Tag: Lakota Schools

The Lakota School Board Has Always Been Political: So why do they want peace now?

Wait a minute, why was Julie Shaffer crying at the Lakota school board meeting on September 12th? After all, she has been one of the most vicious political activists on the school board over the years. She has come after me before, quite viciously. In 2012, after Lakota had suffered its third levy defeat and figured that the only way they would ever win a tax increase from the community was to get rid of me, they came after me in a very public way, not in a softball manner. So since they couldn’t beat me in debate, Julie worked with several school board members and the Cincinnati media to destroy me viciously, which has been well chronicled. For most people, what she and the Lakota school board did to me would have destroyed them, and they didn’t care what it did to my family, life, or reputation in the community. They just wanted me gone, and they took the kill shot, and so did the Cincinnati media, which was hooked in lockstep with them, just as they are today. I have recently watched them do the same thing to Darbi Boddy. After voters elected her, the Lakota school board decided they didn’t want her, so they conspired to get rid of her viciously, with fangs out, and ruthlessly, blowing on the fires of liberal activism throughout the community. They didn’t care one bit what it might do to Darbi, her family, or her reputation. They simply wanted to destroy her in any way possible. 

But then, at the school board meeting’s closing comments, it came time for Julie to provide her’s; fighting back the tears, she said, “that I wish that people could remember that this is more than political theater and that these are people’s lives and future and what they worked for their entire career, and there are more people involved and that these are more than people’s points on a score card.” Well, isn’t that an astonishing statement? Who would have figured that she would say such a thing, given her track record? But then that opens up a whole new can of worms. Suppose she has such a public double standard depending on the political situation. How much bad behavior has she been willing to explain away in the past, knowing what this information tells us about her? I already know the answer, but for you, dear reader, let’s just have a little fun with it. For many years, I have heard of many cover-up stories that the Lakota school board has whitewashed. My hope was that with the current school board candidates that maybe that would change. But as soon as Darbi was elected, the knives came out, and surprisingly, Lynda did not come to her defense like I expected that she would and should. I have not been a fan of public education for many years now. I think teaching kids a progressive, liberal education is a huge waste of money. But I have worked with school board members like Lynda over the years to try and save the system. I have come to the defense of many who found themselves without a voice where the media did not want to tell their stories of bad conduct inflicted upon them to improve the school. I didn’t let my feelings toward people like Julie Shaffer inspire a campaign of complete destruction of the public school system in my district. I’ve held back a lot to make the thing work because I knew there were people like Lynda there trying to make it better. 

But then I heard at that same meeting Lynda gave a strange interpretation of the police report, which is available from the Sheriff’s Department as a public record’s request. Anybody can see it and read it, yet Lynda had a strange interpretation of it. She said, “there are no credible allegations against Mr. Miller. The Sheriff’s Office completed its investigation and found there was ‘no probable cause to initiate criminal charges.'” Well, actually, what the police report says at the end of a description of really extraordinary allegations and a police investigation that seems unreal is that the prosecutor said, “at this time,” as in to mean there wasn’t enough evidence at that point to further criminal charges. It does not “clear” Matt Miller as the media and Lynda said it did. Rather, it eludes to much more, suggesting that there may be more to come. What is implied, knowing some of the inside information from the various witnesses, is that it is hoped that this police report will shut down the investigation unless the public demands more. If the public does, then the prosecutor’s behind would be covered to further the investigation. What is astonishing is that Lynda establishes herself as the judge as to whether or not witnesses are credible or not. So what does that say about the school board that she leads? If someone comes forward with information that the school board doesn’t like, does that mean that the school board doesn’t take it seriously? If the Board is anti-Darbi, anti-Tea Party, anti-Republican, does that mean they will disregard the information if it comes from those sources? I have known Lynda O’Conner for a fifth of my life and think of her as a smart woman. A well-intentioned woman. These statements by her seem strange, not her. But then again, maybe the only reason I’ve ever had a relationship with her was for her to keep her enemies close. Nothing would surprise me. Like I say, always judge people based on what they do, not what they say. 

The hypocrisy of it all is that, on the one hand, the school board is all about politics so long as they are destroying the people they don’t want around. But, they will rally to their own people even if those people are guilty as can be, which everyone should find alarming. This isn’t some conspiracy theory; we see this publicly at school board meetings. Compare the police report with what the Board said at the meeting, and everything becomes very clear. Matt Miller created his own problems. Yes, people have a problem with his behavior and are making their opposition known. But people like Julie Shaffer and her school board accomplices set the ground rules for bloodthirsty politics long ago. They take public money to function, and I wouldn’t say I like paying it for the garbage we get from each graduating class. Lynda knows how I felt, but we still worked together to assemble a nice school board that represented the public more than we had. I am surprised that she turned on Darbi as she did. I was also surprised to hear her say the things she did at the latest school board meeting. But then again, maybe not. You never really find out about people until you go through the pressure cooker with them. If Matt hadn’t done what he did to Darbi with the help of the Board led by Lynda and people like Julie to destroy her completely, then the witnesses against Matt Miller would have probably never had the strength to speak out for themselves and go public with the information that has the Lakota superintendent in so much trouble now. He did it to himself. People are only willing to take so much, and because of what those antagonists did at Lakota toward conservatives in the community, over a long period of time, they have asked for what is happening now. And if Lynda doesn’t think the person who was married to Matt, and her many friends wasn’t a credible witness even after the police did their interviews, maybe she is having trouble with definitions these days, just as she obviously has with the police report.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Click to visit Protect Lakota Kids .Com

Where is the Sheriff Jones Press Conference: Just ask your friendly Neighborhood Lakota School Board Member

