Tag: LEA

The Lakota Education Association Shows Their Radical Political Agenda: Teacher unions are the biggest danger to kids

It used to be controversial, to tell the truth about labor unions. All of them are the works of Karl Marx. Participating in a labor union is an acceptance of the basic premise of communism. Even four years ago, saying such a thing in public would have received snickers from an unsuspecting public; since the mid-1850s, labor unions have been around. They don’t predate our constitutions in America or the basic philosophy of the country’s founding, which is best summed up by the rival philosophy of Adam Smith and his excellent book The Wealth of Nations. The alarm bells of the communist movement by socialist sympathizers emerged with immigration into America during the late 1880s aggressively. Those rivals brought with them the assumption that European socialism, represented by the labor movement, the federal “Department of Labor,” was intent on carrying on the work of the poor loser, Karl Marx, who was a fool in his lifetime, and a weapon of global governments in his death. Everywhere that there is a labor union, we are dealing with some form of communism. In the 1920s, alarm bells sounded in books like The Richest Man in Babylon. Then in the 1940s and 1950s with, Ayn Rand’s uniquely American books addressed the matter. The idea of wealth creation and social organization were under attack by these recent communist assumptions, and over many decades they wore the mask of patriotism, confusing their members into believing that by espousing communist ideas, that they were somehow being patriotic. 

And the destructive effects of the labor movement were never more obvious in the teaching profession, as the radical progressive John Dewey imagined the role of public education. No matter how much money is spent with confiscated tax money from property values, all socialist schemes that predate all our lifetimes, public education will fail because it has been built on the progressive fantasies of John Dewey and his supporters in government and the communist labor union ideas of the various teacher unions. But things are different now; we’ve grown up in a lot of ways from the kind of world we were before President Trump was in office. Many things that were said about labor unions, and even the communist scares of the McCarthy hearings, turned out to be more true than anybody wanted to admit. Now, as we look at the trash heap of our political landscape, people are now admitting to the obvious. Labor unions don’t represent American values, and they have no place in the education of our children. Too many people listened to the labor union diatribes that have embedded themselves into many of our government institutions, and the collision of ideas was always bound to happen. It’s no longer about good wages for teachers, and smaller classrooms, as they have disguised their movement for years from public judgement; what it was always about, which I have warned people over three decades, is blue-haired losers who want to teach kids about sex in kindergarten, and convince them to embark on perverse sexual lifestyles at the earliest age possible. The results of the labor movement’s political escapades have devastated families, and the evidence has mounted up into a modern admission where people are finally willing to say the quiet stuff out loud. No labor union in a public school is good. They aren’t good for the kids. They aren’t good for the community. And they are anti-America at their very foundations and never should have been included in anything “public.” When people cry out that public schools should never be about “politics,” they simply have ignored that teacher unions are 100% about politics, and if they are not dealt with “politically,” then they will continue to erode away the basic hopes of anything good happening with tax money helping children learn the basics of an education. 

And that is the context of the battle raging in Lakota schools these days, where the Lakota Education Association, without a thought in their head, published to their members an antagonizing memo, shown here, trying to get their members to show up at a school board meeting and harass the first year school board member Darbi Boddy. Darbi, for her part, has made public admissions that she feels about the labor union, similar to my position, where she sees them as an impediment to the education of children, which is well founded. And the union responded by saying regarding a recent meeting, “You were under attack at this January 9th meeting by Ms. Boddy. She stated that she did not want to work with the LEA. We need to continue to show our union is strong, and it is not her choice that we have a voice!” Their activism resulted in a loud meeting with the threat of violence looming over everything obvious, meant to intimidate any supporters of Darbi Boddy who might dare to speak. And when many did, the union members didn’t have anything to offer but implied violence as a result. There is no logical debate that they can have because the foundation of their movement is communism straight out of The Communist Manifesto. So, they have violence and intimidation to support their claims of existence. But Darbi represents the voters of the community, who are in charge of everything, and that right predates anything Karl Marx ever wrote. So she is right to have an opinion on the matter, where the union has a mentality of changing it or getting rid of her. With that mindset, obviously, things were going to get pushy at the meetings. Finally, we are uncovering the real problem in these public schools because Darbi has had the guts to expose it by finally representing the public in public. And the LEA labor union hates it.

