan Powell. 

But further than those negative factors, I think Darbi cares about the school system.  She cares about it in ways I don’t.  I believe public education is a disaster that needs to be completely fixed, starting with everything John Dewey built it with.  Darbi reminds me a lot of Lynda O’Conner.  Lynda is the only Board member at Lakota who has been trying to make things better, but she’s outvoted 4 to 1.  And the peer pressure against her by the other progressive disasters has been reprehensible.  Darbi would be a good compliment to Lynda on the board. 

What’s best that I have learned about Darbi is that she is very engaging, friendly, and knowledgeable.  When I have talked to her, I have thrown her lots of curveballs, little things that I use to measure character, and she always hits them.  She has been great at speaking with lots of different types of people without being fake about it.  Her sincerity is unquestionable. Since I first met her, I’ve been a fan of hers, but you never know how things will turn out.  On this little journey, which was to get things started, it’s nice to see someone like her running as an option.  I always say that you have your favorite people about these types of projects, but things don’t often go the way you’d like them to.  Things happen; people don’t get along for this reason or that.  But at the end of it, you want to get the lawnmower started, and it needs to run on its own.   The intent from the beginning was never to micromanage the school board members.  We needed people who would be their own people and run things as reasonable people would on their own.  We started the conversation, and of those, Darbi has turned out to be one of the best and most potent candidates, and I’m happy to see her on the ticket. I’ve known many politicians, and of them, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one who works harder than Darbi Boddi.  And it’s not just been for a week or two here and there.  With Darbi, it’s been hard work for months and months.   If that’s what she’s like, imagine what she could do on the Lakota School Board.  I can’t wait to find out. 

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota Votes for Mask Mandates: The squeaky wheel gets the grease

The Lakota School Board trying to vote on Mask Mandates

As it is everywhere, the health directors, national and local, want their power back. Still, the governors in many states don’t want to return to the kind of authoritarian rule that gave health departments so much power during the first year of Covid.  In Butler County, Ohio, where I live, the health director and bureaucratic officials have been working wherever they can to intimidate businesses and government establishments into CDC compliance for the sheer desire of wanting to boss someone around.  So, of course, they are putting pressure on several local school boards in Butler County to implement mask mandates.  In the satire above, which isn’t far from the truth, the Lakota school board is trying to figure out how to deal with the health director ahead of the meeting on August 23rd, 2021.  The Lakota school system is being pressured by outrageous compliance to CDC guidelines or self-imposed mask mandates. It’s a rock and a hard place for Lakota. They either deal with the wrath of the Butler County Health officials, or they deal with the anger of the furious parents.  And for this school board, at Lakota, it is way beyond their ability to deal with leaving them to pander to the squeaky wheel.  So if you as a parent don’t want masks on your kids while in school, you better get to that meeting and be that squeaky wheel.  Otherwise, the underhanded tactics of the health department are going to play their games of tyranny to establish authoritarian rule. 

Of course, no matter what you think about Covid, there is zero to less proof that masks do anything but make the situation worse.  That stupidity is for adults to sort out, but children should never be victimized to wear masks based on such flimsy science.  If people want to wear them, have at it.  Just as a casual observation, I’ve seen cultures wearing masks in Asian countries for years, and it’s always more about compliance than health.  This attempt to mask the American population is just more of that imposition of eastern cultures on western cultures, just as the Beatles have been trying to do for years and many thousands of other sources attempting to tell us in the west that yielding to authority is the way to solve problems.  No, it’s not.  I had my family at the zoo recently, and they were trying to push the latest from the CDC, encouraging people to wear masks.  Only a few dumb fools were doing so.  My wife and I went to Costco to get a hot dog and a drink for our date night, and they were encouraging people to wear masks, forcing their employees to do so to put that peer pressure on people.  But guess what, most people were not wearing the stupid masks, and I felt sorry for the dumb fools who fell for it.  Yet all the trouble starts with these crazy lunatics in the local health departments who are hungry for their mall cop powers to be restored to them by governors who have lost their ability.

Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, has been a disaster.  He wants to force children to wear masks in school, but the supreme court now challenges him after William Bertelsman granted a restraining order on Beshear.  These kinds of fights are happening all over the country, especially in Florida.  The trend is against the tyrants, the health officials.  Now that people have seen the game, there is no public appetite for the mask mandates.  The federal government has not made its case for why masks should be used.  They are hot, they smell bad and are gross, and they display a kind of anti-science that some backwater countries would implement as a means to solving problems.  And people are sick of them.  Even people who might be liberal are not wearing the masks if they can get away with it.  But all those places mentioned, Costco, the zoo, amusement parks, and the like, are feeling pressure from the compliance cultures to implement that stupidity, which is how the schools feel pressure to comply.  But the attack against our children is reprehensible, and it deserves to be fought with everything we have to fight with.  These school boards will cave if the parents don’t get involved.  Edgewood schools in Butler County have struggled with this issue for weeks, and the parents have spoken up.  Monroe is also going through tribulations.  If Lakota falls, the rest of them will follow.  And that’s the game the health directors want.  They want to rule in silence, from their offices using a phantom menace to scare everyone into some ridiculous authority rule.  So the voices have to be heard at the school board meetings. Otherwise, the school boards will yield to the pressure. 

Watching people wear these masks the second time around, who are in the extreme minority in public, you can almost see the deadness in their eyes.  That desire to comply with authority because they are too lazy to think is a public health crisis.  They are more dangerous to society than any virus because their willingness to comply encourages these bureaucratic tyrants to grab power as they are now.  Covid did not come out and kill everyone like it was told to us.  There are some heartbreaking stories here and there, but fewer people are dying of Covid than are getting killed in car accidents, and people don’t stop driving cars over every crash.  For most Americans, Covid is an acceptable risk.  They might stay home from work for a few days and get over it if they get it.  They want alternatives like a Regeneron Covid Cocktail or a dose of Hydroxychloroquine.  They may use ultraviolet light to kill the virus, a legitimate method of managing viruses, especially UVC light.  Science is great, and there are methods we all know about now.  But this dumb method of wearing a mask is as unscientific and barbaric as anything government sciences have ever come up with.  If public schools are ineffective, why would anybody expect Dr. Fauci and government science to get it right with Covid?  They are either treacherous lunatic terrorists for a new global order, or they are dumb as hell.  Or perhaps, a mixture of both.  But putting masks on kids and ruining their lives with the bad decisions of power-hungry health officials would make bad parents out of all of us.  Kids don’t deserve this stupidity.  It’s up to all of us as adults to at least protect kids from government absurdity, starting in our schools.  And for Lakota, while you still can, you better let the school board know how you feel.  Because if left to their own devices, they will yield to the Butler County health officials and their power grabs from the CDC to put the government in charge of our health, which they have proven entirely incompetent to handle.  They weren’t effective the first time around, and now that we’ve had time to reflect on the mistakes of 2020, why would anybody fall for it a second time?  What we are up against is sheer stupidity and nothing less.

Rich Hoffman

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What Really Happened to Lakota’s Todd Parnell: School board activism adopts ‘Black Lives Matters’ values

The truth of the matter in regard to Todd Parnell, he was offered a new job opportunity out of the district of Lakota and was planning to leave his school board position at the end of the year anyway.  So it didn’t take much to set off his fuse when police came to Lakota West to obtain evidence on a cell phone from a burglary they were investigating when two students went Black Lives Matters on the police resisting their efforts and eventually destroyed the evidence in front of everyone.  Anybody watching the situation would take that as an admission of guilt.  But the students were empowered by the race riots on the national news and behaving badly, so Todd knowing he was planning to leave had a “f**k-it” moment and just said in an email to the Lakota West Principal, Ben Brown, that the police “should have shot them.”  (The students) Honestly, I heard little bits about the case over the last few weeks and I didn’t think it sounded inappropriate at all.  Other than the fact that the students were minors, they were obviously involved in criminal conduct and were behaving poorly toward the police, giving the police many excuses to shoot them, which they smartly showed restraint.  But to what cost?  Logical thinking people who see what’s going on do think that perhaps police should have just shot them and taken the phone and used the evidence to prosecute them, if they lived, and saved the tax payers a lot of money.  To that way of thinking, Todd on the school board represented the opinion of people like me.  If Todd wanted to leave the school board fine, but it would have been, and should have been up to him.

