Tag: Lakota

Lakota Throwing Away Money on Overpaid Teachers: New LEA union contract compensates the average teacher at over $100,000 per year–they are not worth it

There is of course a lot more to the story when we talk about what teachers cost, especially in overly paid districts like Lakota in Ohio. Lakota schools is one of the largest and most wealthy districts in the state with an average teacher salary climbing up to $73,000 per year now that the LEA union there has just extracted a massive pay increase for themselves with a new three-year contract. The costs of course don’t end there, unionized teachers, especially at Lakota have some of the greatest health insurance benefits that are available on the market, and they are expensive. Each teacher at Lakota on average now costs the district approximately $100,000—EACH for only working 180 days a year. The average private sector employee works around 50 weeks per years (250 days a year.) These government school employees cry about not making enough money—there isn’t enough money in the world to make them happy. I can say this, these employees aren’t worth that much money to me for essentially providing a glorified babysitting service, because what kids are learning today in the public education and the college system is not what I’d call a quality education. They sure as hell aren’t worth $100K each.

I watched the video of the Lakota LEA contract vote because I was interested in what would happen next. My hope was that the two conservatives on the board would hold, but one of them wavered and now the three liberals just signed up Lakota to exceed their 100-million-dollar budget. A decade ago roughly when I was giving Lakota such a hard time about their out of control budget I thought it was a lot that they were at $65 million, and that wasn’t enough because they over spent and needed to pass a property tax levy to pay their bills. Now only 8 years later they are out of control again. The district managed to gain a budget surplus and most of us who worked on the fiscal responsibility side of things got busy with other things, and these idiots took that surplus and just tossed it to a bunch of overpaid, spoiled brat teachers on an inflated contract then clapped themselves on the back for saving the school district from a possible LEA strike. What a dismal situation, no public-school teacher should ever threaten to walk off the job when they are paid to be that babysitting service at a bare minimum by the voters of the district. If you listen to the protestors in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma recently, which I’m sure the LEA teachers at Lakota were threatening to mimic, we are dealing with a very destructive class of government workers who complain about everything, do very little by way of real work, and have made themselves impossibly expensive to compensate.

Watching the video of the LEA contract approval Julie Shaffer, Brad Lovell, and the ultra-liberal Kelly Casper spoke in favor of throwing endless amounts of money at these teachers. Brad went so far to say that he thought of his property tax spending as an investment into our community’s children. Comments like that really make me sick because there is nothing about throwing over $100K at liberalized propaganda advocates that makes children better prepared to become educated and functioning participants in the world around them. Take a look at today’s youth, they aren’t doing very well—their educations have essentially destroyed their minds, not made them better—and these people expect to sell us this long-proven theory to the contrary that by over paying teachers we are helping our children? Brad and Julie even went so far in their rationalizations to indicate that they had children going to Lakota, or who would go to Lakota and they wanted to make sure there were teachers there to provide them with good educations—which obviously clouded their judgments.

I knew way back when I debated Julie Shaffer on WLW radio when she first ran for school board that I was dealing with one of those panicky mom types who feed these panicky teachers all the fuel they needed to become $100K employees each in the district. The teachers complained at every step having to do homework at night, or to work on the weekends—or to have to think about their jobs over the summer—or their requirements to go back to college to obtain their master’s degrees. The teachers want money for everything and if they don’t get it they threaten to walk off the job—and always there is a parent with a kid going to the government schools like Julie and Brad who think that they can compensate their parenting into a successful experience if they toss their kids into a government school to be raised by these liberal teachers who make way too much money for doing not much at all. Back then I was challenged to run a classroom, and I accepted it. I even offered to run four at the same time. I could teach a thousand kids more in one day than they learn in their entire high school years, so those types of threats don’t work with me. The guilt and insecurities of many parents are what cause all this trouble and we have at least two of them on the Lakota school board.