Labor unions are the primary danger to Lakota’s kids and all public schools. Their progressive mentality is corrosive to all efforts the human race might attempt to utilize, and years of their conduct are easily seen with history to support a destructive opinion of their foundations in philosophy. Follow the teachings of the labor union members, and you’ll get destroyed families—dangerous sexual lifestyles. You’ll raise corporate stooges who put money above family creation and will end up lost and destroyed as mature adults. You’ll end up with the kind of government we see today, ineffective, too expensive, and unaccountable. To be fair, I can’t think of one possible good thing that ever came out of a labor union, and the kind of society they are teaching to kids are promises of personal destruction. So their assumption that they have a right to exist is only a parasitic promise to steal wealth from hard-working property owners and use that money to destroy the community by destroying the kids in the process. I wouldn’t want any kids to be taught by the losers who attended that January 23rd school board meeting. I am glad that Darbi Boddy is a school board member who is willing to stand up to those hostile forces. And for the sake of the children attending Lakota schools, I would like to see at least two more school board members like Darbi Boddy, perhaps more aggressive than she is, there to govern that mess. The more who do, the more desperate the union members will become, showing the world what they are really made of. If left alone, they will continue to hide their liberal radicalism behind a façade of politeness. But when pressured, as they have been with Darbi Boddy, they show their true nature, which is wonderful for voters to see, and people will be able to see for themselves what the truth of the issue always has been. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lakota Gets a New ‘Conservative’ School Board: Isaac Adi, Darbi Boddy, and Todd Minniear win despite all odds

Great Election Results in 2021

After the election results within West Chester, Ohio, and Liberty Township for the 2021 school board races, the first thing my daughter said to me was, “well, that’s nice, but all public schools are still a dumpster fire.  Thanks, but no thanks.” That’s not just because she’s my daughter, but she represents a significant number of moms who are in their thirties and have watched the lunacy of our government over the last decade where they have decided that they want nothing to do with it.  Both she and my other daughter are homeschooling their kids.  My other daughter pulled her other child out of Monroe schools to homeschool just a few days ago because of the mask mandates and threat of vaccine rules.  Kids don’t need all that politics in their life, and my kids want nothing to do with any of it.  They want their kids to be educated, do the math, read, and adjust to critical thinking.  However, for me, to see Darbi Boddy and Isaac Adi win school board seats at the Lakota public schools was a fascinating thing to witness.  Bad, liberal management of Lakota, in general, has been a problem for decades. Finally, some reasonable people could manage the district in the way many of the Republicans in the county of Butler have needed by representation.  Adding these new names to the board with Lynda O’Conner is an excellent opportunity for sanity to come to Lakota for the first time in my lifetime, which at this point, is a long time.

Nobody can take anything away from Isaac and Darbi.  They worked very hard and were completely sincere in their efforts.  At no time in the process were they phony politicians.  Even when it came to fundraising, shaking hands, and going to political events, they were completely authentic and invested in running for school board and doing good things when they arrived there.  I will have to add a little name that many won’t know; Kristi Ertel worked behind the scenes very effectively and professionally to help make all this happen, as did other people who supported these candidates in unique ways.  This election was very much a team effort extending into the Republican party of Butler County in very positive ways.  None of us just woke up a few months ago and put our efforts into this achievement without a lot of work.  It started many months ago, well before the presidential election of 2020, as a way to figure out how to turn off the insane spending at Lakota, which was going to demand a levy increase by 2022.  It was names like Darbi and Isaac who stepped forward to become part of the solution.  Others helped in other ways.  And some of that group ran but wanted to be independent of a party nomination.

Looking at the results of this 2021 election, Vanessa Wells was one of the originals in these meetings.  I was rooting for her, but I understood well everyone’s problem with her in the race.  The LEA union had three candidates, and two of them were incumbents.  The other represented an incumbent, so it would be hard to beat them  on a good day.  Starting this process, I reminded everyone that the union candidates would get at least 5000 votes if the turnout were around 20%.  So there wouldn’t be much extra to divide among all the other candidates, Vanessa being one of them.  With the union endorsing the school board, which they always do informally, it would take the Republican Party endorsement to compete.  As it turned out, both Darbi and Isaac broke 8000 votes each which put them in first and second place comfortably over the other candidates.  By the way, things looked to me, there were thousands of hits on my blog site in favor of all the conservative candidates, so I felt it was safe to support Vanessa Wells even though she had selected to run as an independent.  I respect that kind of decision, so as it turned out, she gained a respectable 5000 votes all on her own, which is the magic number I pointed out at the start of the process.  While it’s true, those 5000 votes took away from Darbi and Isaac among a conservative base, knowing the minds of Butler County, I wasn’t worried that it would keep them from winning.  Of course, some races are coming, and Vanessa is an excellent talent to apply if she wants.  The same with Karine Chausse, who is a wildly independent person whom I like quite a lot.  She gained 1,400 votes with almost no resources to apply, which I thought was particularly strong.  I wanted to see how they’d do, and I was impressed. 

