Tag: Lakota teachers

Lakota Wants Another Tax Increase to Pay for their Progressive, Radical, anti-American Teachers: The lawsuit of Emily Osterling

A little bird landed on my shoulder recently to tell me that my local school system of Lakota was thinking about attempting another tax increase on property owners after years of declining enrollment, and poor performance, and it sent my blood into a boil. My position on school levies is pretty clear, especially these days. When I’ve been against them before it was largely a cost thing, public schools were just too much of a burden in their communities and they weighed them down needlessly. But now, we have seen that not even the extraordinary costs were even worth the trouble as the kids coming out of these schools are just a mess. Little birds have a way of always coming back and what’s more, its not just one, no matter how much time passes. What they whisper is the kind of things that are truly things to be angry at, because the audacity is something to behold, because if you really do care about kids and their futures, which I do, then this public school scam of sucking so much money out of tax revenue for poor management by the school boards is something that we all must deal with.

For instance, that same school board which is proposing to put another tax increase on the ballot perhaps as early as 2020 also is trying to get transgender policies enacted for the sheer progressive intention of social theatrics. A school like Lakota which is one of the largest in Ohio and has many thousands of students, only has a handful of students who would lay claim to any kind of transgender policy. While a person like me would argue that transgender anything has nothing to do with education and is purely a creation of the progressive political movement, accommodations are made at Lakota for that very specific minority. So there is no need for costly modifications or even the wasted effort by management (the school board) to embark on any kind of transgender diatribe. It’s not even something that a school board should be discussing in relation to budgetary considerations. In any kind of world that type of cause and effect proposal is completely non value added to the end use customer, the children and their families and really is at the heart of all public schools. They simply don’t produce anything of any real value to the world and have worn out their welcome.

In business, it is common no matter what the size for management to ponder how to squeeze cost out of everything so that a company can make money and survive. One of the ways that is done is to determine what elements of a company create value for their end use customer while putting all the other efforts to a category of waste to be eliminated from their processes. When a school system like Lakota is in the mode of thinking that transgender issues are a value to their end use customer, the tax paying public, then there is a big problem and it becomes an even bigger problem when they consider any proposal that increases taxes on a future ballot.

I am clearly aware of the Emily Osterling case who sued Lakota for transgender issues which cost $175,000, $75,000 coming directly out of board funds. Osterling was a long time teacher, one of those employees that I have said for years was overpaid for the kind of work that she was doing. The school board had determined that her activism into transgender rights was cutting into her actual duties, so the activist was put on administrative leave. The school board was trying to do the right thing and get rid of a troubling, and expensive employee that was pushing off progressive causes onto a learning environment that was supposed to be teaching kids. A few years prior in a close vote that Julie Shaffer was pushing on creating a transgender policy at Lakota the issue was narrowly defeated not in a small part due to the two conservatives that sit on the Lakota school board in Lynda O’Connor and Todd Parnell. The progressive activist Osterling wouldn’t let the matter stand and continued to push the agenda which eventually forced the board to settle with her such an extraordinary sum of money over something that most people can agree was not a value to the end use customer, the students and their tax paying parents.

And that is where the real problem is, that the employees of Lakota and every other public school are runaway activists intent to perpetually run up their labor costs and to ultimately turn our children into progressive advocates of liberalism and launch them into a life of confusion and turmoil. On the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati Osterling cited that her administrative leave in September of 2018 to begin termination proceedings based on “flimsy and retaliatory allegations” was somehow out of step with the actual needs of the community, and it is in those kinds of employees that jack up the extraordinary costs of the employees at Lakota which cause the need for ever more tax money to be wasted on them for the basic luxury as acting as glorified babysitters.

Osterling was a prominent Lakota teacher’s union official and a National Education Association board member, and co-chair of the NEA’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender caucus—otherwise as an employee, she was a nightmare—expensive and underperforming toward what the value of an education to children really needed. As part of the settlement Osterling had to submit a letter of resignation on March 26th of 2019. The problem is, she is just one employee at Lakota which has many hundreds just like her, only not quite as vocal. Even when it was obvious that Osterling had to go, it took moving mountains to get her out, and it was expensive.

I didn’t say much on the matter because I felt the school board, at least a few of them, was doing a good job. Julie Shaffer continues to be the entry point for activism allowing people like Osterling to feel they even have a platform to speak from. My history with Julie goes back a long time, our debates can still be found by Googling them which were aired on WLW radio some years back. Of course when she and her board members back then couldn’t win a school levy three times in a row because they couldn’t make a good argument for the money the board was wasting, she turned to identity politics to try and bring great harm to me personally which remains to this day an issue of contention. I offered to put the matter to rest by supporting a tax increase which I knew Lakota wanted to propose soon, but only if they allowed teachers to arm themselves in the classrooms to protect against a mass shooting. Of course, they ignored my proposal which pulled my support of any levy off the table. I’m willing to pay teachers to get gun training and to protect kids from bad people, but I’m not willing to support progressive union activists like Emily Osterling. The school isn’t there for the employees, its there for the kids, pure and simple.

Due to the lack of management, again, not by all the school board members, but there is still a three to two vote against logic in Lakota. If that ratio could be turned around, and activists like Julie Shaffer who obviously has serious problems and is aligned with the radical elements of the employment base, money management might occur. But under the current leadership, Lakota plans to consider another tax increase soon and we’ll be back to all the same old tricks and nonsense again. I don’t think any of us want that. I don’t want expensive employees and lawsuits that are non value added to the end use customer working at Lakota. I thought it was wise for the board to try to get rid of her, which they did eventually. But when members of the board are encouraging the Emily Osterling types along, that expense is on them, not the taxpayer.