Matt Miller of Lakota schools has been very open about trying to get rid of political enemies as he did Todd Parnell over woke politics during bad conduct among the student population, then again with Darbi Boddy when she showed up unannounced to take pictures on the walls of CRT teachings reported there. In both cases the Lakota superintendent, Matt Miller took action to force resignations, which was an insult to the people who voted for those representatives. He acted in a way that showed disregard for what damage might occur to those personalities and what it might cost them professionally or personally. That might seem fair in love and war, but when he stumbles on things, he shouldn’t expect people to treat him lightly. After a messy divorce, some of the documents from that divorce have been revealed by his ex-wife, and many within the Lakota school district have now seen what those documents say. He might say she’s crazy, as a lot of men do about their ex-wives as they try to move on after a previous marriage, but from what she has said about him, it’s clear that we need as a community to check it out. At the very least, the superintendent owes the tax-paying public an explanation that explains away what she has been saying with written testimony. I’ve never been a big fan of Matt, and always thought his $200,000 salary was too much and thought a less expensive person could quickly replace him. That evidence reported by his ex-wife was turned over to the police because it went well beyond politics and community gossip but straight to matters that only law enforcement should be dealing with. There were text messages which came from his phone with entire conversations on them where really bad things were talked about. They were screenshots taken by his spouse. The Lakota school board now has possession of much of this material in addition to many more items that are now public record and are available upon request. Could they be fake, perhaps, that was for the police to correspond through an investigation, which they have been conducting? I reminded everyone involved, which was a growing list of angry people made that way by the way Matt Miller dealt with his political enemies, that everyone had the right to due process. He might be innocent, and all this evidence could be made up. But as things have matured, it looked less likely, so it was all turned over to the police and the Lakota school board, and now that school has started, people are frustrated that the investigation was taking too long. Because based on previous actions and the safety of kids considered as the priority, the lack of urgency by all involved has left many questions. Questions, after all, are perfectly logical, especially after what we learned about the Jason Gmoser child pornography case. I personally like Mike Gmoser, the Butler County prosecutor. But his relationship to that case which carried with it life imprisonment, indicates to the community that when we hear of cases that might be unbelievable otherwise, we have an obligation to investigate at a minimum.

And for good reason, after all, there is a six-count indictment against Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds over just a real estate transaction that led Sheriff Jones and the Attorney General, David Yost, to give press conferences about, and that entire case was built on hearsay, where one party said something about another party that was in the public eye. Many people think that the case against Roger Reynolds is entirely political. Still, if that is the level of criteria we are using to measure legal cases, then there is a lot more hearsay involved in the Matt Miller divorce where his ex-wife is saying in writing much, much, much worse. I again would offer that Matt might be innocent, but when there is that much smoke, there is fire to stir it up. Why wasn’t Sheriff Jones standing in front of his emblem at his office and giving a press conference announcing all he and the police were doing to protect kids from the potential danger of the superintendent at Lakota, according to a reliable witness, his ex-wife? Do we just take his word for her credibility? As a community that pays his salary and counts on him to sell Lakota to the world as a safe and reliable place to send children, are we supposed to ignore what she is struggling to say because it’s inconvenient or that we might personally like the superintendent? It would be one thing if the accusations were just spoken, but these were written in text messages, confirmed by police interviews, and court documents from the divorce corresponded with the conversations. So, there is more than enough evidence to take caution on the matter and find out what’s going on. But after several weeks, and school starting with many upset who know about the matter looking for some acknowledgment of justice, the cold reality of a perceived cover-up was beginning to take hold.

The media wasn’t camped outside his home the way they were with Darbi Boddy when Matt Miller served her with trespassing papers on a school she is supposed to be managing as a board member. Matt took it so far that her story made the national news, and it was very embarrassing for her. Wasn’t that a purposeful defamation of her character? She was only a few months on the job after being newly elected, and obviously, Matt Miller was doing to her what he had done previously to Todd Parnell. He might have thought that a good idea, but he made a lot of political enemies by doing it, and shortly after that came a barrage of whispers about his sex life. You would expect a person who makes as much money as he does to show better discretion than all this. He should have never picked fights like this unless he was squeaky clean, and I mean eat off the glass clean. He might have a good explanation for the behavior of his ex-wife, and he should explain it, instead of digging in and avoiding the problem publicly. His lack of direct response to these issues has fed the fears in the people who have seen the text messages. And for those he has made political enemies out of, they are looking for anything to hang him on. And if he gave them the rope, that’s on him.

One of those six indictments against Roger Reynolds is a statement by Jenni Logan, who surprisingly left her job as Lakota’s treasurer on August 1st of, 2022, just a few weeks ago. Given the timing of this information and how it has been brewing for much of the previous school year, we must now look at who knew what and when and how involved they were in all this, if at all. But first, we must allow due process to do its work. The evidence must be validated, and explanations are mandated. For people to regain trust in Lakota as a school system, an investigation is necessary because this erosion of trust has brought us to this place and was created by Lakota management. Trust is earned; it isn’t just given away by title and by the way Matt Miller has actively worked to get rid of political rivals, as he did with Todd Parnell, and has tried to do with great fanfare Darbi Boddy, there was going to be a cost to it. The anger created by him has caused people to talk, and evidence was bound to come forth. But this isn’t just some community gossip. It’s a family member and a network of mad moms provoked by a long history of Matt Miller’s community interaction. At the very least, he has shown really bad judgment. At the worst, that’s for the police investigation to determine. Based on how the Sheriff’s department went after Roger Reynolds over much less evidence, we should expect the police to confirm or deny the results of their investigation. Doing the right thing is sometimes very hard, but we all have an obligation to justice. Otherwise, we will just get a lot more bad behavior in the future. 