But it was scary for many people leading up to the election.  They couldn’t see what I did, the analytics from my blog site showing an enormous interest in the conservative school board candidates.  What I didn’t know was how would all that enthusiasm equate on election day.  As it turned out, everything came out exactly as we had war-gamed the election 18 months earlier in one of our earliest meetings.  Fear of the unknown taken into account, the people of Liberty Township and West Chester, won on election night.  Our job was to give them options, and they showed up and voted for them.  And it came out exactly like we thought it would.  Not a blowout margin, but voters would do the rest of the work with the suitable candidates, Isaac and Darbi, good sincere people who were in the race for all the right reasons.  The union always gets their base who want easy union contracts to negotiate against.  But their base runs out quickly.  When Isaac and Darbi went over the 7000 voter mark, I knew they were going to win.  Especially in an off-year election.  They exceeded that number more than that, which is a stunning blow to the previous status quo. 

Overall, all my endorsed candidates for the various races came out on top, which shouldn’t be a surprise.  The media does not give coverage to conservative options the way they should, so the blog site at least lets voters know who the good guys are.  It certainly helped in the school board race.  But it also helped in several trustee races. Mark Welch, of course, held his seat in West Chester, but Todd Minniear won as the top vote-getter in Liberty Township.  He was surprised to learn how quickly links to my site died on Facebook.  I explained to him that I was heavily shadowbanned on all internet providers and platforms.  So viral marketing is not possible when it comes to my site.  But, specific searches do work, so my blog site and name recognition, such as signs voters see on the side of the road, will add up to thousands and thousands of views, which is better media coverage than the local papers and tv market provide.  In races like these, it adds up quickly and can make a big difference.  But just as in the case of Darbi and Isaac, Todd worked his ass off on this race, and ultimately people saw that and voted for him.  If anything helped with the blog, people saw Todd campaigning, saw his signs, and looked him up to learn more.  Then they could read more about him, which earned a vote.  So I feel good about my role in helping out.  But that takes nothing away from all those who won.  They did a fantastic job, and I am proud to see each one of those victories manifest into something meaningful and hopeful.  The future is a little bit brighter today because of election night 2021.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Progressive Labor Union, LEA endorses Trent Emeneker: Hoping to slide a liberal under the door for West Chester Trustee

The LEA Endorses Trent Emeneker

At this point, it’s pretty well known that the challenger for the West Chester trustee seat in Butler County, Ohio, Trent Emeneker, is not a conservative.  He has stated that he’s a registered Republican. Still, much of what he talks about, like wanting to turn West Chester into a big bureaucratic city full of city council positions and other nonsense, is excessively liberal.  It didn’t help that he did a meet and greet at Liberty Center’s AC Hotel hosted by an activist Democrat.  So Trent has loads of problems even before a single-yard sign was ever put into the ground.  But as if all that were not enough, the LEA (Lakota Education Association) has endorsed Trent, which is essentially the kiss of death in Butler County.  The LEA, of course, is the ultra-progressive labor union that runs the Lakota school system.  They work under the umbrella of the Ohio Education Association, and ultimately the National Education Association, which everyone knows by now are essentially PAC groups for Democrats and the advancement of progressive causes.  Those not sure what progressive causes are responsible for should know that they are encouraging sex education in early grade school and transsexual bathrooms.  I would go as far as to say that it is an evil organization of radical politics intent on the destruction of the United States.  But judge for yourself.  What matters is that they have endorsed Trent Emeneker and hope to squeak him under the door in an off-year race that typically has low voter turnout. 

There is nothing good that comes out of the LEA.  They essentially protect bad teachers from being fired and lobby to pay them too much money to do it.  They are wholly committed to the destruction of America as we know it.  They collect money from their union dues and apply it directly to Democrats nationwide.  If you can think of something terrible about government schools, and I can think of a lot, the root cause of the trouble goes back to teacher unions, especially the NEA.  So long as they exist and have a footprint of any kind in our schools with our children, there is no hope of making those schools better.  People understand that more now than they did even a few years ago.  At Lakota, there is an opportunity to vote for new school board members to replace the current ones, which might stand against these teacher unions better than we’ve had in the past.  Usually, there is no defense on the school board.  The LEA essentially runs everything, including putting their candidates on the board as they are trying again this year with Kelley Casper, Michael Pearl, and Doug Horton.  There are finally options this year with actual Republican endorsed candidates.  Many people are running, so voter turnout will have to be high to defeat the incumbent’s LEA has also endorsed.  So we’ll see if voters take advantage of this opportunity with great voter turnout on election day, November 2nd. 