Taken on their own, all these people are nice. Some of the school board members are really just concerned parents themselves, and the teachers in most cases like being around children and they enjoy the profession of teaching. I have met some teachers at Lakota who are very passionate about their work. Are they worth 100K per year—hell no. Getting paid six figures in the private sector is considered a real appreciation of value. If someone is making six figures, they are doing something important for the companies they work for. But not in government schools—its expected collectively. The people might be nice who are involved in these discussions, but that doesn’t make them worth six figures, especially when it comes out of the tax payer’s pocket directly through their property values. But nobody, especially the school board members with children in the district, considers the real impact that the government schools have on the minds of the children. I watch every day parents dropping their kids off at day care facilities and if you press them in a discussion they’ll reveal that they can’t wait until their children are of age to attend Lakota because they will be free of the expense of paying for pre-school. Most parents don’t want to be bothered with teaching their children anything, so they hope that the government school will do all the education they can’t provide as parents either because they aren’t smart enough, or they are too lazy to do it themselves. And that is really what’s behind the lunacy of Julie, Brad and Kelly on the Lakota school board. They are insecure parents who want the best for their children and they naturally will do anything for their children, except take responsibility for their educations on their own as parents. They are relying on liberalized institutions to do the job instead, and that is a danger all its own.

There is no evidence that public schools are good for kids. We loosely talk about how children need to spend time with other peers their age and learn about life. But the way government schools have evolved make them cesspools of liberalism where kids learn to hate the Second Amendment, they don’t learn about American history to the extent they should, and they are having their minds turned off, not on. Ask an 8th grader about global warming and they’ll tell you how America is destroying the world, and they know so because their teachers at school taught them that. Ask that same child to give an opinion on capitalism and American business and they they’ll go on a tirade of how the 1% run everything and that society needs to put more focus on equal rights—which is a fancy way of saying the dumb and lazy need to be equal to the ambitious and productive. As those kids look around at their teachers who make $100K per year and have paid summers off—those students are surprised to learn that the world was never the way it was presented to them in their government schools—and they aren’t prepared for that disappointment. So how is paying all this money into the government school system worth it? It’s not!

Just saying something doesn’t make it true and paying teachers at Lakota over $100,000 a year each doesn’t magically produce a good child. As much as Brad wants to believe in the system, the system of public education destroys far more lives than it helps and is simply a very expensive baby-sitting service for the adults who are too busy with their careers, or not intellectual enough themselves to teach their children the things they need to learn in life. Instead they drop their kids off at a government school, which is like dumping them at a public park with supervision and expect good results no matter what the cost—so long as the whole community is willing to help pay for it. Most of those panicky parent types like Julie Shaffer don’t mind paying a $8000 tax bill on their properties each year because it would cost them a lot more than that to send their kids to a private school. they pay the higher taxes happily because it also coaxes their neighbors who no longer have kids in the school to also pay for their child—and that’s where things get nasty. The communities of Liberty Township and West Chester have given Lakota an extraordinarily high budget to work with, and the school board couldn’t even stay within those parameters—even with declining enrollment! It’s all very embarrassing to Lakota. Nobody sympathizes with teachers who make over $100K in compensation under any conditions—especially when they are really only babysitters for busy parents. That is not a good situation at all, the people involved should be very ashamed of themselves for wasting so much money on an emotional issue that defies logic.

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman
Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.

Vote for Ernest Gause on November 7th 2017: Protecting a cash surplus at Lakota from the forces of chaos

 

If you ever wanted to see a guy who has his act together running for a school board position it’s Ernest Gause.  Watching this situation at Lakota schools in Southern Ohio for many years now and fighting many levies to keep taxes down, I’ve never witnessed a better person for a school board position than Ernest.  To get an idea of how on top of things he is just have a look at his website, specifically his press release section shown below.  In it Ernest breaks down the cash situation at Lakota schools and shows just where we are in 2017 to managing the Lakota school system for the next decade.  To do the job right, good school board members like Ernest Gause need to be in place to safely steer the district into the correct direction.  Gause is a school board candidate offering that not only wants to avoid future school levies, but he wants to have a replacement strategy which essentially means working within the budget parameters and decreasing the budget need over time—which has been unheard of by any school district anywhere.  And he plans to do all this by raising the expectations of Lakota as well through performance standards.

https://www.gauseforlakota.com/articles-and-press-releases

Essentially here’s the situation, Lakota has cash on hand through 2026 to avoid a school levy.  However the current school board members are reluctant to commit to that because they still spend more than they take in so the positive elements of their cash surpluses will eventually catch up to them.  Lakota has that cash surplus because they pushed for a levy they didn’t need in 2013 when they violated the deal they made with me to keep a levy off the ballot for two years after the levy defeat of 2012.  The school board at the time pushed for a levy all in the name of school security, but they really didn’t need it because of declining enrollment in our aging community, so they unnecessarily increased our property taxes into this abundance situation that we have now.  Unlike past school board candidates, Earnest actually has a plan to avoid school levies in the future but taking our current surplus and reducing the tax footprint that Lakota imposes on future development.   Here are more specifics off his website that articulate his position:

End dependencies of tax levies by creating levy replacement strategies.