Yet here’s where things go wrong.  Activism on the school board, activism to remove conservative voices like Todd Parnell took over and rival school board members led by the Superintendent Matt Miller moved quickly to use the incident to purge the school board of an elected official, so that they could replace him with someone more friendly to their progressive positions, which is precisely what they have done.  They picked a replacement who may be the nicest guy in the world, but he is not an elected person that represents the community.  He is a pick by activism by the school board president Brad Lovell to stack the votes against conservative voices and it’s a pretty dirty trick that didn’t become clear until the smoke cleared from the Lakota West police incident.  Who does Matt Miller think he is, or Jenni Logan for that matter, the treasurer to push for a human resource move against Parnell?  They aren’t in charge; the school board is.  If voters want to get rid of Todd, they would and could have shown outrage and maybe he would have resigned on his own due to public pressure.  But the pressure was completely activism on behalf of the school board to take up the Black Lives Matters Marxist position and give criminals more due process than an honored member of the school board.  It was a case of wokeness at its most obvious and its disgusting.

My phone has lit up over the last week about this case and it did surprise me that Parnell resigned.  As I said, most everyone I know thought about the young criminals the way I did, that they should have been punished on the spot for their actions.  It was beyond logic that the school board would defend the criminals and adhere to the new definitions of Black Lives Matters more than the culture of Butler County understanding the politics of the area the way they should.  It was arrogant at best and I held my tongue until more of the facts came out because I personally know a lot of these people and I was having a hard time believing they would be that stupid.  But as it turns out, the Lakota School Board cares more about Black Lives Matters radicalism than they do the voters in the district and they took action on their own to remove an elected official and it was all initiated by the Superintendent and the Treasurer.

One thing I don’t do is kiss and tell, unless the lipstick has some truth that is needed for the case in hand.  At that point I will use it if justice is the outcome.  At the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns, one week before Ohio shut down restaurants, I was at P.F. Chang’s interviewing potential conservatives for the Lakota School Board’s upcoming elections.  In came Matt Miller, Jenni Logan and West Chester Administrator Larry Burks to have lunch there also, so we had a slightly uncomfortable exchange of hellos as they clearly were not comfortable that I was eating lunch where they were.  But I was fine with them, I personally like Jenni and I think Matt is pretty good as a superintendent so long as he isn’t asking for money, which I said to him.  I was happy they were there because I had seated in the booth next to them one of the number crunchers from the old No Lakota Levy campaign so I could get a report on the meeting, which was impromptu because my meeting prior to the school board candidates was with him to discuss strategy for the 2021 and 2022 school levy campaign that we knew was coming soon.  To me its all a chess game I’m happy to play with them, to them, they’d rather have complete social compliance at any cost.

As we broke our little talk and Matt went back to his table, I offered to shake his hand, as Covid-19 wasn’t yet a quarantine thing, hard as it is to believe.  My school board candidate while this was happening, he was commenting on the drop in stocks that were happening as we spoke and was alarmed, so all this was new to everyone.  But instead of the handshake Matt offered me an elbow bump, which was the first time I had ever seen that—which is now as common as the sun.  It bothered me that the guy was so into all this progressive sentiment that he’d know to do that so early in the process.  And it made it clear to me where his mind was.  He intends to be a “woke” trendsetter and that is the direction he intends to go as a school superintendent, and it was at that moment I realized Matt Miller was not someone who I could work with.  And that he is very much a progressive activist rather than a concerned community member who wants the best for Lakota.