The LEA endorses Trent Emeneker for West Chester Trustee

It is just that kind of low voter turnout that the LEA hopes push the liberal Trent Emeneker into a West Chester Trustee seat.  They usually have their activists who always show up to vote and preserve their intent to destroy America.  So Republican voters will have to show up and defend themselves to keep that from happening.  But as to Trent’s intent, there is no doubt about it now that the LEA has endorsed him on their web page.  When you have the LEA behind you, you know that a vast evil is not far behind.  Everything the LEA does is rooted in some destruction for the American way of life and the families that make the country great.  Behind all teacher union activities are actions intended to attack family and its institution to a progressive need.  Suppose there are members of the LEA who call themselves Republicans and just go along for the great six-figure paycheck at Lakota. In that case, they are doing like all RINOs do, help evil get a foothold into our lives with the death whisper of compliance which is silently killing our country as we speak.  Those teachers in the LEA are just as bad as the purple-headed progressives advocating gay rights, critical race theory, and globalism by saying nothing and letting evil have its way in the world. 

Trent has tried to sell himself as an old military guy hoping that blind allegiance to service might make people ignore his obvious liberalism.  His biggest complaint about the current West Chester trustees is spending a few million dollars on landscaping for the new Union Center exchange.  He considers that fiscal irresponsibility.  Yet West Chester is operating in the black, which is how it should be, and considering the amount of GDP produced at that highway exit, the landscaping costs are easily justified.  Oddly enough, at a recent debate where Trent tried to make an issue of this cost, it was Lee Wong who best slapped him down for it.  Now everyone knows I’m not a huge Lee Wong fan, one of the current trustees.  But next to Trent Emeneker, Lee sounds like Donald Trump.  Lee explained well the need for the landscaping in a very Trump-like way.  Union Center in West Chester is one of the premier spots in the entire country for economic activity.  I would put the GDP moving through that exit among the top in the country.  There is nothing wrong with having some nice flowers there to greet the mass commerce that occurs.   Of course, nobody talks about that the LEA is against all capitalist activity as they are socialists and communists in their origins.  They are “the vote red for ed” types. The red is the red flag of communism, so for Trent to attack a few flowers when Lakota is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars into these LEA employees advocating against family values, small government ideas, and the promotion of the religion of climate change, Trent proves he’s just a stooge for the LEA liberalism and not interested in fiscal responsibility.  If he indeed were, the LEA would never endorse him because all they want is a run-away wallet with no limit on the credit card. 

So remember as you vote that the LEA endorsed Trent Emeneker.  I don’t think it will change anything.  The same several thousand people who will vote to keep the current big spenders on the Lakota school board will vote for Trent as a trustee.  But there are a lot more Republicans in Butler County than Democrats.  It will all come down to voter turnout.  If you don’t want to see more LEA liberalism contaminating our community, then be sure to get out on election night and vote. Don’t just show up and vote for Trump or the mid-terms.  Vote now and for the same reasons, defend your turf from these radical progressives and their plans of doom for our children.  And know when you vote that Trent Emeneker is one of them.  The LEA does not endorse Republicans, not real ones.  They are out to destroy conservative politics so they would never put their name next to anybody who won’t help them do just that.  Trent is a big government guy, which is why they want him.  But, if you show up to vote, you can stop their plans.  So, could you not take it for granted?  The time for action is coming up; make sure you are part of the solution.   

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

LEA Endorses Current School Board: More reasons to vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi

The LEA is wanting to Pick their Own Boss

News flash, the LEA, the Lakota Education Association have endorsed their three picks for the school board.  They endorse Kelley Casper and Michael Pearl, incumbents, and support the Brad Lovell replacement, Doug Horton.  No surprise there, as I’ve always said, those are all the liberals on the school board and why it has never functioned correctly.  The labor union puts its own kind of people on the board, so it’s no wonder that union contracts get approved without a whimper, transexual bathrooms are something to even talk about, and Critical Race Theory is infesting the hallways of all the schools.  When you let the teacher’s union pick their bosses, you naturally get a disaster, which is precisely why public education all across the country right now is in a crisis.  But I think it’s good to see these endorsements because now the union is saying the quiet part out loud.  For so many years, they have hidden their intentions beyond a bipartisan mask that they used to hide the politics of these candidates. This year, because of the pressure, the LEA had to show their cards, and once they did, every voter is now armed with a truth that wasn’t there for them before.  I’ve always said it, but now people can see for themselves.