I would have preferred to just see what comes from the police investigation, but after the events that occurred on Monday the 22nd of August 2022 some understandings must be met. I watched the school board meeting to see how this issue would be addressed, knowing the contents of the email that was sent to the school board earlier that morning. The same email ended up in all of the media by the afternoon sent by the person who wrote the board her concerns. Yet the reaction by the superintendent was a threat that would open up a whole can of worms with witness testimony and submitted evidence, police interviews–and mostly silence by Lakota generally, except for massive amounts of gossip. What started as a concerned parent reporting what was told to her that was very much a police matter; the public employees don’t get to go on the attack against their boss, the voters of Lakota. Explanations are the burden of the superintendent, it’s his life, his mess, and it’s up to him to explain all this to people for continued employment. The institution of Lakota is not more important than the individual people involved. And as to the superintendent’s reputation, he has to be able to manage all these things as part of his job. He owes us, the taxpayers, a lot of answers. But he doesn’t get to boss around members of the community for things he has himself opened the door to. He is not the victim, he is the responsible party, and the burden of explanation falls on him.

Rich Hoffman

More Conservatives Win School Board Seats in Florida: We need more Darbi Boddy types at Lakota

Just because the conservative experiment at Lakota has not turned out well doesn’t mean it’s a failure across the country. I would say the problems we have at Lakota are natural and part of the transition process. Not the result of failed intentions. When I signed up to help elect a conservative school board at Lakota with a 3 to 2 vote on issues, that, of course, assumed that we were getting conservative candidates. But through the rigors of the day-to-day operations, sometimes people find out they aren’t so conservative. They may have thought they were conservative in the safety of GOP meetings, but when the rubber hits the road, and process bureaucracy starts to take effect, people learn a lot about themselves that they may not have known. And people fall off the wagon. In that case, we just need to look for more candidates and keep putting them on the school board. I signed up for a Darbi Boddy type of school board, not a bunch of softies who would let the superintendent rule the world. I expect the school board to be in charge, not to let radical employees rule the day, and so far, in 2022, that is what has happened. Once things started to get tough, we discovered that Darbi was the only one showing up for work. And that is why we have a lot of the problems that are going on at Lakota now. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure of an effort as much as we are learning what kind of people make good school board members, and we are getting a definition of conservative values that is challenging people’s belief systems in themselves, which will ultimately be good for the community, even if it’s painful now. And as usual, what goes on in Lakota, a big government school in Northern Cincinnati, in the community where I live, so goes much of the rest of the nation. 

In the recent elections in Florida, Republicans showed up to vote for school board members 3 to 1. The more states in America that start to run their states as Ron DeSantis does, the more this trend will continue. Ohio isn’t quite there now. There are a lot of RINO Republicans who still think of themselves as Bush conservatives and Reagan admirers. But Trump is a bit too much “solution” for them, and when the pressure is on, they crack like eggs over an omelet. School boards should never have been considered “politically” neutral. The goal in politics isn’t for everyone to get along.

Public schools are radical institutions conceived by liberalism for teaching liberal arts. They have not produced children that grew up into happy Americans, quite the opposite. Many parents are seeing that they are unhappy with the product of public schools and are finally inserting themselves into possible solutions. For years people have asked me to be a school board member at Lakota for several decades now. Over time, the idea of public school has absolutely made me sick. I don’t think they are good at anything they do. But I have offered my help, especially these last few years, to help make them into a solution. I was quite aware that the people I was dealing with were professional community conversation types who befriend you to win you over, like a timeshare salesman. But I helped anyway because the school of Lakota was already in my home district. I personally pay thousands of dollars a year into that mess. So, I was open to the idea if it could be saved somehow. So, I helped where I could to see what might happen. It was worth a shot.

Other Darbi Boddy types are out there, and school boards across America have elected them by popular vote. It’s part of the trend of populism that is migrating to form the modern political movement that is going to sink all the mistakes of the administrative state finally, as it was conceived by communist and utopian socialists like John Dewey when they came up with the dumb idea of public education in the first place. Sure, it’s been a good free babysitting service for busy parents, but it has raised disasters in people who are failures of the 7 liberal arts in every way they could be measured. Even the best students of the public education system have turned out to be disasters of people and what is bad about the whole institutional approach is that public schools led by liberal-leaning school boards have developed the habit of protecting the bad conduct that goes on in the schools, rather than managing those problems for the betterment of the children involved. It’s all been a disaster from top to bottom, and finally, people are starting to admit to it and are offering themselves as options to get elected and help the way Darbi has been in Lakota. Even if the vote count at Lakota isn’t as conservative as it should be, it’s still better than what we had before. And future elections can certainly smooth that ratio out and will naturally match the national trends toward populism. 

Ultimately, however, my opinion hasn’t changed, even with this trend toward conservatism on school boards. Public education as a concept is doomed. It’s too expensive, inefficient, and doesn’t produce good people. It’s just a trainwreck in the best of cases. It certainly has not been a replacement for good parenting. After the behavior I have witnessed so far in 2022 regarding school board behavior and how the big liberal administrations behave toward it, it’s obvious to me that public education is doomed to complete failure. Suppose they think Darbi Boddy is bad and that the only acceptable Republican on a board is some wishy-washy RINO who will go way out of their way to get along in a “nonpartisan” kind of way, always bending the knee to radical liberals empowered through the teacher’s unions. In that case, there is no hope for them. If they are having trouble now, what will they do in the next elections when more Darbi Boddy types get elected and replace the stale old establishment types who covered up way too much bad behavior just to protect the school from outside opinion? They aren’t going to make it. I remember in April when the news story was all about Lakota might lose their superintendent over the radical school board member, Darbi Boddy, as if we needed to get rid of her to keep him and his $200,000 salary. Well, I don’t think he’s worth it, especially after watching his performance through Covid and recently over several things. We would do better with a much more engaged and less progressive person. I know they fear teacher shortages and bad state report cards, and the public relations of the superintendent are meant to put rosy glasses on all that for the illusion of goodness. But when a district is garbage, it is garbage. You can’t put perfume on it to make it smell better. The fact that the public employees of Lakota want so badly to get rid of the best school board member, Darbi Boddy, says that they aren’t ready to deal with the national trend in public education that is happening everywhere. And that fault is their own for failing to adjust to a changing world and holding on to a failure from the progressive past. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Caves of Lakota Schools: An email and another attempt to divert attention to Darbi Boddy from where the real problems are

