The Current Lakota School Board was Too Lazy to Know What they Needed to
In all the same ways that the Biden executive orders on mandatory vaccinations violated all kinds of laws, the government’s push to bluff their way into putting masks on school children in public schools has been reprehensible and frightening to people. And it’s even worse when you are a person who knows better. When you know the government has overstepped its mandate and is acting dangerously, they almost dare the public to act. For them to gain so much power, they need a lot of dumb people, like what we have on the current Lakota school board. They are dumb because they allowed themselves to be completely scammed by the Butler County Health Department, who is still angry that they lost their emergency powers when the House and Senate took those powers away from Governor Mike DeWine early in 2021. Most people don’t see politics everywhere; my readers here do, but most people don’t, so they don’t understand what’s behind it all. And that’s usually fine for average, ordinary people. But for people who want to be in leadership positions, it’s reprehensible to be stupid. After a recent debate with the West Chester Tea Party featuring candidates for the Lakota school board, the current insiders showed clearly why everything is so expensive. Why they have been caught tossing money at the teacher’s union recklessly, and how little they had managed anything at the government school. When the question was asked, “how much authority do you believe the Butler County Health Department has over Covid policy in public schools,” the current school board did not know the answer, all of them. Amazingly, the current board members and one of their hand-picked replacements for Brad Lovell all answered the same way: they did not believe they had any authority on the school board to resist a health order from the department of health. But the challengers all got the answer right to a certain extent; Vanessa Wells, Karine Chausee, Issac Adi all understood that the health department and the government, in general, had no rights to mandate Covid protocols in a public setting. But Jodi Boddy, who has put some effort into this issue, knew the answer in detail and said so on the video included in this article. She is correct. The health department, any health department, just like the CDC, can make recommendations. They cannot make law. That is unless a governor under emergency orders so empowers them. And as I said, those powers were taken away from Governor Mike DeWine because he had abused them in the way many blue-state governors had during Covid.
Darbi Boddy Knows Better
I heard the Brad Lovell replacement, Douglas Horton, talk about how smart he was as a brand marketer at P&G, yet when he had to answer this straightforward question, he had no idea what the answer was. And if he wants to lead a school board with thousands of people employed under it or attending the school, they look to him to know these kinds of things. Darbi knew. Kelley Casper is on the board now and was part of the decision-making process on the mask mandates. She dared to sit there and tell the crowd that the health department has the right to order them around on many things and that the ridiculous quarantine policy they had come up with was worse than making students wear masks. Why didn’t she know that she didn’t even have to follow the quarantine policy? Nobody elected those health officials. They are appointed to do a job, but the procedure is not set with them, except under emergency orders, and we aren’t under an emergency. That is set at the state level, and as I said, DeWine lost that power. Biden will lose his power, too, because he has no constitutional grounding for anything he is doing. He counts on suckers not knowing better and trusting what they are told, just as Douglas Horton, Kelly Casper, and Michael Pearl did when the Butler County Health Department told them they had to dance to the quarantine protocols or wear a mask. Because they were lazy and didn’t read and understand the law, they just accepted that what they were told was true. Which, of course, is stupid.
Out of all the questions that evening, I felt that one about the health department showed clearly the problems with this current school board at Lakota. They are not intellectually curious about what they are supposed to be doing. They get pushed around by the state; they get pushed around by the health departments; they get pushed around by the teacher’s union and for what, because of something Michael Pearl said in his answer, that when his car breaks, he hires experts to fix it. And that’s what the Lakota school board does with everything. Darbi Boddy had done the research and did talk to health experts. She knows the difference between a “recommendation” and an “order.” We don’t just get ordered around by unelected bureaucrats, but we do elect our school board. We expect leadership out of them to ask those kinds of questions. Yet, nobody involved with the current board knew the answer. They know how to ask the lawyers for Lakota what they should do, and of course, lawyers will always take the safest path on everything. After all, most of them are lazy too and want to get paid and move on to the next case. So for dumb people who aren’t asking many questions, a lawyer will say “no.” “Don’t challenge the health department most of the time. Don’t challenge the state. Do what they tell you to so that if some panicky parent sues the district, you can always punt to them as your guidance.” But that’s not very ethical; what about the poor kids who have to sit in a class all day wearing a mask for a virus that the government decided was going to be about the “Great Reset,” and was based on no science whatsoever but was instead about everything involving global politics. Kids don’t need to be wrapped up in that mess.
We can only imagine how many other mistakes this current Lakota school board has made involving everything. If they arrive at their decisions the way they did with Covid and the mask mandates, it’s no wonder things are so screwed up. And they only have themselves to blame. The information is out there; it’s easy to get. Darbi Boddy knew the answer. There isn’t a path for any health department or any government agency to win anything involving Covid in a court of any law. Many of us are shocked by the overreach of government, but when we elect school board members, we expect them to work hard to know things. And this mask mandate thing was an easy one. At least one of those school board members should have understood that the health departments only had the power to recommend actions. They could not order anything. No court of law anywhere could hold a case for even the little things that Covid protocols have required. Biden thought he could get away with this mandatory vaccination action since it has worked to some extent with these school boards across the country. That is what happens when you put people with very little intellectual curiosity into positions of power, like on a school board. Lucky for us. Finally, we have a choice. We have four good candidates to replace three seats in Lakota. And, by the way they answered this one simple question, it’s obvious why all three of those current board members need to go and go fast.
Rich Hoffman
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A Great Debate and a Time to Remember How We Got Here
The West Chester Tea Party hosted a friendly forum with the Lakota school board candidates for the November 2021 election without the Covid nonsense, which allowed people to meet the candidates. The local Chamber will sponsor the next debate, and they are doing their event virtually, which will be a tremendous disservice. Without a public meeting, people would not see how unlikeable two of the candidates are in real life, the incumbent Kelley Casper and the incoming bobblehead, hand-picked clone of Brad Lovell, Douglas Horton. Yikes, listening to him talk was like a cat falling off the roof of a chicken coup and into a bucket of manure after a heavy rain. It was not pleasant. I wondered if I was too hard on him, but I think I wasn’t hard enough after meeting him in person. If the event had been virtual, likely, these candidates might have hidden their unlikability. Still, you can watch the videos shown below to decide what you think of them by your own decision-making process. I filmed each question independently, so the clips are short and easy to watch or refer to later. I present the clips unedited and without any commentary. The camera is sometimes shaking, but it captures the event as well as you can without corrupting the debate. However, for the benefit of my readers, I will break down each candidate here with my thoughts to assist in the decision-making process.
Lakota School Board Debate at the West Chester Tea Party
For the record, I openly support Issac Adi, Darbi Boddy, Vanessa Wells, and Karine Chausee. I am dead set against Kelley Casper, Douglas Horton, and Michael Pearl. I think Michael is a pretty good guy. However, and you will hear it in his clips contained here, he’s a big government guy, one of those liberals that might be fine in a park or at a symphony but managing millions of dollars. Forget about it. As I said in the video above, you could tell who the incumbents were, people who are already savvy with how school board business works. I consider Douglas Horton an incumbent because he was hand-picked by Julie Shaffer, a current progressive school board member who wanted a carbon copy of Brad Lovell. When Douglas said during this debate that he was answering a call to be on the school board, it wasn’t God he was talking about. It was Julie Shaffer, to preserve her big-government approach, her critical race theory disguised behind legal theatrics, and her big-spending tendencies to support the teacher’s union at all costs. The challengers, the people I mentioned that I support, were nervous and often spoke from the heart. I do not doubt that once they are on the school board and get used to speaking in front of people, they will smooth out just fine. I have zero concern about any of their public speaking ability. What does concern me about the incumbents is that they were too smooth and avoided answering many of the questions. For instance, Douglas Horton said he saw no evidence of Critical Race Theory at Lakota even though he was sitting next to a display taken straight off the walls of Lakota schools showing Critical Race Theory. So, let’s get into the candidates and talk about each.