As a community, we need to ask the question of why we need levies and what we can do as a community to ensure the school get what it need, our children are educated and the community (tax payers) get a return on our investment.

The answer is simple; we need transparency and full disclosure for every dollar spent.

There need to be the following:

  1. If there is going to be more busing, then which schools and how much.
  2. If there is going to be more technology, then which school and how much.
  3. If there is going to be small classes, more teachers and more resources, then which schools and how much.

Within Lakota there needs to be more transparency, more openness and better reporting to the community.

https://www.gauseforlakota.com/tax-levies

Our SUCCESS as a Community

Expand our footprint, when, where, why and how.

I am a firm believer in expanding out educational footprint. I believe a board member needs to be active in supporting education, partnering in education and an outspoken advocate of education. How do we support education? We support education by putting the work in and by supporting our teachers, administrators and our students. But in order to do that you have to educate yourself in knowing what is going on in your community and surrounding communities.

​

To make sure our students and our teachers are ready for the tools of the 21st century, six schools have demonstration classrooms. The classrooms are equipped with a variety of devices, including:
• 1-to-1 laptops
• A classroom projector
• A mini-projector
• Two aqua boards
• iPad and tablet sets
• A document camera
• A digital camera
• An AV rover
Champion Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics to compete on the world stage by partnering with Universities.

Enhance professional trade programs through business and university partnerships for electrician, plumbers, pipefitters, realtors, engineering, accounting and electronic trades.

Here is a fun quiz that can help you decide what is right for you.​
Just to be transparent, this site will ask you for your contact information!  It will give you some great insights into a trade you may be interested in.
​

CONTACT ME NOW

1. Technology Tools
2. Champion STEM
3. Trade Programs

Add blended learning opportunities for special needs students.

Prepare students for transition into post-secondary institutions of higher learning through increased Academic Resources and external Partnerships with corporations.

End dependencies of tax levies by creating levy replacement strategies.
As a community, we need to ask the question of why the need levies and what we can do as a community

4. Tax Levies = NO
5. Partnerships
6. Blended Learning
   8. Resources
7. Technology Integration

Bring state of the art technology to the classroom & integrate in daily curriculum, lessons & homework

11. Data Tracking

Track GPA’s year over year in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics to ensure progression and disclose at Board Meetings.   Transparency = Responsibility

Give our teachers additional resources on how to integrate technology into the classroom.

Provide Transportation to High Schools to reduce financial burden for working families.

9. Transportation
10. Distance Learning

Integrate distance learning into classrooms to attend college level courses.

12. Internships

Provide realistic job previews working with the business community for internships, summer work study and sponsorship.

https://www.gauseforlakota.com/platform

Lakota’s current treasurer Jenni Logan has done a good job with the budget, but I remember when they put her up front in 2012 to profess the fiscal cliff that Lakota was headed for justifying the tax increase the board wanted at the time.  Many who know how money works told Lakota then that if they could control their costs, largely their payroll, they wouldn’t need any more money—but they didn’t listen so presently they have on hand cash until 2020 where deficit spending is projected to begin, according to this article shown at the link below.   That’s the point where the step increases start taking over from where the board has been able in the past to hold them down due to all the public pressure.  The teacher’s union has had to keep a low profile over the last half decade namely because the public sentiment was not with them, and it will continue not to be.  That makes putting good management on the school board that is smarter than the negotiators for the union a priority so that deficit spending can be avoided.  Earnest is jus t that type of manager that we need on the school board for the next decade, to keep the cash managed while raising the expectations for the district.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/local/projection-lakota-budget-deficit-until-2020/S3GMVzMqKS4pKZqClEVJeO/