Rich Hoffman

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Fire Lakota’s Teachers: Protest over merit pay bad example to kids

I have written and said so much on this topic you’d think that the ridiculously arrogant teachers in the Lakota school system would have learned by now.  However, they apparently have the memory span of Dory from the Finding Nemo movie, and about the same politics—and they can’t remember anything from five minutes ago, let alone five years.  Like a bunch of children they protested in front of various Lakota schools over the implementation of merit pay—which is something that’s happening all over the nation, not just in Ohio—and is certainly not limited to Lakota.  I’ve said it before, I don’t mind paying a teacher $200,000 a year if they are really good, but I don’t want to pay a slug $65K per year just because they showed up and fulfilled a step schedule established by the labor union.  I want to see management deciding who gets paid what for an expected criterion.  I do not want to pay for collective bargaining which favors the lazy at the expense of the hard-working.

Of course the impact of these entire teacher antics in attempting to wreck the budget at Lakota will provoke another levy attempt, which I have been saying all along will happen right around the 2017 mark—if not sooner—since the school board knows it will likely meet resistance and may take a few years to pass.  What they are asking us to pay for is the same ridiculousness they have in the past—out-of-control employee costs that are directly linked to this kind of teacher behavior.  Because the union is protected by state and federal law management often caves under the collective pressure of protests like this recent one at Lakota and the tax payers are stuck with the bill—which means an increase in property taxes.  People new to the district don’t mind paying a bit more on taxes until they live in the area for a few years and are stuck with excessively high taxes.  It is then that they get buyer’s remorse—meanwhile all these radical union employees retire and move away leaving the mess to the rest of us to clean up.  I let the Pulse Journal know my thoughts about the Lakota protests with the following Letter to the Editor.

In a fair world every teacher who took part in the Friday April 24th demonstrations in front of the students at twenty of Lakota’s schools protesting merit pay, should have been terminated immediately.  However, we don’t live in a fair world and are currently stuck with an out-of-touch teacher’s union culture in these schools that feel they are entitled to district resources without the judgment of their job performance being established through a merit pay system. 

Defenders of the action will declare that their gathering was a “peaceful demonstration” and they (the teachers) have the right under the First Amendment to “assemble.”  Yet the protesters in this case are district employees who consciously made a decision to impose their viewpoints in front of the same children they are supposed to be teaching which should be considered a breach of contract by attempting to radicalize students against value assessment—merit pay.  It is insulting that they’d even contemplate the protest at Lakota after that district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to repair their image after the last few years.  Talk about short memories—and a lack of gratitude.  The school board went to great measure to improve Lakota’s image and the teachers decided “collectively” to perform this task—in front of their students–amazingly short-sighted.

I’m looking forward to the further antics of the Lakota teachers over the coming summer.  Since we can’t fire them, they will make fighting the next levy attempt that much easier. 

Thanks,

Rich Hoffman

The judgment was so bad that all those employees should have been relieved of their duties and sent home on the spot.  But we don’t live in a fair world—but one where public employees like these people are used to getting what they want, when they want it.  They are spoiled brats—and that is putting it mildly.  The Lakota teachers participating in this demonstration are easily replaceable, and should have been treated justly.  They expect too much money for doing entirely too little—then they have the arrogance to be a disruptive force within the school.

It should be quite clear by now why I still think it was a teacher who left the note in the bathroom just days before the last election in Lakota threatening a shooting spree if voters didn’t pass a levy.  Even though the levy was to throw money at these same teachers as appeasement for maintaining a wage freeze at the time, the levy was sold as a way to keep our “kids” safe in school.  Conveniently, just days before the election a threatening note was left behind promising a shooting spree.  The FBI and Butler County Sheriff’s office offered no leads, no hand writing analysis, no arrests in their “investigation” because they knew what I did—that the investigation would have taken them to the classroom of one of these radical teachers instead of some disgruntled kid.  Heck, Sheriff Jones even put his name behind the passage of the levy.  But if it was a kid, where could we place the blame for learning the behavior—look at their teachers?

Much is said about the millennial generation and how bad they are regarding work ethic—how pretentious they are relative to generations from the past.  Granted, the parents are largely to blame for these screwed up kids.  But the public schools have sold themselves as an option to parenting—as a viable substitute.  Well, here is the proof of what kind of things those mentors are teaching kids.  No wonder kids grow up expecting the world to be handed to them on a silver platter; they learn it from their teachers.

Until Ohio becomes a Right-to-Work state these radical nutcases will have all the leverage against tax payers—because management of them is simply not possible—if teachers will protest merit pay—where good teachers get paid based on how good they are—they’ll protest a turtle crossing the street.  Their argument becomes so ridiculous that it’s almost science fiction.  What’s encouraging is that these Lakota teachers have shown so early in the game that they are willing to behave like a bunch of Saul Alinskey radicals just as they did in 2008 with a strike threat, which I brought up continuously in 2010 through the first three levy attempts, caused the budget problems at Lakota.  These latest actions by them will just give those of us willing to fight these idiots cannon fodder—so I welcome more of these antics.  But there is a bit of me that feels sorry for the management of the Lakota school system—which is an entity I have been very critical of—because of their willingness to stay away from the hard decisions like this merit pay issue.  They tried so hard and spent so much money extracting money from the community and this is how the teachers show their thanks.  It has to hurt.  But nobody can say they weren’t warned.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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