Lakota Debate Video 2
Issac Adi is an absolutely wonderful man. He tells a bit of his story in the videos, but my experience with him is that he is as sincere and righteous as you’d hope from an angel. Not only is Issac likable, but he’s also intelligent and engaging. He is just the kind of person you want to be running a school. He’s fair, compassionate, judicious, open-minded, but he has a firm sense of worth that allows him to see wrongdoing at its source, and he’s not afraid to act on it when he does see it. This is all new to him, politics, but as you can see in the video clips, he would undoubtedly add a breath of fresh air to the school board at Lakota and contribute solutions that have been needed for years.
Lakota Debate Video 3
Darbi Boddy is a young lady I have come to know over the last many months. If anybody has her heart for doing what’s right in her community, it’s Darbi. If I had to think of a politician, she reminds me of what many people think of as a star, Lauren Boebert, except Darbi is a lot smoother and has more tact. She has natural instincts in politics and wants to align those skills to helping kids. Those are rare traits in a person, someone who knows how to be politically diplomatic yet not to lose herself along the way. I think it’s because she has a very nice family, a loving husband, and an otherwise supportive cast. That has freed her to run for the school board and invest herself uniquely for any candidate. She’s not afraid to take chances, and if those chances do come up short, she is willing to outwork everyone else to achieve her objectives.
Lakota Debate Video 4
Kelley Casper is one of those people you can’t wait to get out of the room with when you are stuck having to sit down next to her somewhere. She oozes unlikability. She is a big government type, which is apparent in her debate performance. Her instinct is to punt everything to an expensive expert and let the world be run by the rules those experts come up with. She is not a natural leader, and she seeks to cover that up by hiring people around her, which only adds to the overall cost of running Lakota schools. Ultimately, when we talk about money and where it goes, things get expensive when there is a lack of leadership. And Kelley has next to zero leadership ability. And when I say next to, I mean in the negative. She is used to dealing with the free babysitting moms and big-time union supporters. When pressed by the Tea Party, her genuine nature showed, and it was ugly. Very ugly as you can see for yourself.
Lakota Debate Video 5
Karine Chausee is an absolute sweetheart. She is authentic, pure, and everything most young moms want to be. She is running for the school board to help make the school a better place for all children. But she does not want to be a politician. She made it clear in the beginning that she didn’t want a party affiliation. She wants to be as independent as a person as possible, and her natural independence showed clearly during the debate. She didn’t even want to follow the rules of a debate format. She wants to do what’s right for her community so her kids can live in it well. She is excessively intelligent, way more than she lets on, and would be a great addition to any school board with fresh ideas out of the box, loaded with the passion for actually doing what she says she’d do.
Lakota Debate Video 6
On the other hand, Douglas Horton was the opposite of Karine Chausee in every way and not in anything good. He came across as arrogant, self-important, and out of touch. When he mentioned in his debate performance that his kids never seemed to experience Critical Race Theory at Lakota, even as he was sitting next to copious examples of it displayed for the debate, I thought of the dad in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. One of those super-achievers at the office who didn’t see what was happening to his kids right in front of his face. Aloof, distant, and seeing the world through a prism of big government, his answers in this debate were much like Kelley Casper’s. When I said of him when he first announced that he was a bobblehead for the school board, a hand-picked Brad Lovell replacement, I thought for a second that maybe that was too harsh. But seeing him in person, he’s far worse. I’m sure someone loves him in the world, but clearly, he’s in love with himself more than anybody else ever could be, and he would be a disaster on the Lakota school board.
Lakota Debate Video 7
Michael Pearl, however, who is an incumbent, is a super nice guy. Very likable. Full of life. The trouble is, he’s a big government punt it to an expert type, just as Kelley is. It’s no wonder he was picked to run the school board after Brad Lovell ran off the conservative Todd Parnell for a wrong statement following the arrest of a student of color at Lakota West. It was an unfortunate statement that the current school board used to get rid of a known conservative on the board. The current school board has done many things that could have blown up the way Brad used against Todd. But that’s how Michael came to the board; they got rid of Todd and replaced him with the very progressive Michael Pearl, and for that reason alone, a conservative needs to replace the one elected there in the first place. As nice of a guy as Pearl is, he’s still a big government guy who votes against conservative values whenever they come up. He supports Critical Race Theory, which is evident by his comments, even if they don’t call it that. And for that reason alone, he needs to be voted out and replaced with a conservative.
Lakota Debate Video 8
Then there is Vanessa Wells, whom I’ve known now for a long time. She came to me with her story of a student who threatened to kill her daughter. After listening to her talk, I thought she would be a good school board candidate. Vanessa is very likable, very passionate, and is really smart. Really smart! As we talked, she decided not to be a victim and be part of the solution instead, so she decided to run for a school board seat. If they wouldn’t listen to her, then she’d become one of them so that in the future, she could help some other parent who might go through what she went through. After all, there are many stories like the one her daughter went through, but parents often find the red tape of doing anything about it too much to deal with. So, the issues never get resolved. She wants to be a school board member for all the right reasons, but her primary one is to be there for parents like her who have problems and don’t want the hand in your face answer that the current school board gives everyone.
Lakota Debate Video 9
Essentially it all comes down to votes. For many years conservatives have been trying to elect conservatives to the school board. Typically, we allow the process to do what it does, and Republicans have played overly fair. This current school board led by Brad Lovell used a progressive story, something that was communicated among peers to bust a fellow board member in what they did to Todd Parnell. Sure, nobody should say that police should shoot someone, but context tells more of the story, and many people think what they think. Todd represented people on the board who were unhappy with all the Critical Race Theory antics increasing for many years. Currently, Lynda O’Conner is the only conservative on the school board, and Todd was the critical second vote. You need three to do anything on the board. So what Brad did by throwing Todd under the bus was essentially get a fourth vote on the board by bringing in a person of color, and a disabled person at that with Michael Pearl, to secure liberalism on the Lakota school board for many years to come. So instead of coming into this year’s election needing only one more conservative voter to get a majority on the board, we are essentially starting over due to Brad Lovell’s activism.
Lakota Debate Video 10
Even with Brad leaving the district for a big six-figure job in Sycamore, the board has picked Douglas Horton to replace Brad and keep the liberal majority controlling the board. To keep all this liberalism intact, the school board has used Critical Race Theory elements to manipulate politics. So they do not have innocent hands in the matter. Kelley Casper was involved in the coup against Todd Parnell and vote stripping against Lynda O’Conner. During the last teacher contract debate, only Lynda voted against the measure. All the other members voted for a pay increase when it was apparent the district couldn’t afford it. The denial activism ultimately worked against Vanessa Wells when a fellow student threatened to kill another student. But the board cares a whole lot about a conservative who says that police should have shot a kid of color for bringing crime to Lakota schools was suddenly a problematic situation. You see, it’s not about fairness in these matters. It’s 100% politics, and all these incumbents participated in removing a representative from the board who had opinions that a segment of our society feels. They did it all in the name of Wokeness, to control our thoughts and actions by unearned guilt that we all can see on the national stage. But this was all happening at Lakota, in our neighborhood, where we should and can do something about it.