No my thoughts on Lakota and the school board right now depend largely on the election.  Its not a secret, I tell everyone who asks me, my plan is to see Trump elected and to put Betsy DeVos into a position to defund any liberal activism in all public schools of federal dollars.  So this is a very top down issue and Lakota will certainly qualify with this kind of behavior of losing their federal dollars and I am ready to fight them on the ground when they try to cover the balance with property tax increases.  I like our chances to win at least 3 to 5 levy attempts with the ground numbers we have now, so that will force a lot of these liberals off the school board under great pressure and allow for activism going the other way.  So I don’t blame Todd for wanting to leave or for what he said.  Losing a conservative at this point doesn’t matter much until the federal funding cuts come next year.  But it is a shame to see such activism from Matt Miller and Brad Lovell who clearly has let the status of president go to his head.  Brad was always a little sideways anyway, but since they let him take the president seat, he has become what we all thought he always was, way too power hungry and much more manipulative.  They all have some big embarrassments coming.  And being “woke” won’t help them.  People vote for representation; they do not need the management structure at Lakota further undercut than it already is with radicalized labor forces.  It may be hip to know about the progressive “woke” trends, which Matt and Brad are clearly in line with, but we are supposed to be teaching kids at Lakota right and wrong—life skills, not teaching them to be woke, and to defend criminals from police, which is now an official position by the Lakota School Board.  They are more interested in defending criminals than protecting property owners of their hard-earned tax dollars.  But rather, they intend to use it to destroy our culture and everyone in it who resists the “woke” culture and their Marxist intentions.  That is the real story of the resignation of school board member Todd Parnell.  The school board did not come out in defense of their friend and colleague, they used racism and criminal conduct to drive him off the board so they could re-staff the position with someone they liked, and that is a real problem.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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Lakota Schools is Going for a Tax Increase in the Fall of 2020: Government schools lose their leverage of busy parents

Before there was any concerns of a coronavirus Lakota schools in Southern Ohio were planning to put a tax increase on the fall ballot of 2020. They had for a while great cash reserves, but who wouldn’t in a rich district like Lakota where the enrollment has been going down year by year. However, their concern was coming from the notion that charter schools were going to swipe away tax money from the children leaving, causing them budget problems since there was a real threat of state money following kids to other competing schools. The management of Lakota, which is a bunch of buffoons to say it nicely had given away too much of their budget to the teacher’s union since they had a surplus, just as I always said they would putting them on a path to need a tax increase soon due to their gross mismanagement. So I knew that we would have a fall of 2020 tax increase attempt where we had to have the old fight again and tell the stories of why the management of our tax payer dollars was being squandered by truly incompetent people. As I told some of them recently, I don’t care what Lakota does until they start looking to take money away from the community, and since that is their plans, well, they’ll get what they deserve. They asked for it.

Yet this time, its different. There were a lot of bad things that came about through the ridiculous Covid-19 shutdowns but some of the good ones was that the schools were closed. It reminds me more of when Lakota schools took away busing way back in the early part of the last decade and busing never recovered to what it had once been to people. So too will be the situation with government schools, especially those like Lakota. If they were showing before Covid that they were a dying means of educating children, then in the post-world, that would be an understatement. I’ve always said that government schools were not about educating for busy young parents, they are all about baby sitting while those same people go out an conquer the world with their own little careers leaving their kids to the state to raise. Well, confidence in the state has been greatly diminished for one, but additionally, now that the government schools have been taken away for a sustained period of time the schools and their teacher’s unions have lost their emotional leverage when it comes to these school levy fights. The report is that now that they’ve had to do it, 40% of parents everywhere are thinking about continuing to homeschool their children rather than sending them back to those horrid places. For a government school like Lakota that’s bad news because they already have an aging population that is getting older faster than they are filling up kindergarten classes. So why would those people vote themselves higher taxes on a service they aren’t planning to use for the free babysitting service that schools provide?