I keep getting asked why I haven’t reported on the big Lakota story. Well, for all the reasons that we saw at the last school board meeting, one of the most intense emails that could be sent to a government body was sent that very day. But in the end, the board was OK with Channel 5 doing a story about a mad mom complaining about fellow board member Darbi Boddy again, who compared her to a school shooter. That was the news at 11 after a day of very interesting information. I received the same email that the board had, so I knew the content of it, and based on that, then the meeting started with a strange executive session; another hit piece by Lakota against Darbi Boddy was hardly a concern. Instead, watching the behavior of everyone involved has been interesting. As I say all the time, don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do, and you’ll learn the truth. Or, in this case, “don’t say.” I am watching how the authorities deal with this email. They have the information, and the clock is ticking.

The silence has been revealing. Everyone in town had this email. I had communicated with Karin Johnson from Channel 5 earlier that morning, so the buzz was……buzzing. Yet the story they chose to do was one against Darbi Boddy, again, about the same trespassing in the halls story they have been pushing. And that story was one that Darbi Boddy could easily say was slanderous, character defaming, and intentionally misleading. It is one thing to have an embarrassed mother of a girl who ended up in the Channel 5 story speaking at a school board meeting. It’s quite another giving school support behind it, and the way the board reacted was almost in relief that the news was talking about something else except what was in that email. 

The email was unbelievably bad, so to answer that question properly, I think it belongs in the hands of authorities to deal with quickly. But at this point, I am more interested to see how all the participants behave, which unfortunately goes well outside the government school of Lakota. So, I have not been eager to report all the details because on this one; it’s more important to see where all the insects go when the light is turned on. Turning the light on too fast will only scare them into hiding, where they stay all the time. One way or another, this email situation was much more significant and demanded that the light be turned on differently. I am more interested in seeing how everyone behaves rather than seeking justice for the few involved. Because what’s at stake is the heart of all public education and the mechanisms of the Liberal World Order. Every vestige of the Administrative State, of government built by the foundations of the Seven Liberal Studies, taught to us from our earliest memories, was at work. The media was at that school board meeting because they were looking for acknowledgment on the contents of that email and what management planned to do about it. Instead, the behavior revealed things about their collective strategy that was very surprising, to say the least. They were fine to sacrifice Darbi Boddy as a fellow school board member as they have been from the beginning with the defamatory rhetoric of a community member. But they were uncomfortably silent on the real matter that everyone was there to hear, and they certainly didn’t come to the defense of Darbi when such an accusation was leveled at her. They seemed to welcome it.

One of the ways you can trace the flow of water in underground caves is to pour colored dyes into the water upstream and see where those colors come out of the cave and into an outside creek or river—doing that gives the study an understanding of how water flows through the complicated crevasses and mazes within the cave that wouldn’t be obvious while crawling through the mud and tight corridors. Sometimes the best thing when you can see that crawling through underground caverns isn’t the best way to understand complicated problems; a different approach is needed. Well, the same thing is true in complex social and political issues that emerge in society. When you want to know the who, what, when, where, and how, you won’t find out that information by crawling in the mud with them. You need to see how information flows through their networks and how they react to it. And then, only then, will you understand the nature of the problem. When it comes to emergencies, I think everyone did what they needed to do. The email itself might be so unbelievable that it would turn out to be complete fiction. There are witnesses, and professional medical staff who are available to cross reference, so there are ways to validate the email. At that point, a small press conference about it would be appropriate, and a cautionary tale, no different than the mom who accused Darbi Boddy of being a school shooter would have transpired. After all, we are dealing with public figures here, and everyone involved should be able to endure a bit of scrutiny for the safety and security of the children in the schools of Lakota. If they are innocent of wrongdoing, they should get in front of a camera and say it. Then move on to the next thing.   But that’s not what we are seeing with this email. We see the lights being turned on; the cockroaches are scattering to their hiding places, only this time we are observing the actions with night vision, and can see the difference between light and dark, and can then trace where our bug problem really is, by first admitting that we have one.

So to all those concerned out there who are looking for justice and information, I would caution you to value information above all else. This is obviously a much larger problem that requires a complete understanding of what we are dealing with. So I have been in no rush to turn on the light for all the reasons mentioned. Rather, I would prefer to see how the colored water moves through the complicated politics of our community and to what walls it bounces off of so that a greater understanding of friends and foes can be established. Because when it comes to schools, their whole point is to provide a safe environment for kids. Schools are not a playground for the adults to make large wages and have an easy time making a living. If the adults involved are more interested in the politics of getting rid of school board members they don’t like or protecting a teacher’s union, then their priorities are all wrong, and they need an adjustment. If the media is more interested in the gossip of local politics rather than protecting children, then we have big problems. And if law enforcement is as corrupt as many people fear it is, then we’ll have to address that as well. But we will never know if we just turn on the light. We need to study the flow of information and see what people do with it. Even knowing how serious that information is, it only gives credibility to the data collected through observations made. It’s not acceptable just to have fears and speculations about the motives of the politics of government schools that are attached to tax dollars, radical leftist labor unions, and global political sentiment intent for the destruction of America. Facts and information are far more critical, and what we are learning is infinitely more valuable. So be cool and watch where the bugs run once the lights are turned on. And you’ll have your answers.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota is Teaching Children to be Street Walkers: Darbi Boddy pulls back the veil to reveal what has been hidden from the public, thanks to Channel 5 News