I think Todd Parnell is a decent board member, but if Earnest were added to the Lakota school board a trend of conservativism would finally emerge that could pave the way for a solid four vote majority by the next election term where Julie Schafer’s term would expire.   It takes time to build the right team because good candidates are hard to find.  In the case of Earnest I am very attracted to his lean manufacturing background and think the best way to keep their costs down at Lakota is by applying the same methods that are expected in business on the current teacher’s union.  One way that the labor unions for the automotive industry had to be brought into the modern age of thinking was to apply lean standards to them so that the unions couldn’t use the chaos of many different job classifications to justify outlandish wage expectations driving up the cost of the product.  Well, in this case the product is the education of children and I think the urgency of a proper approach is that much more important.  So obviously, we want good managers in place to handle the vast amounts of money that we send to Lakota and to keep them out of our pocket books in the years to come while giving kids good foundational skills they can apply for the rest of their lives through their education.  There is no reason that Lakota couldn’t be a trend setter and still drive down their payroll.  But we can’t get there unless we try something different, and Ernest Gause is a tremendous step in that direction.  So when you have to vote on Tuesday, make sure you pull the lever for that very good person on November 7th 2017

Rich Hoffman

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

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

http://joanpowell4wc.com/

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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Joan the Hutt: Lee Wong and a former Lakota tax and spend liberal want control of West Chester as trustees

I was watching Star Wars with my grand-kids the other day while catching up on some news in the print media and I noticed that the big spender Joan Powell from the Lakota school board was seeking a seat on the West Chester Board of Trustees.  I was astonished that she’d come out of retirement to run for such an important seat, and given her track record even desired to put herself up to the scrutiny of public office.  But it’s her life, and she asked for it—because there’s a lot to pick on when it comes to Joan Powell.  That’s when I looked up to watch the movie again and thought it was astonishing how much she reminded me of the Star Wars character Jabba the Hutt—the vile gangster and villain from the old child targeted story about good and evil.  I know Joan better than most people do and I remember how she ran the Lakota school system like a thuggish gangster for the teacher’s union complete with back room deals and a tax and spend philosophy that was as maniacal as any liberal in America.  I know because I was part of a deal she was a part of way back in 2013 when a report at the following link came out showing that Lakota had declining enrollment and didn’t need a tax increase. Yet Joan the Hutt pushed for one anyway to give pay raises to the public employees she was supposed to be managing before she retired.   Read that report here.  The important parts of the report have been highlighted in yellow on pages 1 and 16:

Lakota Enrollment study

Watch this little clip from Star Wars showing Jabba the Hutt making deals and trying to destroy her rivals.  Hutts in Star Wars are hermaphroditic so the female designation is appropriate in comparing the fictional villain from Star Wars to the real life con artist from Lakota.

Now watch this anti-Trump ad that Joan Powell the Hutt did for Hillary Clinton during last year’s presidential campaign.  Take away the flowers and the references to grandchildren, can you tell any difference? I can’t.

http://joanpowell4wc.com/

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/former-longtime-lakota-board-member-running-for-west-chester-trustee/TlmBdiJr2FTsQruxhSdtJI/

For context let’s go back to 2012, a group I was running with several other people called No Lakota Levy had successfully defeated several of the tax increases that Joan the Hutt tried to implement from 2005 all the way up to that point in time.  The teacher’s union was Joan the Hutt’s network and they wanted a pay increase.  The Lakota school board had to get a tax increase passed to appease those government employees and they weren’t going to do that so long as I was the face of No Lakota Levy.  Joan orchestrated through her vast network of media contacts and feminist groups a hit job against me, not much different from when Jabba set a trap for Luke Skywalker to fall into the Rancor pit to be eaten alive.  Only in real life the terrible beast I had to fight was a bunch of tax levy supporters who were part of a vicious tax and spend cult ran by Joan the Hutt.   Like the fictional movie, metaphorically, the same result occurred.  I ended up in a blistering exposé meant to destroy me in every way possible because of my involvement with No Lakota Levy.  Joan wanted to remove me from the political scene so that they could pass a levy at Lakota.  Some members of my group sided with Joan the Hutt but little to their dismay I was more popular afterwards than before.  People appreciated that I stuck to my guns to defend them from the vile clutches of this West Chester liberal and her legions of tax levy supporters.   In spite of the extremely negative press, the Joan Powell led school board knew they couldn’t get a levy passed with my name in the papers every day so they had to try something new.