I always say that the school boards are bad management because the kind of people who tend to get voted in are union stooges who are easy to beat in collective bargaining negotiations. Lakota has taken steps to improve that situation, we have been looking for a third vote for a long time to stop some of this madness. Currently there are two decent school board members at Lakota but there are still three who are grotesquely liberal and have led to the spending problems experienced there over their union contracts. However in the past, there was always that fear that the LEA union would go to the extreme of striking to get their tax increases and the school board along with panicky parents would be quick to cave on the issue in fear of it. But by the time there will be a vote in November on Lakota schools demands for ever more money the teachers themselves, who make up most of the budget had been out of work for most of the year, from March of 2020 to August of that year due to the Covid-19 overreaction by our state government. But they didn’t go without a paycheck, and they weren’t working, but they surely showed that they were “non-essential” employees. Nobody missed them for a sustained period of time.

Usually when teachers go on strike, the media helps them by putting forth constant reports day by day however long the strike goes on. Usually a two or three week strike brings forth lots of devastating news and the school boards give in because they just don’t have the stomach for the constant peer pressure that comes from the news coverage. Well, Covid-19 showed the world that teachers really weren’t needed and that kids would be just fine if they went on without the influence of government schools for months and months, and in this case, a half a year. The teachers were getting paid for doing nothing, the children had rediscovered their parents, and the world did not fall off the edge of the earth. The market value for a teacher had greatly diminished and in the middle of this new reality, Lakota schools is wanting to convince people to pay more taxes after many of the voters had lost their jobs due to government stupidity and had learned to live without the Lakota teachers and their free babysitting. Many people had learned to work from home and may never need to go back to the office, meaning they can stay home and raise their own children and work too. We are talking about a whole new way of looking at the world.

Sure, there will always be the latte sippers that I talk about often who vote tax increases as if it were some patriotic act instead of the result of a bunch of dumb people managing millions of dollars who roll over and play dead for a radicalized liberal organization in the teacher’s union. But what isn’t known now is how effective they will be now that Covid-19 has forced people to consider alternatives. For Lakota’s part, until there is a third conservative vote on the school board, there will always be requests for tax increases because there is no management of the money that goes on. They give it away like candy and when they run out, they just demand more so they can spend more. The report card for Lakota is not the best, even though they are saying they want to pay the best teachers at the top salary to keep them, but with the kind of results that Lakota has produced, I would think a used tire for $5 would be just as fine. But the school board has always known that what parents want is a place to dump their kids for the day that is cheaper than day care. And their fear has always been that if they don’t appease the teacher’s union with ever increasing wages, instead of cutting back like they should have been doing all along, that they might go on strike. Yet now that we’ve seen a world where the teachers aren’t working for months, and the kids turned out just fine, if not better than when they were going to school, then why should anybody vote for a tax increase? The answer is, they likely won’t.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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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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Joan Powell Comes Out Anti-Union as a West Chester Trustee Candidate: The difference between good management and being a suck-ass

 

One of the things that most shocked me from the recent West Chester Trustee Candidate Forum at Indiana Wesleyan College sponsored by the West Chester Tea party was that Joan Powell stated quite emphatically that she was anti-union and would like to see Ohio become a right-to-work state.  Who would have ever thought she’d say such a thing because it was Joan who sat on the Lakota school board for so many years caving into the union demands wrecking the budget with increased payroll with no management in sight.  Now that Joan is running for trustee in West Chester she has come out against labor unions which is interesting given the fact that many union radicals have targeted the trustees with their themes of dissidence exclusively because Mark Welch and George Lang had been exploring ideas to bring right-to-work legislation to West Chester specifically because Ohio’s governor Kasich has been soft on the labor unions due to his defeat of Issue 5 several years ago. Because of her friendly attitude toward labor unions in the past, strategists would have thought that Joan would seek the Lakota union votes in this trustee race but oddly she tossed that away with the statement seen below.