I suppose we should thank Channel 5 news in Cincinnati and the attempts by Karin Johnson to help the mad moms of Lakota build a case against the new school board member, Darbi Boddy, for showing us something we did not previously know. We keep hearing from the actual people committing all the vile acts in Lakota about how innocent they are, how CRT isn’t being taught and how mean Darbi Boddy is and how several parents are circulating a petition to get Darbi removed, even though the voters just picked her to do the job she has been doing. Darbi represents a large portion of the Lakota school district just north of Cincinnati, Ohio. She has been asking many questions, mainly about what kids are being taught and how radicalized it is toward progressive political goals that are nationwide and very dangerous to a healthy society. Darbi didn’t believe the people who were saying there was no CRT in Lakota and that the transexual agenda wasn’t a problem. So Darbi showed up at a couple of Lakota’s schools unannounced and took some pictures. This outraged parents, so they pulled security footage of where Darbi went, and Karin Johnson from Channel 5 put some of the results up on a television report. In one of the clips, they are accusing Darbi of taking a picture of a student, even though she said she didn’t take any pictures of any of the kids. Based on what was shown, it’s an irrelevant point. The student that Darbi took notice of in the hallways and that the mother of the Karin Johnson news report pulled back the veil just enough to give voters a real glimpse into what is really going on at Lakota, away from the sustained eyes of the public and hidden behind polite theatrics at school board meetings. We saw in the video a young girl dressed essentially as a street walker on par with some of the worst in Washington D.C.’s K-Street.  And it shows that Lakota has some big problems.

To hide the issue, the mad moms, the complicit administrators, and the rival school board members, the fuel behind the Channel 5 continued story, felt Darbi shouldn’t have been there. She didn’t have “permission” to visit the school in such an unofficial capacity. Yet legally, Darbi Boddy was elected to do exactly what she has been doing, so the debate is over technique, and as I say all the time to everyone, the rules are not meant for winners. The losers write rules to protect them from the winners in life. And rules are often used to conceal crimes, not reveal them. The administrators and members of the teacher’s union do not want management just showing up unannounced. So they have all kinds of unwritten rules to protect them from judgment. But if you really want to know what’s happening somewhere, especially where you are expected to manage the employee resources, you need to show up when they least expect it and see things for yourself. Within that framework, Darbi considers such an investigation “official business.” The school board might think they need a vote from the board to do such things, but it’s behind that kind of bureaucracy that the real crimes get committed. So I think Darbi is right to show up unannounced to take some pictures and stir things up a bit. Because if she hadn’t, we wouldn’t be talking about this story in the middle of summer 2022 when very few people are thinking about public school business. 

There has been a lot of frustration about CRT at Lakota and across the country. Polite school board members playing by the unofficial rules of conduct are hoping that people will be honest and reveal their clandestine radicalism while they are in possession of the community’s children. So they keep hoping a whistleblower will step forward and reveal all the evidence needed to conclude a case, and action can then be taken. But as I have also been saying for a long time, you can tell all you need to know by the kind of students and what views they express just from the safety of a school board meeting. But if that weren’t enough, my attention was directed to a Spark article about dress codes that came up over this overly sexualized student in the Channel 5 report, which clearly shows how radical the student population has become. Spark is the student-run newspaper. In the December 28th, 2021 edition titled “Back to the Drawing Board,” students are seeking to reform the school’s dress code to reflect anti-racist sentiments, which specifically include do-rags and sexually “expressive” attire that is directly tied to rape culture. Yeah, that’s really in the article. Strangely, Karin Johnson didn’t report about that even when there was evidence of it right in front of her. The point of the Channel 5 report was to talk about how “dangerous” Darbi Boddy is as a school board member and not following some written or unwritten rules. And that the kid dressed as a streetwalker in the school in front of other children and administrators was the victim. The Spark article goes on to say, “regulating students’ bodies is also another way of perpetuating white, heterosexual, middle-class values, as most dress codes conform to a certain kind of femininity and masculinity that does not take into account cultural, racial, religious, gender, and sexual differences among students.” Many people likely don’t know about the Spark article and otherwise wouldn’t know what students think about dress codes if this Channel 5 report had not shown us the alarming student who thought she needed to express herself as a K-Street applicant to a purple-hatted pimp on the street corner. We used to call them ladies of the night, but these days, the streetwalkers are on the streets at 6 AM. So it’s an expanding market looking for more Lakota applicants, by the way, things look. 

Essentially, the inmates are running the asylum. The administrators allow this bad behavior to continue in the schools and look for overly restrictive school board rules to protect them from administrative judgment. If Darbi Boddy had not gone to see what was going on for herself, we wouldn’t know a lot of what we do about the culture that is clearly driving CRT teaching and making everyday classroom environments highly sexualized.   When the school newspaper thinks that dress codes impose white, middle-class values on them, what the heck are we wasting all this money on an education for? If kids are learning this kind of garbage, and there are mothers like this mom of the girl in the Karin Johnson report who will expose their child on national television just to use her as leverage to get rid of Darbi Boddy off the school board, then is any of the public education at Lakota worth anything?   My question to that mom is, “why would you let your kid go to school dressed the way she was?” To be fearful that Darbi Boddy took pictures of her kid when she was more than willing to exploit that kid to push an obvious political agenda that feeds the kind of maniacal subculture reflected in the Spark article about dress codes…………….we have much bigger problems than just CRT. The public education environment is rotten to the very core of its purpose and is a problem that cannot be ignored. But thankfully, in their hate of Darbi Boddy, all these characters, the mom, Karin Johnson, teachers, administrators, purple-haired people eaters who complain at all the school board meetings about fairness as they push for openly sexual lifestyles have let us peek into their tainted world in reaction. And what we see is very ugly, dangerous, and expensive. 