Two Republican endorsed candidates created the pressure I support emphatically, Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi.  There are other challengers as well, but it was the Republican endorsement that made the faces of the LEA melt and decry how unfair it was for them.  They expected everyone to keep playing by the rules of impartiality. At the same time, they put their people in the office in the background and destroyed the Lakota budget with union nonsense and progressive politics.  If there is ever a hope of fixing government schools, the priority is to get the politics out of them.  And there is nothing about labor unions that isn’t about politics, especially the teacher’s union.  As in the case of Lakota, the LEA is a subsidiary of the OEA, the Ohio Education Association.  Then, of course, the OEA is a subsidiary of the NEA, the National Education Association.  You end up with a massive political action group of members who are soldiers for progressive politics, and the money we pay them off property taxes is taken and used to fuel the Democrat Party.  These unions do not give money to Republicans.  They are purely a radical political arm of the Democrat Party.  And in Butler County, Ohio, where Lakota is located, many people would be surprised to learn that. 

I always thought it was common knowledge of the connection between labor unions and the Democrat party.  A decade or so ago, I dealt with this issue often, but to me, that felt like just yesterday.  There is a whole new generation of parents now who were little kids themselves back then, and they don’t know about these kinds of things.  They want their kids to have a shot at a decent life, and they think by dropping those kids off at a government school, that somehow their kids will get the support and education they need for life.   They’d love it if politics were not such a dividing line, and they glaze over when these kinds of topics come up.  But the truth of the matter is, even if Republicans just sat in a faraway office and did not play the game, the kids in all public schools would continue to be harassed into converts of progressive causes, the kinds of things that Democrats care about.  Just as the gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said in Virginia recently, he didn’t believe parents should be telling schools what to teach. You see the same attitude among the teacher unions across the country.  They think they own your children and that they are a shared resource among us all for consumption as the collective sees fit. 

The game works like this; labor unions need an army to advocate for their future progressive causes.  And teachers specifically use the chaos of liberalism to drive change, making school boards throw endless amounts of money at them, spiking their payrolls to extraordinary levels.  When you hear the stories that teachers don’t make very much money, you hear union nonsense.  Many teachers at Lakota make six figures.  They aren’t going to go hungry in this century or the next.  And of course, their union contracts always get approved because, as you can see in Lakota, they advocate for their people to be on the board, union stooges who will lay down and give them anything they want.  Just as the incumbents at Lakota have over this past year, all three of the names the LEA has endorsed have worked essentially on behalf of the LEA union and not the community in general.  When we elect a school board, we are supposed to be putting in place a management team that will work with all the elements to make a successful school.   As things have been for decades, everything has been tilted away from the families and their children and leveraged toward the power of the labor unions and building up the Democrats as a national party. 

Well, at Lakota, we wanted to change that, and there are several good picks to choose from to replace Kelley Casper, Michael Pearl and keep Doug Horton from becoming a problem in the future.  The Republican endorsed candidates Darbi Boddy, and Issac Adi could work well with the current Republican board member Lynda O’Conner to gain a three-vote majority, and that by itself would dramatically help the situation at Lakota.  But people would have to show up and vote.  There are far more Republicans in Butler County than Democrats.  But on off-year elections with these kinds of races, most of the Republicans stay home.  Usually, there aren’t such good people to pick from, but this year there is.  We know that the union picks will show up to vote; they have their steady stream of supporters who always drink the Kool-Aid.  They will get a lot of votes, as they always do, from pro-union radicalism.  That would mean that many Republicans would have to show up on election night and vote for the school board, who usually would sit home that night.  The LEA is worried about it, and for a good reason.  We want them to worry about it.  They shouldn’t control our school board, and they want to keep it that way.  But for the first time that I can think of, voters finally have a choice. 

We don’t have to accept this premise of the labor unions running our schools and taking endless amounts of money from our tax base to stuff their faces and greedy hearts.  And in a not so indirect way, fueling a Democrat party seeking to destroy our country, starting with our children.  If nothing else got voters to go out into the night and cast a vote for Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi, it would be the chance to right wrongs we can all see.  But for once in our community, to do something about it.  We don’t have to sit around and take it anymore.  For a change, we can change that corrupt system for the better with a simple vote and set an example that the rest of the nation can follow.  We can lead in Butler County, Ohio and take back our schools and our kids, and beat back the power these labor unions have over our lives.  Once and for all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman
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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

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