Lakota Debate Video 11
I love elections; I love to see the choice of the people shaping our republic, whether it’s local, state, or federal. I love elections! But what I don’t like is what happened to Todd Parnell and Lynda O’Conner. As conservatives, they play by the rules, and we had been focused on getting a third vote on the board for a long time now. During the last election cycle, it was Jim Hahn, and he didn’t quite get there. We took our lumps and decided to look to the next election, so long as Lakota wasn’t asking for more money, we didn’t get too crazy about it. But, when this current school board targeted Todd Parnell with all the wokenss that has been eating away on the national stage, and they were doing it in our own backyard, well, that requires some action, which has resulted in this approach. We have four outstanding candidates running for three seats to replace the current board who has been extreme activists against conservatives, which in Butler County is most households.
Lakota Debate Video 12
So, there you have it. Finally, voters in Lakota have a choice, lots of good decisions, and now you can understand some of the backstories of how we arrived at this point and what’s at stake. If you want to see conservatives control the school board at Lakota, pick one of these four and vote out the three liberals. It’s very simple. The key is voter engagement. The teacher’s union has its network, and those people will show up to vote on election night. There are lots of conservatives on off-year elections, which usually sit out on these occasions. If you want to see a change this year, don’t stay home. Get out and vote. Take all the rage you feel about the Trump election, about Biden in the White House, about election fraud nationally, and show up and vote. Could you do something about it? If you don’t, it won’t be the fault of these friendly conservatives I’ve mentioned. If the bad guys win, it’s because good people sat home and did nothing. So do something and make a difference. The fight is in your hands; make it count!
A Great Young Lady to Run for the Lakota School Board
For much of the last year, some of us from the old No Lakota Levy group have been looking for a way to replace the school board at Lakota with fresh new faces. We heard from the school board that they had wasted all the surplus money from declining enrollment and that Brad Lovell was pushing for a property tax increase in either 2021 or 2022. So rather than get the gang back together to throw money at fighting an eventual tax increase because the school board couldn’t manage their money, we started having meetings looking for school board replacements. These people would be interested in becoming a school board member but weren’t sure how to get there. This year, in 2021, three school board seats are coming up, all flat-line liberals. And I’m happy to hear that we now have three Republican-endorsed candidates to challenge them. Butler County will see that they are voting for conservatives instead of the usual closet liberals. The latter is always the teacher unions’ pick to grease the skids for the next contract negotiation for mandatory pay increases, which Lakota doesn’t need. I’ve written articles on two of those three Republican-endorsed candidates. But there is one that I’m happy to announce who received her endorsement at the end of August, Darbi Boddy. I first met Darby at one of those early meetings, and since then, she has impressed me with her diligent work ethic. She is sharp and is running for all the right reasons, and I can say that she would be great on the Lakota school board. Instead of just fighting the current school board’s bad decisions, Darbi will be part of the solution with a few more votes.
Darbi Boddy and Her Very Nice Family
One of the big tricks is that the school board candidates have been sold to us as non-partisan. That has essentially allowed Democrats or people who call themselves Republicans to get elected in Butler County. But they vote and manage as liberals, which is why Lakota has been a mess for so many years. No matter how much money we have given them, they have wasted it as all significant government types do. It’s one thing to get angry at how the rest of the world is, but school boards are local and are some of the parts of our government that we are supposed to have the most control over. But when you can’t even get a school board to do the right thing, you know government is hopeless. However, this year we finally have a choice. We’ve tried before to get conservatives elected, and when we do, it’s been one here, one there. Then they get attacked because they are outnumbered, and it’s just been an absolute disaster.
For the old No Lakota Levy folks, it’s all about money. We all have grown children, and we don’t want Lakota asking for money over their bad decisions. We want the local community who want the free babysitting service to do well, have nice kids and have an overall asset to our neighborhoods. But there comes a price where that sentiment expires. Lakota hasn’t been asking for money since 2013, when they finally passed their last levy after we fought them on it for four years, and it was sometimes bloody. My policy was to leave Lakota alone for the most part so long as they weren’t asking for money. But now, in 2021, Brad and the gang have spent their surplus. Now it’s time to deal with it. The best way to do that is with a management change of the board now that a majority of the board is up for re-election.
Darbi Boddy on Channel 5 News
I know all the candidates running as Republicans very well. And one thing about Darbi Boddy specifically is that she works hard. In almost every event I have been to over the last several months, she has been there shaking hands and introducing herself. I’ve seen her pressed under contentious conditions, and she has conducted herself exceptionally well. She has always been cool and intelligent, and the more I have come to know her, the bigger a fan I have become. I will say I am voting for her without hesitation. She is conservative in every way I can see; she is the opposite of our current school board. And in speaking with her, I am sure she can help manage the budget, which is very generous for what we already give Lakota. All this Critical Race Theory nonsense starting in Columbus by the DeWine administration will be overturned at Lakota by Darbi. She is also solid on the transexual issues that have been trying to creep in through the current board members, especially with the pick your sex bathrooms that progressive politics has been trying to sell us with old radical progressive activists like Sandy Wheatley and Joan Powell.
But further than those negative factors, I think Darbi cares about the school system. She cares about it in ways I don’t. I believe public education is a disaster that needs to be completely fixed, starting with everything John Dewey built it with. Darbi reminds me a lot of Lynda O’Conner. Lynda is the only Board member at Lakota who has been trying to make things better, but she’s outvoted 4 to 1. And the peer pressure against her by the other progressive disasters has been reprehensible. Darbi would be a good compliment to Lynda on the board.
What’s best that I have learned about Darbi is that she is very engaging, friendly, and knowledgeable. When I have talked to her, I have thrown her lots of curveballs, little things that I use to measure character, and she always hits them. She has been great at speaking with lots of different types of people without being fake about it. Her sincerity is unquestionable. Since I first met her, I’ve been a fan of hers, but you never know how things will turn out. On this little journey, which was to get things started, it’s nice to see someone like her running as an option. I always say that you have your favorite people about these types of projects, but things don’t often go the way you’d like them to. Things happen; people don’t get along for this reason or that. But at the end of it, you want to get the lawnmower started, and it needs to run on its own. The intent from the beginning was never to micromanage the school board members. We needed people who would be their own people and run things as reasonable people would on their own. We started the conversation, and of those, Darbi has turned out to be one of the best and most potent candidates, and I’m happy to see her on the ticket. I’ve known many politicians, and of them, I can’t say I’ve ever seen one who works harder than Darbi Boddi. And it’s not just been for a week or two here and there. With Darbi, it’s been hard work for months and months. If that’s what she’s like, imagine what she could do on the Lakota School Board. I can’t wait to find out.