Rich Hoffman

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Abuse of Power in Butler County: And it’s not Roger Reynolds doing it

I’ve talked about it before; I sympathize with the Steve Bannon contempt of congress case that is happening at the end of July 2022 more than other cases because it’s personal for me. I don’t communicate with him a lot, be we occasionally do. He has shared some of my articles on social media, and we have exchanged text messages on occasion, so it’s more personal to me to see what is happening to him than it would be if I didn’t know something about the person himself. As I watch him go to federal court every day and the judge lecture the defense about not making a circus out of the case, it is bewildering to think that Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress in 2012, yet no punishment ever came his way. But because Bannon is a member of the Trump White House, he is being treated like a criminal, guilty before proven innocent, just by association. And all this has made me think of the case of George Lang several years ago, who was facing jail time just for knowing John Boehner, who was poised to be speaker of the house, and the Democrats wanted to sink him through his friends. George, of course, was found innocent, but it was scary for sure. We could all point to misconduct in court proceedings that were purely politically motivated and shake our heads. But we often don’t say much about it because we fear that injustice being turned in our own direction, so we just move along and try to ignore it. Yet, I see the same thing happening to Roger Reynolds in Butler County, where political rivals are accusing him of corruption in his office. And I just don’t see it in any of the indictments, for which a 6th came out just recently to add to the pile, intent on knocking him out of office. It’s an election year, some rivals want Roger out as a political character, and they’ll do what they must do to sink him. 

Believe me; I’d rather talk about a million other things than this case, which I’ve discussed in detail. I’d prefer to leave all this mess to the courts to decide but based on a ridiculous article by Jennifer Edwards Baker from Fox 19 about the details of the 6th indictment against Roger Reynolds, which now involves Lakota schools, the issue is so preposterous that we just can’t ignore it. Obviously, the prosecution in the case against Roger, much like the case against Steve Bannon, doesn’t have much to go on, so they are prosecuting the case in the court of public opinion through reporters who might sway public sentiment ahead of upcoming elections. And that is the entire goal of the proceedings. And we can’t ignore the case because it could be any of us falsely accused. It’s not that I love Roger Reynolds. I think he has been an excellent auditor. But he’s made political enemies over the years, which is all part of the blood sport of politics. I think he could handle many things better regarding social interactions, but I recognize that he’s an A-Type personality, as is Sheriff Jones, and a clash among those types of people is bound to happen. I see it as more of a human resource problem than a legal one. If those two people have problems, they should resolve them in some other way than in political tricks ahead of elections and wasting the time of courts for personal vendettas, which is clearly the case with this indictment against Roger involving Lakota schools.   

The Fox 19 article says many things that could easily be misconstrued, leaving out all the relevant factors, such as all the axes to grind among public employees, especially those who handle money. The indictment indicates that Lakota schools were due to get back $750,000 from the auditor’s office. Roger suggested to the treasurer Jenni Logan that they spend that money on the Four Bridges Golf Course in a partnership. A whole series of emails between Jenni and the school attorney show an interest in Roger’s proposal. Ultimately, they decided it probably wasn’t a good idea, so the concept was rejected. That was back in 2017, a long time ago. So why is this story coming out now? Jenni is retiring on August 1st, 2022, and this is something for the road that fits into the motivations of Sheriff Jones and his political needs regarding putting someone else in the seat of the Butler County Auditor. So, they completely made up the word “coercion” in the indictment and tried to build a case that forced Roger to prove he wasn’t guilty of it due to pressure from public opinion, rather than proving that Roger actually used coercion in any way during the proposed spending of the money. When people see $750,000, they might think that’s a lot of money, but in reality, within the budget of Lakota, it’s much less than 1% of their expenditures and is actually about 11 or 12 teachers. Teachers make a lot of money, despite what the unions say about compensation. I can easily see how Roger would suggest that Jenni spend the money on something more useful, like an elevated lifestyle for the students of Lakota, rather than just blowing it on more activist teachers. Jenni must have thought the idea a good one because she pursued it through emails which are part of the case. But she did so voluntarily. That is not coercion; it’s a discussion among professional adults. 

All this doesn’t change my opinion of Roger Reynolds. As I indicated, I could tell stories all day long about court cases that were purely intended to destroy a political rival and had nothing to do with actual justice. I mentioned a few here based on personal experience. But it’s quite common as a practice. I’m all for law and order, but justice should be blind. What is going on with Roger Reynolds is that laws are being applied against a political rival instead of uniformly applied. It’s an abuse of authority, but it’s not Roger doing the abuse. It’s the accusers, not the recipient. I’ll still be voting for Roger Reynolds in the upcoming election. All the people participating in the investigation against him should be trying to work with Roger instead of getting rid of him over their personal problems they might have. Destroying people’s lives is not the way to solve a problem. It might be common, but it’s certainly not right.

The courts are not private playgrounds to bully people into fight resolution that might have been settled on a playground when everyone was kids. As adults, judges, attorneys, and media bottom feeders are not replacements for fists to the face. When the courts are abused, as they are clearly being abused in this Roger Reynolds case and the case of Steve Bannon, that gives politics and our justice system a bad name, and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves, as far as I’m concerned, all six of these indictments against Roger Reynolds are political witch hunts. If I had been Roger, I would have handled things differently, where there was no question as to blurred lines. But social mistakes aren’t against the law. Intent to commit a crime is, and to assume intent where there clearly isn’t any evidence, just for the political theater of altering an election is despicable at best and gross abuse of authority at the very least. 