Behind the scenes Joan the Hutt wanted to make a deal with me using school board members I had been supporting and members of the No Lakota Levy group.  She wanted to negotiate a two-year ceasefire on the levy fight.  I thought that was a good idea so I did my part of the deal which was to not campaign against Lakota for that two-year period of time and Joan the Hutt wouldn’t attempt another tax increase.  Meanwhile Joan the Hutt and her legions of levy supporters went hard to work paving the way for a community consensus on a tax increase hiring a progressive firm to go around and soften up the voters for another levy attempt which shouldn’t have taken place until 2014.  Taking only one year off from the levy fight Lakota went for another levy in 2013 knowing that if that report referenced above got out to the public that people would never support a tax increase.  So they broke their deal with me and went for their raises for the teacher’s union in fall of 2013.

Joan the Hutt by that time had split up the No Lakota Levy group the same way she tried to split up Republicans over Donald Trump in favor of crooked Hillary Clinton so the tax increase just barely passed.  Joan the Hutt knew that if my group had stayed together that she would have never won so she used all the levers of power to do whatever she had to do—including destroying me if possible—to give her public employees a pay raise when it was clear from the report that Lakota needed to actually cut teachers—not giving them a pay increase.  Joan the Hutt has shown on many occasions that she can have a propensity toward vile conduct to achieve her tax and spend desires and to my experience what she did at Lakota was no different from what a gangster might do for a criminal enterprise.  The double-dealing, the vicious use of legions of blood thirsty supporters and a facade of a serene grandmother to hide it all when reality indicated a vile underground network of thugs for which she was the leader.

West Chester under the guidance of Mark Welch and George Lang have produced budget surpluses and low taxation for many years now leading to an economic boom that has been unique to similar areas around the country seeing much slower growth.  But with such great numbers come the thieves and bandits who want a free ride and to seize that growing wealth so they can pass it out to their criminal underworld.   There is a third trustee at West Chester named Lee Wong who you will find often trying to get a free meal who needs a partner in crime in West Chester to get a needed second vote to plunge the community into chaos.  Lee wants to pass those surpluses produced into that public sector underworld for which Joan the Hutt has such a vast network.  You might have heard of Lee’s name before as it is often associated with scandal and treason such as the efforts he committed himself to recently in defending a woman fired from her job for giving secrets to China.   People on his side think Lee’s a hero for standing up for a public sector worker, Republicans see an alarming trend in Lee that he seems always associated with scandal and bad decisions rooted in Democratic behavior hidden behind a mask of conservatives that he knows he needs to even attempt to win any office in Butler County.  Like most public employees what Lee shares with Joan is a love for attention, taking money from those who have it and giving it to people in their inner circles of power to keep them loyal and close.  Those two see an opportunity to have a two vote count in West Chester to get control of the surpluses that have been produced by good management so that they can expand their bases of power—just like gangsters do.

The thing to do would be to keep Joan the Hutt out of office and send her back to her supposedly quit life for which she indicated in her pro Hillary Clinton commercial.  The experiences I have provided are just one example of the way she operates as a person and you have to wonder about someone like her who desires to get her hands on the levers of power to even run for such an office.   But for people who just can’t help themselves the good efforts of Mark Welch and George Lang are too attractive to avoid.  For people like Joan and Lee those surpluses are ways to make friends and obtain more free meals around town, to get a respect they can’t give themselves through merit based work.  George and Mark are privately successful so their roles as trustees have been about as pure as anyone could hope politicians to be—and that is why West Chester has been successful now for a period of years.  The criminals who want a few more friends and a way to expand their influence can’t help but want to put their teeth into that surplus to work their maniacal plans for government expansion and double-dealing drama for which their naturally corrupt minds can’t avoid.   Yes, Joan the Hutt is back and she wants to be fed a steady stream of tax money to sustain her big dreams of a vast syndicate of liberalized activism hidden behind a mask of Republican Party affiliation.  Those kinds of things can be difficult to see in reality when people shake hands, but when you watch fantasy films geared toward children, like Star Wars, it’s easy to see that in West Chester we have our own version of the popular villain Jabba the Hutt.  And she wants to become a trustee in 2017.