The Lakota School Board trying to vote on Mask Mandates
As it is everywhere, the health directors, national and local, want their power back. Still, the governors in many states don’t want to return to the kind of authoritarian rule that gave health departments so much power during the first year of Covid. In Butler County, Ohio, where I live, the health director and bureaucratic officials have been working wherever they can to intimidate businesses and government establishments into CDC compliance for the sheer desire of wanting to boss someone around. So, of course, they are putting pressure on several local school boards in Butler County to implement mask mandates. In the satire above, which isn’t far from the truth, the Lakota school board is trying to figure out how to deal with the health director ahead of the meeting on August 23rd, 2021. The Lakota school system is being pressured by outrageous compliance to CDC guidelines or self-imposed mask mandates. It’s a rock and a hard place for Lakota. They either deal with the wrath of the Butler County Health officials, or they deal with the anger of the furious parents. And for this school board, at Lakota, it is way beyond their ability to deal with leaving them to pander to the squeaky wheel. So if you as a parent don’t want masks on your kids while in school, you better get to that meeting and be that squeaky wheel. Otherwise, the underhanded tactics of the health department are going to play their games of tyranny to establish authoritarian rule.
Of course, no matter what you think about Covid, there is zero to less proof that masks do anything but make the situation worse. That stupidity is for adults to sort out, but children should never be victimized to wear masks based on such flimsy science. If people want to wear them, have at it. Just as a casual observation, I’ve seen cultures wearing masks in Asian countries for years, and it’s always more about compliance than health. This attempt to mask the American population is just more of that imposition of eastern cultures on western cultures, just as the Beatles have been trying to do for years and many thousands of other sources attempting to tell us in the west that yielding to authority is the way to solve problems. No, it’s not. I had my family at the zoo recently, and they were trying to push the latest from the CDC, encouraging people to wear masks. Only a few dumb fools were doing so. My wife and I went to Costco to get a hot dog and a drink for our date night, and they were encouraging people to wear masks, forcing their employees to do so to put that peer pressure on people. But guess what, most people were not wearing the stupid masks, and I felt sorry for the dumb fools who fell for it. Yet all the trouble starts with these crazy lunatics in the local health departments who are hungry for their mall cop powers to be restored to them by governors who have lost their ability.
Andy Beshear, the governor of Kentucky, has been a disaster. He wants to force children to wear masks in school, but the supreme court now challenges him after William Bertelsman granted a restraining order on Beshear. These kinds of fights are happening all over the country, especially in Florida. The trend is against the tyrants, the health officials. Now that people have seen the game, there is no public appetite for the mask mandates. The federal government has not made its case for why masks should be used. They are hot, they smell bad and are gross, and they display a kind of anti-science that some backwater countries would implement as a means to solving problems. And people are sick of them. Even people who might be liberal are not wearing the masks if they can get away with it. But all those places mentioned, Costco, the zoo, amusement parks, and the like, are feeling pressure from the compliance cultures to implement that stupidity, which is how the schools feel pressure to comply. But the attack against our children is reprehensible, and it deserves to be fought with everything we have to fight with. These school boards will cave if the parents don’t get involved. Edgewood schools in Butler County have struggled with this issue for weeks, and the parents have spoken up. Monroe is also going through tribulations. If Lakota falls, the rest of them will follow. And that’s the game the health directors want. They want to rule in silence, from their offices using a phantom menace to scare everyone into some ridiculous authority rule. So the voices have to be heard at the school board meetings. Otherwise, the school boards will yield to the pressure.
Watching people wear these masks the second time around, who are in the extreme minority in public, you can almost see the deadness in their eyes. That desire to comply with authority because they are too lazy to think is a public health crisis. They are more dangerous to society than any virus because their willingness to comply encourages these bureaucratic tyrants to grab power as they are now. Covid did not come out and kill everyone like it was told to us. There are some heartbreaking stories here and there, but fewer people are dying of Covid than are getting killed in car accidents, and people don’t stop driving cars over every crash. For most Americans, Covid is an acceptable risk. They might stay home from work for a few days and get over it if they get it. They want alternatives like a Regeneron Covid Cocktail or a dose of Hydroxychloroquine. They may use ultraviolet light to kill the virus, a legitimate method of managing viruses, especially UVC light. Science is great, and there are methods we all know about now. But this dumb method of wearing a mask is as unscientific and barbaric as anything government sciences have ever come up with. If public schools are ineffective, why would anybody expect Dr. Fauci and government science to get it right with Covid? They are either treacherous lunatic terrorists for a new global order, or they are dumb as hell. Or perhaps, a mixture of both. But putting masks on kids and ruining their lives with the bad decisions of power-hungry health officials would make bad parents out of all of us. Kids don’t deserve this stupidity. It’s up to all of us as adults to at least protect kids from government absurdity, starting in our schools. And for Lakota, while you still can, you better let the school board know how you feel. Because if left to their own devices, they will yield to the Butler County health officials and their power grabs from the CDC to put the government in charge of our health, which they have proven entirely incompetent to handle. They weren’t effective the first time around, and now that we’ve had time to reflect on the mistakes of 2020, why would anybody fall for it a second time? What we are up against is sheer stupidity and nothing less.
Lakota Schools Seeks a Tax Increase to Cover Their Deficit Spending
I remember watching Brad Lovell’s campaign material on what he thought a school board was for. I wasn’t going to make a big deal about his naivete, I didn’t care much about the issue so long as Lakota wasn’t asking for more money, but I was embarrassed for him. He stated he wanted to get elected to the school board to support the leadership staff at Lakota, such as the current superintendent, the treasurer, etc. The school board’s role is to manage the district and provide that leadership, not to punt to chaos and let the teacher’s union run the school. And after the late Monday night vote of April 26th, it was only Lynda O’Connor who voted against even more raises for the latest teacher’s contract. In voting yes, Brad and three other school board members, including the current President Kelley Casper, who is up for reelection this year, have guaranteed that there will be another Lakota tax levy in 2022. They will wait to put the levy up for a vote because it will be between elections for the school board members. They’ll have to due to the massive deficit spending that Lakota has been engaging in over the last several years. Only Lynda O’Conner has shown any interest in managing the money of Lakota. On the other hand, Brad and Julie Shaffer have turned over all that responsibility to the “leadership team,” which they seem to have forgotten, works for them as elected representatives.
There were options, with the way that Covid has been, this would have been an excellent time to play chicken with the train of the Lakota Education Association. They have very little leverage currently to use a strike to dispute a lack of labor contract. The market conditions being what they are now could challenge a lot of the payroll that Lakota is committed to and force some legacy teachers to retire early. Parents, after all, have become used to not having a school to take their kids to due to Covid problems, so the brand of Lakota would at least have withstood some scrutiny. And given that Lakota is a destination community for many people, it would not be hard to replace any fresh out of college teachers and full of vigor for the job, making about half the wages of a legacy teacher of $100K or more. Those are management decisions, hard ones, but the kind of decisions that we elect school board members to conduct on our behalf. Instead, what happened was that only Lynda O’Conner had the guts to vote no on a new teacher contract that has unjustified raises contained within it. The rest of the school board caved to the teacher union demands and have signed us all up for a levy fight next year. Brad and Kelly are up for reelection this year, so that’s not a good time to put a levy on the ballot. And in two years, Julie Shaffer will be up for reelection. That makes next year for a levy to be just suitable for the politics of the school board at Lakota that is much more concerned about making progressive, expensive, and overrated teachers happy rather than working on behalf of the community to keep costs in check in a challenging time.