Rich Hoffman

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Darbi Boddy Gets the Sam Adams Award: What people want out of school boards

It was ironic to attend the Patriot Awards at the historic 20th Century Theater in Oakley, Ohio, to see Darbi Boddy get the Sam Adams Award for constitutional preservation and outstanding patriotism while the radical elements of Lakota schools were petitioning a judge in Butler County to remove her from the Lakota school board. Two different views of the world couldn’t be further apart. Since Darbi entered her first term as a school board member at Lakota, activated due to her concern for the way things had been going in public schools, the politically left-leaning elements of the union-controlled Lakota were irate toward her very existence. And they have been pushing to have her utterly destroyed. Yet, there are lots of people happy to see Darbi Boddy fighting on their behalf, and here they were on a Saturday night during Memorial Day weekend, giving her an award for doing exactly what was making the radical elements of Lakota so angry. Darbi received her award and gave a nice little speech that clearly indicated she wasn’t about to resign from the school board, as the school administration was pushing for her to do. At the heart of the matter was a battle for who really controls public schools, elected officials or hired administrators. And the hired administrators were obviously fighting to maintain their assumption that they were in control and that the elected members of the school board were just token sentiments. So the battle lines were drawn up in Lakota schools for an issue that had emerged to be a national one most clearly expressed in the newly elected Darbi Boddy.

The teacher unions have established themselves as being in charge of all public schools. There has evolved a kind of mutual understanding that nobody questioned so long as parents had the free babysitting service of public education. A superintendent would be inserted to be a mediator between the progressive radicals of the union and the school board elected by the public. As soon as school board members were elected, they’d join the Ohio School Board Association and would learn the rules of conduct that the public would see. And the labor unions would then advocate for a more progressive political world shielded by the superintendent, who would take over the management tasks from the school board. While the school boards worried about all the rules of their endeavor, the radical progressives in the labor unions were putting the focus on pay, benefits, and whether or not there were gay rights celebrated at the school, and all references toward God and country removed from the instruction of the children. I’ve been pointing these things out for several decades, and it’s taken people a while to accept these conditions as a reality. I knew at some point there was going to be a wall that the whole thing would hit; I figured it would happen during the Trump administration. But really, it took Covid to bring it out, as mad moms saw what was really going on in the classrooms because the lockdowns broke the cycle of free babysitting that had been occurring. Parents had time to think about how serious the problem really was in public education. 

For all those who hate Darbi Boddy, I can report that there are many like her out there. Darbi is one of the best that I’ve run across who may be able to save some aspects of public education because she genuinely cares about the school and the kids in it. And their parents. But the fight to go back to what labor unions used to have, a superintendent who would run cover for all their bad conduct and continue to ask for perpetual raises regardless of performance, is over. Getting rid of Darbi Boddy won’t put that mess back together; it was always destined to hit the wall of public perception. Darbi is just the first brick in that wall they’ve come in contact with. Like bell-bottoms and disco attire were come-and-go fashions from the 70s, this period of union control of public schools will be viewed as archaic and embarrassing in hindsight. The future of public education is not in the union’s control of them. Like all institutions that labor unions have controlled, they have driven them out of business because they insist on the organization’s management control. But they do not make management decisions; they make emotional ones, so their efforts fail everywhere they are tried, especially in public education. To hide their failure, they use the superintendent to hide their incompetence behind high wages and get the school boards to chase their tails through rules and regulations—something I call “procedural camouflage.” Well, that’s no longer acceptable, and taxpayers are finally figuring out the story with public schools; they aren’t worth the money, aren’t teaching kids the right things, and are open sores in their communities for progressive politics. While the school boards try to play by the rules, the crimes of public schools are hidden behind the rules. 

That is why there was so much anger at Darbi Boddy for immediately going around the rules to get to the heart of the matter, in challenging the power structure of the superintendent and his protection over his flock of unionized teachers. Within the culture of Lakota, of course, Darbi was hated. And voters cast in her favor because they wanted her to do that particular job. They wanted her to seek media attention to get the story out so that it couldn’t be contained within the structure of institutionalism and concealed from the view of voters. And while she was being vilified at school board meetings and in the halls of the schools the way most bosses are by incompetent employees, at the Patriot Awards, Darbi was getting applause for patriotism under fire and doing what many didn’t have the guts to do, stand up to the corrosive elements of public education and dare to ask questions that nobody wanted to answer. I tend to see Darbi Boddy as the best thing that has happened to Lakota schools. Public education, in general, is undergoing major changes. The labor unions will not be able to remain in control as they have been. Soon, the public money that the schools divide up like pirates after a robbery on the high seas will go to the kids. It will only take the next Republican presidential administration with a Republican-controlled House and Senate that will take the power of the Department of Education away completely, as Ronald Reagan had promised back in the early 80s. His failure to do that has caused much of the trouble we see today, which new politicians like Darbi are coming forth to challenge. Soon, it will gain national steam, and the political capital will be present to change the entire structure. There are already 1.5 million kids who stepped away from public education because of Covid. That number is increasing due to the obvious CRT teachings and the transgender politics that so many parents find objectionable as a public policy. Public schools have done it to themselves. Lakota will be glad that they had these disputes with Darbi early in the future. Maybe they can use this conflict to get in front of the inevitable, and Lakota can find a way to be relevant in the ways of the future. Holding on to the past where the unions ran everything, and the superintendents ran cover for the unions is over. And that wasn’t the fault of Darbi Boddy. She’s doing what the voters want.   Lakota schools were the ones caught going in the wrong direction.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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The Lakota School Board Created the National Circus: They want short meetings, and Darbi Boddy asks too many questions