This may be the first time I’ve ever agreed with Joan Powell.  When I was heading the effort to make Ohio a right-to-work state in 2012 Joan turned her political guns on me and did whatever she could to erase me from what she was doing as president of the Lakota School Board.  At the time Joan was trying hard to give the teachers who worked for Lakota a raise when I had been showing that the exclusive cause of the operating levy she had been seeking was to add more to the wage rates which were already well over the average household income.  Joan’s position was extremely friendly to the labor union at Lakota, and her track record is her track record.  There isn’t anybody who can assume based on her history that Joan would do anything but lay down in future negotiations with the various unions that are in West Chester’s wheelhouse, like the police and fire departments.  I mean it’s easy to say that we value school teachers, fire fighters and police officers—and to give them all the money they are asking for.  It’s hard to tell them no, and that they already make too much money.  In the case of fire and police officers they always give you the speech about how they run into danger while everyone else runs away, so when their contracts come up public support usually favors the unions but as trustees elected to manage the finances, sometimes you have to do the hard things then explain it to people even when its unpopular.   The easy thing is to do as Joan has done in the past and that is to just give the union what they want to keep them from going on strike, then seek tax increases to cover the costs.  That’s why her statement here is so surprising.

If this Joan Powell had revealed herself 10 years ago we might have avoided a lot of bloodshed in the Lakota school district.  I might have gotten along with her!  But, my experience with her says that she knew what kind of crowd she was speaking to and she formulated her comments specifically to her audience.  What she really believes is something else entirely.  Nobody can look at the record of Joan Powell over the years as a president of the Lakota school board and determine that she was anything but excessively friendly to the public union effort.  Yet you can hear with your own ears her declaration that she is against labor unions so who could really know what to believe.

I personally think public sector unions should be illegal.  If you have a job funded by tax payers you should not be able to organize against tax payers or their representatives for more money.   In private business competition can help bring reality to labor union activism so the free market does the job of helping to manage the situation.  But in government, we are talking about monopoly status over the tax dollars in question so labor unions have unfettered access to the funds of the communities they are supposed to serve.  It’s easy to obtain the funds they desire because often the only people who stand in their way are politicians like Joan Powell who never want any bloody conflicts with their labor unions, just peace.  Elected politicians find the temptation to throw vast amounts of money at these public sector unions too easy.  It’s far easier for them to ask for tax increases from a faceless community hiding the effort behind children or the safety of our citizens.  That makes those types of people terrible managers and Joan Powell is certainly guilty of that.

Yet for the record in 2017 Joan has declared that she is against labor unions so as a note to the police, the firefighters and the public school teachers who might think that they might vote for Joan Powell looking for an easy run over politician to engage in future negotiations with—she has indicated that she is anti-union.   I mean perhaps she has learned some lessons over the years.  I wouldn’t vote for her as a trustee, the only people I think have a chance of doing good work as a West Chester trustee are Mark Welch and Ann Becker.  Lynda O’Conner may be a good pick for that third seat because Lee Wong is a disaster and Joan Powell has a terrible track record at managing big budgets.  But in regard to her statements on labor unions, I actually agree with Joan Powell on something.

In actuality Joan was likely just telling the audience what they want to hear, which is worse than being an open liberal because as a voter you can never be sure what the person you are considering really stands for.  Knowing a bit about Joan Powell I think she is very malleable—her thoughts always go to the path of least resistance and that’s fine if you are a grandma handing out cookies to your grand kids—but when you are supposed to protect millions of dollars from the greedy hands of public employees who want the most money for doing the least work—you want someone who will manage that money with some valor.  Labor unions may want to vote for Joan because they smell the blood in the water, but one thing they won’t be able to rectify is that she did come out against labor unions in the 2017 election.   Her comments are now part of the public record and they will be used against her in the future.  That’s why we have these forums, so that we can test the candidates in the forges of reality to see how they hold up to a little scrutiny.  Obviously Joan Powell says whatever she needs to in order to appease the people she is addressing.  If it’s labor unions, she gives them what they want.  If it’s the Tea Party, she does the same.  So there is nothing about Joan Powell that indicates she would ever do anything but tell people what they want to hear.  The damage she has always done, and obviously seems committed to in the future, is that she is more in love with the popularity of being a public official than in doing the hard work of management.  And that is what deciding this election of 2017 is all about.  If people want good management, Joan Powell is not their person.

Rich Hoffman

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