Many people who are voters in Lakota have been seriously restricted in their professional lives, going without pay increases since Covid started, or they have lost their jobs due to layoffs or forced early retirement. Because of Covid, more people are working from home, have learned to do other things with their children since schools were closed, and many of these teachers were home sitting around doing nothing. Simultaneously, the pandemic was used politically to reshape our society into a more progressive one. The voters aren’t going to be too happy to hear that all these teachers are getting a raise and because Lakota didn’t have the money to give them a raise, it’s going to force a tax increase proposal on their property taxes. Due to Joe Biden tax increases, increases in the cost of gas, government tampering with market economy needs, and unemployment that is much higher than when Trump was in the White House, Lakota is planning to demand more money for their lack of leadership with deficit spending.
Lakota had it made; they had a community of high-income wage earners with expensive property and many businesses to tax. They had declining enrollment, which meant they were bringing in more money than they were spending, by quite a lot. That’s why there hasn’t been a levy request since 2013, when the last levy was passed. However, Lakota has managed to deficit spend its way anyway by giving teachers raises over time that wasn’t needed. They are mandating that they now have to ask the community for more money because of their lack of leadership in a changing public education landscape. The pre-Biden administration problems of charter schools are still present. The social movement to attach tax money to children instead of the school district is still a hot topic, and it’s going to change shortly out of necessity. School board members like Brad, Julie, and Kelley at Lakota can drag out the inevitable for a while, but it’s coming quickly, and these reckless spending habits that they are so used to engaging in will be a thing of the past. Soon, Lakota will have to compete with other districts in a very real way, and this kind of behavior in a very suddenly cost-conscious culture where everything is now getting more expensive due to the reckless spending of the Biden administration will change voting patterns dramatically.
But you could hear in Brad’s voice the problem from before he was even elected to the school board. Like many people who run for that office, he has no idea what it’s supposed to be doing. He likes to be someone important in the community; it gives people who want attention something to do. Still, the hard stuff is punted to a superintendent supposed to be working for the school board as the source of leadership. These people want to do the job as long as nothing hard comes up, such as voting on the teacher’s contract. But as we have witnessed, only one school board member voted against it, and she was put under tremendous pressure to vote otherwise. People like Brad Lovell care more about school board uniformity, even if it’s the wrong answer, than in the proper response and arriving there through debate. Then, of course, the LEA teacher’s union knows this going into negotiations. They know they have the votes to approve a raise for their members before the negotiation even begins. Someone like Lynda O’Conner can try to negotiate and draw a hard line, but there was no incentive for the teachers to give up anything. They only know to take, take, take. They know Brad has a wife employed by the school, that he would like to see increases to the payroll budget because it ultimately helps him through his wife. And that is the truth of the matter, something they won’t talk about in the newspapers or nightly news. So prepare yourself for a fight, next year at Lakota, there will be a tax levy. Due to this school board making terrible decisions and spending money that they didn’t have, they were confident they could steal it from the taxpayers due to their selfishness and sheer stupidity.
If there was any doubt about the Marxist political activism of your local school, take this fine example from my local public school, the Lakota school system which is one of the largest in Ohio. They are also in what is considered a wealthy district so they are functioning from the best place that a government school could hope for, there is a great tax base, the kids have mostly intact families at home with as engaged of parents as there are these days, and it has a political class that pays attention to it that are connected directly to the state.
In all aspects, if there was something good about public schools, Lakota would show it. But I’ve had to deal with these people for a long time and can report that as an employer and as the largest babysitter for our community, Lakota schools is an activist organization that has ill intentions for our children, and they are very anti-family following closely the Marxist agenda for Black Lives Matters. For proof just have a look at Lakota’s new Diversity administrator Elgin Card and his several online postings recently since he has taken the new job creating post in June of 2020 shown throughout this article.
Recently Elgin was awarded with a new job position as senior director of diversity and inclusion which now oversees the Lakota Outreach Diversity and Inclusion Department from his previous job as principal of Lakota East. I’d say that he was Lakota’s first black principal but that would be racists to separate him from other people just by the color of his skin. But to say the least, Elgin has been given a special job to make Lakota and its students much more woke, to use this modern term for “awake to Marxism” to put it more appropriately, and the goal of Elgin and his department is essentially to turn Lakota’s curriculum into more of a Black Lives Matters agenda rather than teaching kids to function well in society and they are wasting millions and millions of our tax dollars to fund it. To show you have bad it is here is Elgin congratulating his boss for apologizing for his “whiteness” on Twitter. The pictures are blurry because of the low resolution of the screen captures that were sent to me, but you get the point.
Here is the superintendent of Lakota schools being woke. Our tax money pays for this crap pic.twitter.com/sM6ynGg4EX
Of course none of us should have to apologize for the color of our skin, especially white people, and that Matt Miller thinks he needs to appease people of color by apologizing for something he had nothing to do with, and that there are costly promotions happening at Lakota from a labor perspective indicates that vast amounts of money are being wasted at Lakota over this issue and that is a real problem. Racism as we will especially discover in hindsight in the year of 2020 was purely a political platform meant to derail the Trump presidency and nothing more. Lakota especially in relation to any other place in the country is not suffering from a racist community, so all this Black Lives Matters inclusion into their focus is entirely inappropriate. Black Lives Matters as an organization has declared itself a Marxist advocate and their purpose is one that I have been talking about for many, many years, this idea of destroying the nuclear family and returning everything in a community back to a “village” approach to everything is not what we should be paying teachers of any government schools to teach our kids. There is no place for Marxism in a school that should be teaching kids how to live in the capitalist republic that is the United States. Anything else is subterfuge and a waste of money. We are not a racist nation, and we are not a racist school district, and we don’t need to waste money on a progressive advocate with a dime of our property tax collection on a person like Elgin. If they want to make him a useful administrator like he was as principal that would be one thing. But to pay him to be a community activist for Black Lives Matters, that is not appropriate, especially paying him six figures to do the job.
I’m involved in a lot of things, but within Lakota I am the person that many people come to when they think of fighting public education. In the past, when I have fought against the school levy increases that Lakota has tried to put forth, my reasons for being involved were more because of these progressive stances that the district took more than what other people wanted in just trying to save money on their tax bill. They were not aware of some of the things I had been saying about the very nature of government schools, this Marxist curriculum that has been brewing for many decades, accelerated rapidly when the Department of Education was started in 1979. Ronald Reagan new of the government forces who wanted the spread of communism from the Soviet Union and China that were very active in those days and understood that the direction of public education was headed in that direction. When both George Bushes were president, they had no idea what public education was up to, they thought “no child left behind” was an honorable message that would get more kids into college. They didn’t know the intention was to turn as many kids into Marxist anti-capitalists that public education could was the true goal. Well, by now, everyone can see the evidence for themselves and they know I wasn’t just an education hater. It took a while, but now the doubt is no longer there, and people bring me many examples of public school radicalism that is stealing our tax money and using it like this, to advocate for some Marxist intention whether its Black Lives Matters, or some other communist conspiracy in working with China to normalize Chinese society here in the United States. There is nothing new about any of this, but for many of my neighbors and community members, they are just now coming to terms with what Lakota and all public schools have been for decades.