There is a big difference between making mistakes and purposeful maliciousness. What Darbi Boddy did as a Lakota school board member was make a few mistakes. At the last meeting, I pointed this out to the board by giving a brief history of mistakes the Lakota school board had made, precisely one that resulted in an embarrassing lawsuit last year that cost many thousands of dollars. As a new board member, Darbi has been asking lots of questions. Still, the radical element has been aggressive toward her, primarily since she worked immediately to remove mask mandates at the school. Darbi Boddy was targeted right out of the gate, which wasn’t unexpected. But what was surprising was the level of activism that the school board would take to use whatever mistakes Darbi Boddy made as a new school board member to create a public circus just to get her to resign. Darbi, I think, has been a good school board member, and it was the job of the rest of the board members to reach out and to build a team with her instead of plotting behind the scenes to get rid of her because she didn’t fit a mold they saw as being on their school board membership. The voters picked the board, and the school board, along with Matt Miller, the superintendent, became activists to remove Darbi Boddy with a classic trick of social ostracization and peer pressure to force her to resign for a mistake only six months into the first term. The result was a national spectacle that was grossly unfair to Darbi. It was a level of activism that told many stories, but the worst of all was in its doing and the lack of responsibility that anybody utilized in the aftermath. The school board itself acted as if Darbi brought all this negative attention to Lakota when they tried to use the media and the radical element churned up for blood to destroy Darbi Boddy in every way they could. 

For me, what started years ago to simply fight school levies to keep the costs down of tax burdens in our school district, I have grown to hate Lakota schools over the years. I don’t think Lakota does anything well for the kids. I would argue that even the sports programs are unhealthy for the kids and their future culture once they’ve graduated. The more I have learned about public education, the more I hate it. So after the last election, I felt that Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi, the two newest board members, did care about public education. A lot more than I did, so they might be able to make Lakota the best it can be for the taxpayers who are forced to contribute small fortunes to essentially a progressive institution that works against them politically.   I heard at that last meeting Issac’s statements about not wanting to be on the news, and all his experience as a program manager with Master’s Degrees in college, because he was struggling to understand what a school board member at Lakota was all about. I felt sympathy for him, Issac is a very good person, and he means the best for all lives he touches. I think he and Darbi make the school board better, and maybe they’ll actually help some kids along the way. I was happy with their elections, so I stayed out of Lakota business because I personally find the whole thing sickening. Everything about public schools is political, and they aren’t my kind of politics. So I’m not eager to waste my time at their stupid meetings. All they have is a parade of complaints of below-the-line thinking from a unionized mindset that projects that more money is always needed to solve their problems. And to get that money, kids are always used as hostages to move public sentiment. So if I can put Lakota out of my mind and forget about it as much as possible, I’m a happy guy. If they drag me into their mess, well, then I’m not so happy. 

Politics is a blood sport, which I say all the time. Nobody really likes each other about much of anything. Politics, then, is a game where people use each other to achieve whatever objective they find bounces around in their minds. It is those skills specifically that I think Darbi Boddy has that make her better than most in school board business.   The greatest weakness in any school board culture is the Ohio School Board Association which turns the whole effort more into a country club mindset than anything practical for the business management of a district. What ends up happening is that the OSBA runs cover for the radical elements of progressive public schools, focusing on damage control of public image over the substance of actual management of resources united through political friendships and peer pressure. Darbi went into the school board without needing to have the illusions of friendships and being free of peer pressure. She has a nice family at home, a husband she enjoys, and is a dedicated mom, which is good enough for her. Going into the election, I thought that she had the potential to actually be helpful as a school board member at Lakota because of those traits. But she didn’t feel a need to maintain illusionary friendships aimed at group consensus, and this was a problem for the traditional way of running a school board, so things got off to a rough start from minute number one. Perhaps when Matt Miller gave Darbi and Issac their fruit baskets as a gift at the beginning of the year, they all would have gotten along better if they had given Darbi something she actually wanted. Whatever the case, the board would have done better to make political friends with Darbi than they did. Instead, they looked to destroy her because the value system was featured on cooperation and politics than on actually doing the job for the school.

The result of the school board approach with Matt Miller playing his role of passive-aggressive assassin was to use the media and the mob to push Darbi Boddy off the board with scandal, like a Shakespearean play. They could have used some of Darbi’s rookie mistakes to bond with her and do team building which is how such things are done in the professional world. Everyone would have understood, after all, the board as a body had made more than its fair share of serious mistakes over the years. Nothing that Darbi had done was malicious. There is a hostile political element in Lakota that the board should be fighting as members of management. Not yielding to. That radical element seeks to take away the management ability of the board at every juncture, and the net result of that is always more money.   At that last school board meeting, the seeds were certainly being planted for a future tax increase. The cost of diesel was going up, so busing was getting too expensive.

Teachers weren’t feeling safe in a post-Covid world; what would Lakota do to prevent teachers from leaving for other districts? The subtext of all the conversations was “more money.”  And what always costs more money is a lack of management which the political radicals at Lakota purposely interject always to keep the school board on its heels. And when they can get the board fighting each other, as they were baited into doing against Darbi Boddy, well then, of course, the result is continuously increased costs and unregulated monstrosities. The excuse that while the board was focused on shoving Darbi Boddy off the board, one of the schools needed an extended parking lot for increased busing, which would cost more money and create a need for another tax levy. All the while, to cover up the hard decisions with obvious indecision, Darbi Boddy made a convenient punching bag. The superintendent and other board members who aren’t getting paid want to go home. They don’t like long marathon meetings, and Darbi won’t shut up about her questions.   So they attacked her to push her off the board so that perhaps they could get back to 45-minute meetings again, or even 20 minutes. But from what I heard at that last meeting, the Lakota school board needs the questions that Darbi has been asking even more. When you are managing many millions of dollars, those meetings should be every bit of 4 to 5 hours. And if they take 12 to 15 hours, then that is what should be done if managing all those schools, all those progressive employees, and all the variables in between is required not to have to ask the public for more money. At that May 9th meeting, I heard that the superintendent and the board wanted to be lazy, and they wanted to get rid of the person who wanted to work the hardest so that they wouldn’t have to.   And they created the embarrassing national circus so they wouldn’t have to do the work that the taxpayers expected.

Rich Hoffman

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