Oh, and in that last video, do you know why dear reader that Lakota didn’t go for that levy in 2017?  Because Joan the Hutt retired from the school board.  Miraculously after she left the board, Lakota’s finances were straightened out.  Just keep that in mind when voting in November.

Rich Hoffman

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The Phantom Kids of Lakota: Losing 100 baby sitters and the desire to hire more

All public schools are the same, so my national readers should find the story regarding my Lakota local palatable—and informative. Lakota is hiring more baby sitters in the disguise of teachers. The superintendent and teacher union president believe “high-quality teachers are in demand, making it critical that we get out in the job market and start recruiting early. We are looking for teachers who are well-trained in their specialty areas, care deeply about each child’s success and are committed members of our schools and our community.” Also according to the official school newspaper, Today’s Pulse “a more diverse staff to match the 26 percent racial diversity among Lakota students is important in future hiring.” No wonder most people leave that free paper at the end of their driveway destined directly for the trash. The cause of this hiring need is that 100 teachers recently retired leaving staffing positions vacated—hence the need to hire more baby sitters because after all the fancy talk by the government employees of the district school—that’s all that’s really required.

I have written about the incompetence of the school superintendent of Lakota before. Karen Mantia is a good politician, but a terrible manager doing what has always been done in public schools to deal with their budget short-falls—ask for more tax money to deal with their lopsided collective bargaining agreements with the teachers union, the Sharon Mays led LEA. My group in the past, No Lakota Levy has shown the district from the inside and out how to manage their money—but they have refused to listen instead relying on political theatrics to extract more money from the community—as all public schools do. However, in Lakota’s situation, they have been given a gift—it’s called declining enrolment.

For the next ten years Lakota will see fewer students than they had in the previous years, and losing 100 teachers is a great way to reduce their internal payroll. If Mantia really wanted to be considered equal to a CEO of a company—she would instantly recognize that the retirements were a blessing to Lakota—a way to drop millions of dollars in payroll without a RIF—but instead she instantly thought of ways to replace those positions so that the school would remain top-heavy with their staffing. She is a former teacher after all and is more concerned about appeasing the school employees than the tax payers of the district.

Mantia recently in the same paper, has been doing a lot of sucking up to the school board to renew her contract—for her it’s an easy gig. She locks herself arm and arm with Sharon and gives the teachers whatever they want and when the money runs out, they just go to the tax payers to extract more money from property owners for their glorified baby sitting service.

The Today’s Pulse reporter Eric Schwartzberg didn’t do much work in his recent article because he sought quotes from the cause of the problem herself, Sharon Mays, president of the teachers’ union at Lakota to provide expert opinion on the matter. That’s like asking a fox why it eats chickens. Of course Sharon wants more members for her teacher union, more lobby power to send letters of extortion to local politicians and more bell-bottomed parasites passing out levy support information during the next election. 100 more employees to Sharon is another 100 foot soldiers of progressive influence. What Eric should have done is put the school board members on the spot and made them give their opinion. Not pawning the article away to the two biggest pro tax people at Lakota who owe their employment to them. Even through Sharon is the president of the union, she is still an employee of the district, and that management of that district should fall on the elected school board.

But that wasn’t the intention; the goal of Lakota is to always grow, even if there aren’t students there to support the hiring. It is a good thing that Lakota’s teaching staff dropped 17.4 percent from 2010 to 2013. The drop in employees almost gave Lakota a surpluses in their budget—but Mantia and the gang wanted to give all their overpaid baby sitters raises on wages that average over $63K per year—so they sought yet another tax increase. They won that increase by spending a lot of tax money on public relations and still only won by just a hair over 1%. In 2010 there were roughly 1,100 employees which dropped down to 923 currently. Further reductions would of course save more money and avoid the need for future tax increases.

However, the goal of Lakota and all public schools are not to save money, or even teach kids. It is to give kids someplace to go while their parents work, that’s why Lakota is supporting pre kindergarten glasses so that children under five can go someplace while their parents save money on day care. That is the one and only function of a public school because lets face it, kids aren’t learning anything meaningful. Parents might argue that they want their child to have an opportunity to get into college with a sports scholarship or some other benefit—but the merit of the enterprise is completely ridiculous and false.