My solution to all this is to defund them. Don’t give Lakota a single dollar more, and fight hard in the future to take away their money. This is the kind of garbage that the Lakota school board and their employee Matt Miller think is appropriate for spending tax dollars, on destroying the minds of our kids with this communist crap disguised as racism. But in the long term, people need to get away from the patriotism of their local school and to start supporting more competitive options such as School Choice. When President Trump gets re-elected and can then empower Betsy DeVos to defund any school teaching “wokeness” Lakota is going to lose a lot of federal money because of activism like what Elgin Card has been hired to advocate, and they will be coming to the community to cover the gaps in their mismanaged labor contracts with the teacher’s union. And we are going to have to fight them, and not in the nice way that we have in the past, but to get vicious with them. The people who run these schools are not our friends, and they certainly don’t have our kid’s best intentions in mind as they run these schools we pay for. They are activists to turn our children against us and if there is any proof that you need, just look at the social media of Elgin Card and his boss, Matt Miller. Their intentions are obvious and its time that the rest of the community realize what they are doing with the money we give them. Its not to teach our children to be better, but to turn them against us and make them citizens of the world, under a communist flag ushered in behind the banners of racism which in the case of Lakota, is a completely made up crises politically motivated by liberal agendas in an election year.
The truth of the matter in regard to Todd Parnell, he was offered a new job opportunity out of the district of Lakota and was planning to leave his school board position at the end of the year anyway. So it didn’t take much to set off his fuse when police came to Lakota West to obtain evidence on a cell phone from a burglary they were investigating when two students went Black Lives Matters on the police resisting their efforts and eventually destroyed the evidence in front of everyone. Anybody watching the situation would take that as an admission of guilt. But the students were empowered by the race riots on the national news and behaving badly, so Todd knowing he was planning to leave had a “f**k-it” moment and just said in an email to the Lakota West Principal, Ben Brown, that the police “should have shot them.” (The students) Honestly, I heard little bits about the case over the last few weeks and I didn’t think it sounded inappropriate at all. Other than the fact that the students were minors, they were obviously involved in criminal conduct and were behaving poorly toward the police, giving the police many excuses to shoot them, which they smartly showed restraint. But to what cost? Logical thinking people who see what’s going on do think that perhaps police should have just shot them and taken the phone and used the evidence to prosecute them, if they lived, and saved the tax payers a lot of money. To that way of thinking, Todd on the school board represented the opinion of people like me. If Todd wanted to leave the school board fine, but it would have been, and should have been up to him.
Yet here’s where things go wrong. Activism on the school board, activism to remove conservative voices like Todd Parnell took over and rival school board members led by the Superintendent Matt Miller moved quickly to use the incident to purge the school board of an elected official, so that they could replace him with someone more friendly to their progressive positions, which is precisely what they have done. They picked a replacement who may be the nicest guy in the world, but he is not an elected person that represents the community. He is a pick by activism by the school board president Brad Lovell to stack the votes against conservative voices and it’s a pretty dirty trick that didn’t become clear until the smoke cleared from the Lakota West police incident. Who does Matt Miller think he is, or Jenni Logan for that matter, the treasurer to push for a human resource move against Parnell? They aren’t in charge; the school board is. If voters want to get rid of Todd, they would and could have shown outrage and maybe he would have resigned on his own due to public pressure. But the pressure was completely activism on behalf of the school board to take up the Black Lives Matters Marxist position and give criminals more due process than an honored member of the school board. It was a case of wokeness at its most obvious and its disgusting.
My phone has lit up over the last week about this case and it did surprise me that Parnell resigned. As I said, most everyone I know thought about the young criminals the way I did, that they should have been punished on the spot for their actions. It was beyond logic that the school board would defend the criminals and adhere to the new definitions of Black Lives Matters more than the culture of Butler County understanding the politics of the area the way they should. It was arrogant at best and I held my tongue until more of the facts came out because I personally know a lot of these people and I was having a hard time believing they would be that stupid. But as it turns out, the Lakota School Board cares more about Black Lives Matters radicalism than they do the voters in the district and they took action on their own to remove an elected official and it was all initiated by the Superintendent and the Treasurer.
One thing I don’t do is kiss and tell, unless the lipstick has some truth that is needed for the case in hand. At that point I will use it if justice is the outcome. At the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns, one week before Ohio shut down restaurants, I was at P.F. Chang’s interviewing potential conservatives for the Lakota School Board’s upcoming elections. In came Matt Miller, Jenni Logan and West Chester Administrator Larry Burks to have lunch there also, so we had a slightly uncomfortable exchange of hellos as they clearly were not comfortable that I was eating lunch where they were. But I was fine with them, I personally like Jenni and I think Matt is pretty good as a superintendent so long as he isn’t asking for money, which I said to him. I was happy they were there because I had seated in the booth next to them one of the number crunchers from the old No Lakota Levy campaign so I could get a report on the meeting, which was impromptu because my meeting prior to the school board candidates was with him to discuss strategy for the 2021 and 2022 school levy campaign that we knew was coming soon. To me its all a chess game I’m happy to play with them, to them, they’d rather have complete social compliance at any cost.
As we broke our little talk and Matt went back to his table, I offered to shake his hand, as Covid-19 wasn’t yet a quarantine thing, hard as it is to believe. My school board candidate while this was happening, he was commenting on the drop in stocks that were happening as we spoke and was alarmed, so all this was new to everyone. But instead of the handshake Matt offered me an elbow bump, which was the first time I had ever seen that—which is now as common as the sun. It bothered me that the guy was so into all this progressive sentiment that he’d know to do that so early in the process. And it made it clear to me where his mind was. He intends to be a “woke” trendsetter and that is the direction he intends to go as a school superintendent, and it was at that moment I realized Matt Miller was not someone who I could work with. And that he is very much a progressive activist rather than a concerned community member who wants the best for Lakota.
The ordeal traces back to an incident that took place in Lakota West High School's parking lot in late August. https://t.co/QUOMJFqopU
No my thoughts on Lakota and the school board right now depend largely on the election. Its not a secret, I tell everyone who asks me, my plan is to see Trump elected and to put Betsy DeVos into a position to defund any liberal activism in all public schools of federal dollars. So this is a very top down issue and Lakota will certainly qualify with this kind of behavior of losing their federal dollars and I am ready to fight them on the ground when they try to cover the balance with property tax increases. I like our chances to win at least 3 to 5 levy attempts with the ground numbers we have now, so that will force a lot of these liberals off the school board under great pressure and allow for activism going the other way. So I don’t blame Todd for wanting to leave or for what he said. Losing a conservative at this point doesn’t matter much until the federal funding cuts come next year. But it is a shame to see such activism from Matt Miller and Brad Lovell who clearly has let the status of president go to his head. Brad was always a little sideways anyway, but since they let him take the president seat, he has become what we all thought he always was, way too power hungry and much more manipulative. They all have some big embarrassments coming. And being “woke” won’t help them. People vote for representation; they do not need the management structure at Lakota further undercut than it already is with radicalized labor forces. It may be hip to know about the progressive “woke” trends, which Matt and Brad are clearly in line with, but we are supposed to be teaching kids at Lakota right and wrong—life skills, not teaching them to be woke, and to defend criminals from police, which is now an official position by the Lakota School Board. They are more interested in defending criminals than protecting property owners of their hard-earned tax dollars. But rather, they intend to use it to destroy our culture and everyone in it who resists the “woke” culture and their Marxist intentions. That is the real story of the resignation of school board member Todd Parnell. The school board did not come out in defense of their friend and colleague, they used racism and criminal conduct to drive him off the board so they could re-staff the position with someone they liked, and that is a real problem.
With a big school board candidate election coming up this year at Lakota in southwest Ohio the differences are quite obvious between them. Of the topics most talked about at a recent Meet the Candidates evening at the VOA Miami University Lecture Hall on October 22nd 2018 the topic of arming the teachers to prevent another mass shooting, especially at a large, affluent school like Lakota, and the various ways of looking at that problem was very well defined. Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn had the obvious conservative approach to things, self-reliance, and solution-based results at the point of danger whereas Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer were obvious liberals who believe in big government, passivity, and some kind of prayer to avert danger. Of them Ray had the most ridiculous answer to the question of arming teachers in the classroom, although Julie Shaffer wasn’t far behind with her 22% of shooters hit their targets under duress. Well, that’s 22% better than not having a gun. What a lunatic. But her thinking was very much captured in Ray’s statement which can be seen below, and it took everything I had to sit there and listen respectfully.
I get tired of people like Ray, people who are obviously timid peaceful people lecture the rest of us how society should be constructed to their sensibilities, then selling it as if being a police officer at some point in time gives him the right to say such a thing. As he told his story about wanting to dig into the concrete to get away from a firefight when he was a cop in Chicago all I could think of was the word “wimp.” Now that’s not a politically correct term, but lets face it, that’s what we all thought of it and if we didn’t, we would call ourselves liberals, people who count on some institutional system to avert our fears about the things in life that scare us. Just because Ray was a cop doesn’t make him some magical man of authority on the subject. Lots of people become cops for all the right reasons, and when they get shot at, they learn perhaps that the job is not for them. It can be scary, but for some people, being shot at is exhilarating and they are the best that they can be when danger is presented. I’m sure we have those types of people working at Lakota and it is they who should be carrying a gun. If Ray is too scared, well that’s fine. We don’t want him digging into the hallways of Lakota if there is a firefight. We want someone to engage the target, so I get it, Ray and Julie are not the people we want armed. But when a bad guy shows up, somebody needs to meet them while we wait for the police to arrive, because the body count will be measured in seconds of engagement, not minutes.
Speaking for myself I am an adrenaline junkie. I have been shot at and had guns pointed at me, many, many times. I am a little too crazy for the structure of the military or the police force but unlike the institutional perspective of Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer there are other ways that people get shot at in life. For a time, I was a repo man during the years that a lot of people go to the military repossessing cars from deadbeat owners who often become violent when they learned you were there to take their property away. I volunteered for every assignment I could because I thought it was exciting and when gunfire did break out, I thought it was pure heaven. Being that close to a dangerous situation was fun to me and I couldn’t get enough of it. I was also a bouncer at a night spot I worked at around the same period of my life. I wasn’t yet 21 years of age, yet I was throwing out drunks, breaking up fights, and taking fights to safe places with people much older and bigger than me. And in those fights guns came out all the time and I never thought twice about crying about it or digging into the pavement while bullets flew around. I’ve seen people get shot, and I’ve seen people die. And all that occurred in the private sector. I once knew a judge of very high rank in the city of Sharonville and when I got into trouble, he helped me out. It was a good arrangement and I learned a lot from it. But why did he help me, well, people who love danger as much as I did, and still do are hard to find. And he appreciated that trait and thought it valuable enough to cut me some slack when things did go wrong. Let’s just say that.
I tell that little bit of the story to say that some people love danger and they want to help others get away from it. And we need to empower those people to stop crimes before they happen. It’s better to have someone smashed up and in the hospital sometimes than to play everything safe and leave the problem to the institutions where some pot smoking loser kid who knows they are going nowhere in life decides to go shoot up a school. By the time Ray and Julie’s police arrive, 5 to 20 kids could be killed, because that is the kind of world we are living in. And you’d be surprised at the kind of people who hear a gun shot and will run straight through the bullets to stop the carnage because they have a natural inclination to do well while in danger.
I thought hard about becoming a cop, or joining the special forces in the military, but honestly, I was never a yes sir no sir kind of guy. I don’t like the structure of those organizations, so I didn’t join, even for the ability to carry a gun and shoot down bad guys. It was tempting, but it wasn’t worth enduring all the silly rules. But don’t assume that being a cop makes someone an expert on gunfights. Personally, I’d love to be in a gun fight, every day if I could. So, Ray is speaking from an experience of a guy naturally timid, and that’s OK. But don’t assume you speak for everyone.
Just a rough bet, but I would say that at least 5% of the employees at Lakota have some bit of the adrenaline addiction that I described about myself. When danger happens, they only think of one thing, engaging it and stopping it. They don’t pay attention to the sounds of the gun fire; they are instead inspired like a fine symphony to conduct their lives to the beat of danger. And if not for those types of people, we would have a much more dangerous type of world in America. I would argue that suppressing those types of people with institutional constrictions has led to far more death than in allowing adrenaline junkies who love justice for all to carry open firearms to engage any potential targets in fractions of seconds than the time it takes to make a 911 call. And that again is proof of how ridiculous Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray have been as school board members. They make decisions based on their timid perspectives while the real solutions are handcuffed behind institutional virtue. To assume that everyone in the world is just as timid as they are is more dangerous than arming teachers. And that is what nobody is putting into perspective, that is, perhaps until now.
I think the best thing that could happen is that Julie Shaffer would lose her seat to a new school board candidate in this upcoming fall 2019 election. Jim Hahn is a potential for that, he’s running and is a business guy, and if the Lakota school board could pick him up and keep Todd Parnell, and Lynda O’Conner, there would finally be a three vote conservative presence that could avert the current levy plans that are in place for attempts beginning as early as 2020. If there is another tax attempt, I will say right now that I am all on board to resume the fight against it, and I understand that others are also interested. A gentle message to Lakota and all the real estate agents that spawn off the school system, there is a storm coming, so I hope you have built a boat, because the next levy attempt will be a bloodbath. The liberal activities of Brad Lovell Kelley Casper and of course Julie Shaffer along with the very disappointing sentiments that have evolved from the new superintendent Matt Miller, they have squandered a very good opportunity, a great budget with declining enrollment that has even further inflated the payroll for teachers who clearly aren’t worth the money, and they have been caught in gross mismanagement. The two conservative school board members have shown a bit of hope in properly managing the district, but the school board itself hasn’t gone far enough—the liberal activism is still a problem in the management of the government school.
I have no love for Julie Shaffer, we have a history together. When she couldn’t defeat my arguments back in 2012 she had to turn to identity politics to separate the No Lakota Levy group I represented for their 2013 attempt which they ended up winning by a very narrow margin. But it wasn’t Lakota who did anything to turn the tide, it was Sheriff Jones who wanted to put armed cops in the schools to protect them from mass shooters, or the potential. As it turned out, just as I said it would be, the whole thing was a scam, the money from the levy wasn’t used to cover cops or even security. Lakota did do those things, but ultimately the money was only to give teachers raises for their very high wages. My argument back then was that it didn’t bother me that Lakota had several teachers with six figure salaries, but that through collective bargaining the labor union wanted everyone to have those extraordinary salaries and back then the average wage was over 70K per year. We always hear stories about how low teachers are paid, well that’s not the case at Lakota, the teachers are well paid and the union props them all up and makes it nearly impossible to fire problem employees like the recent drama witnessed by the ex-Lakota employee, the transgender activist Emily Osterling. She sued the district for her proposed termination, and she won a settlement of $175,000 which the tax payers had to cough up ultimately.