I knew a couple recently who took their daughter from the years of 9 to 14 years old to gymnastic classes everyday hoping that she would become good enough to become an Olympic gymnast. The little girl was good but the parents weren’t doing all this work for her—even though that’s what they said to everyone—they were doing it to save their marriage and the failed expectations of their miserable adult lives. They were using the little girl as a meal ticket and they ruined the kid. The girl now is a drug abuser just shy of her 18th birthday and is a mess. The parents ruined the kid by processing her into a system looking for glory through her success so they could ride her coat tails. Most children in public school sports are in a similar situation—their parents are trying to live through them—rather than teaching them anything meaningful. So even the cited positives of the public education experience, the dances, the sports, the community involvement with friends is an illusion. The public school is only there to do for children what their parents are too lazy to do for themselves, and parasites living off the community like Karen Mantia and Sharon Mays are happy to provide the service of relieving those parents of their guilt. But at a cost.

In this case, the 100 employees that Karen and Sharon want to replace at Lakota are for phantom kids that don’t even exist. The only purpose of those employees would be to keep their employment numbers up over 900 so that they could remain statistically one of the largest employers in Butler County. For Sharon it means more union fees. For Karen it means more employee hires under her watch. But for the tax payers it’s just another useless cost to be applied to kids that aren’t even in need. Over the coming years there will be even fewer children attending Lakota and a greater need to reduce the employees at Lakota through a RIF. But don’t expect Karen, Sharon or the Lakota newspaper The Pulse to recognize that, because the parents have a need for the baby sitting service of Lakota to alleviate their stress, and their personal failures.

If Butler County is concerned about job creation the 100 jobs lost at Lakota will be filled down the road at the new Culvers restaurant in Monroe opening near Cincinnati Premium Outlets. They are opening in August and are hiring 60 positions. That almost covers the situation job for job. By the time Liberty Way opens there will be a surplus of jobs in Butler County so there will be growth. The big difference is that the government jobs are shrinking and the private sector jobs are increasing—and that is the real issue. To me the advanced college degrees mean nothing to the Lakota baby sitters—it just makes them overpaid labor to watch kids while their parents build careers. A waitress or cashier job at Culvers is equal to the typical Lakota teacher. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Rich Hoffman and Dave Varney Visit the Scott Sloan Show on WLW

It is with great pleasure that I present this pod cast of the Scott Sloan Show from September 20, 2010, in which I along with Dan Varney who is the treasurer of our NoLakotaLevy.com group, revealed a bomb of carefully hidden facts obscured by the smiling faces of Lakota’s PR efforts.  My daughter, Brooke came along to photograph in order to provide some background  images. 

It had been a busy week leading up to our invitation to be on Scott’s morning show. On Saturday Darryl Parks had read from my Lakota Blog on the Top Pay of the 432 Teachers at Lakota, which led to an invite to be on The Big One, Monday. It has been a relief to get some support from an aspect of the media that has given those of us against school levies a fair shake. In the past, newspapers, and television have sided without too much probing any situation where a school system asks for a levy. It is in this soft reporting that has created a system which actually threatens to bankrupt our entire education system, by letting powerful education influences run school budgets up to unsustainable amounts without the media to check them on it.

So it is with great thanks to Mr. Sloan, and to Mr. Parks for giving us a voice in a minefield of discontent. And the result was a powerful hour of radio that is compressed down to a half hour for your convenience. Basically what follows is our revelation that Lakota is asking for more money when they already have a budget that is just over 75% dedicated to wages and benefits, and it is their own mismanagement which allowed the budget to inflate to an unsustainable level.

But this is about more than just Lakota Schools. This is about tyranical government influence that is a gigantic presence in our own back yard, and if we don’t have the guts to do something about it whether at Lakota or any other school system in the United States, then we don’t have a right to demand change in the way government does business in any other fashion. If you don’t have the guts to stand up to something as easy to see as a school levy where excessive spending is so obvious, then you won’t have the backbone for the much harder problems that are facing this nation.
So with that, enjoy this groundbreaking podcast from people that understand what’s really at stake. And Scott Sloan gets it.

Rich Hoffman

www.overmanwarrior.com