Lakota is in my back yard so I want them to do well, but only until they become a pain in the ass in asking for too much money. I am proud of Lakota as long as they aren’t asking for money and by looking at their annual budget of over $220 million per year it is clear that the school board has not managed the money correctly. Now to their defense, the collective bargaining agreements by the union make normal value stream assessments nearly impossible. It takes three solid votes to really manage a district when there are five board members. It has taken a long time to get the two good ones that we have now and a lot of pushing and shoving. I have been asked many, many times to take on the job, but for my part, I have no desire to negotiate with a labor union all the time and I think the education system should be completely dismantled and recreated with a school choice competitive option. So its not a job for me, but we do need smart people who understand value creation to do the job. In that regard, there is an option in Jim Hahn.
However, the union vote will come out for their own preservation and they will vote this November for Julie Shaffer, so it will be a tough climb for Jim Hahn. He’s going to need some help and a good turnout. The union will not want him on the school board because they are against anything that does not stop the upward mismanagement of financial resources that are set to run out by 2023. Most of that $220 million budget is all in teacher salaries and that is just ridiculous. In an age where kids are learning more from hand held devices such as smart phones and personal computers, physical teachers are going the way of the drive-in. The test results just do not show that a teacher in the classroom make or break much in a student’s life. Most of the feel good stories are propaganda by the unions which young people are prone to be sucked in to, but are shallow in credibility at best. Just take a look at the Lakota website and their reported financials. They are short on substance but are flashy with surface points and comparisons to other districts who are every bit as much of a disaster as they are—because they are all driven by unionized employees hungry for inflated wages and as little work to do as possible.
The bloodbath that I am promising will be simple value stream analysis of what Lakota really does for our community, which is very little. The high school football games are only important to the students and their families, the other 100,000 people who live in the Lakota school system could care less and people like me without kids in the school system go through our daily days not even noticing the school buildings or their occupants. Life is busy and there is a lot for people like me to do that has nothing to do with the school system, and people like me are in the majority. All it takes is to get them to show up to vote, and they can easily out vote the union radicals which is why it takes Lakota an average of three levy attempts to get a tax increase passed. And to do that they have to resort to guerrilla warfare, not the goodness of people’s hearts. I would personally rather have the bloodbath rather than harm future business growth in our region with another Lakota tax increase, and argued that way, the way all businesses are measured, the story is quite clear. Lakota is not a value to our community, but a hindrance and the product they produce is failing and will continue to fail until the unions no longer run the government schools. That is, unless a third conservative is elected to the school board, and the budget crises that is coming can be averted. The value of the district won’t change but the bad reputation that will put Lakota through a lot of pain could be averted. And I would think that to be a good thing.
Personally, I think Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota schools is doing a good job, and in general the Lakota school board, for the most part. Managing one of the largest school districts in Ohio isn’t for the incompetent and these guys are a lot better than what we’ve had in the past. A lot of the union leveraging games have been removed from their general management and I am supportive of them, so long as they aren’t asking for more money in the form of taxes. I was glad to see that Miller did his best to make sure that parents of the many thousands of kids who attend Lakota each day know where to put the blame regarding the Petermann bus driver’s strike, or the potential for one by getting out in front of the issue. Meanwhile, he did what he could to get information out about the negotiations where a bunch of spoiled unionized bus drivers were demanding more money and better working conditions, or else.
And as it stood going into Monday night of this past week, the drivers were threatening to walk off the job all the while professing their divine love for the children, they transport each day which personally made me sick. I think the proper response would be to fire every last one of those ungrateful lunatics. Driving a bus is not hard. If anything they should be paying the school district for the right to do so, because as a subcontractor of Lakota schools they cost a lot of money to provide convenience to the residents so that their children can get to school each day. But honestly, especially for retirees just wanting to supplement their income as bus drivers later in life, they should consider the job a privilege. There is nothing complicated about it, in a lot of ways it’s what I would consider a loser job for loser people. I wouldn’t mind doing it for fun, but once you put money to it, it sort of cheapens the whole role for me. I think busing could be done by community volunteers. It costs enough in fuel and maintenance to run a bus, let alone some fat ass loser who sits in the Kroger parking lot with three or four other busses and their drivers during the school day waiting for their pickup times.
School buses are increasingly an irritating element to our community. They stop at every damn railroad track and when they have to pick up a kid on a double laned highway, such as RT 4 nobody really knows if they are supposed to stop or not. The busses all in the name of “safety” become a major traffic impediment. Buses are slow and are cesspools of bad behavior among the kids. When you walk the halls of any school you can tell the kids who have their parents drive them and those who have to ride the bus, because there is a lot of bullying and peer pressure on those bus rides that are completely unnecessary and it has an impact on the overall consciousness of the children. Ultimately parents should be taking their kids to school instead of sending them on the bus. Of course, not everyone can afford to, but they should try.
Back in the levy fights of Lakota pulling busing from previous school boards was the tactic of extortion they used to encourage busy parents to pass the tax increase, so that the kids of the parents could have that free ride to school back. In a wealthy district like Lakota the ploy didn’t work very well, because parents for the most part had the financial resources to drive their kids to school and many never did use the bus again after the busing did eventually come back. So explain to me why we need these bus services? It was a pretty dirty trick to try to pull off a last-minute strike with only a month left in the school year, less actually. And to send parents to bed not knowing if a bus would pick up their kids in the morning and take them to school. Any worth that the product of busing did provide was eroded in that single moment at the end of Monday night going into Tuesday with uncertainty hanging in the air.
As I’ve said many times, school teachers have no business being involved in any kind of socialist union. But even worse is a busing union. What the hell are bus drivers doing in a labor union? As we now know, and I’ve been saying it for decades, all labor unions are socialist organizations. Why do we have a socialist organization running our school transportation and having access to our children with radical employees who are perfectly willing to walk off the job just to get more money? It brings into question what they might do for money in other circumstances if they are so cheap. I wouldn’t trust them, and I never did while my kids were growing up. I made sure my wife always had a car to drive them to school, EVERY day. I certainly wasn’t going to turn over the life of my children to such labor union radicals.
I will give credit to Matt Miller for setting the record straight and getting his message out there on the news to make sure parents knew exactly what the situation was. He did his best to communicate the conditions to parents. But he shouldn’t have been in that situation to begin with. Lakota subcontracts those busing services out to avoid these kinds of problems. It would be my suggestion to immediately shop a second source. A single point of failure is a promise that this will happen again. Lakota over this upcoming summer while all these unionized drivers are basking their fat asses on a beach somewhere need to find alternatives. An alternative to Petermann since they obviously don’t have management control over their drivers.
But even better, parents should just take their kids to school and keep those buses empty. Show those drivers just how little they are really needed and let them sit in the parking lots of storefronts wasting time on the clock all day knowing that nobody really needs them. That is the best way to handle this situation. What those bus drivers did was disgusting and their willingness to leave kids without a ride was very disingenuous. And they need to feel a sting of reality from it. Because you can bet dear reader that the moment they think everything has cooled off that they will try it again. It might not be next year, or the year after. It will likely be a new generation of kids that flow through the school system every four years or so. But they will do it again, they’ll ask for money they should be paying the tax payers for the privilege of helping our community children. Since they are members of a socialist labor union, they should already be thinking that way. But as usual with them and the many like them, they are really just out for money and the easiest possible way of making it. And to hell with whomever it hurts in the process.
The Overmanwarrior 