Tag: Lynda O’Connor

Tipping the Scales Toward Equity for All: The legal strategy to destroy Darbi Boddy who stands in the way of those tipped scales

I have people tell me a lot of things. A lot of things. You should see my email inbox, and regarding notifications on my cell phone, my battery life usually only lasts for a few hours because the screen stays on so much with people sending me texts, calling me, or notifying me that I have a new email on one of my three accounts that average over 300 new emails per day each. I try to answer as much as possible, but it’s impossible. I must pick what I listen to, and out of all that information traffic, I have a lot of very well-connected people who give me a lot of valuable information every day, all days of the week. That’s how I know what is really going on behind the scenes at Lakota with Darbi Boddy and the phony prosecution of her by essentially the same kind of people who have been using the same legal gymnastics to go after Trump. For instance, Sheriff Jones has been coming up a lot lately because of the Butler County Republican Party’s desire to pull together after the defeat of Lynda O’Connor on the Lakota school board, who has her fingerprints all over this talk of sending Darbi to jail for six months and a fine of $1000 just for showing up at a school board meeting. We’ll get into that more in a moment. But the details are pretty explicit, and these people are well placed, and they aren’t slack-jawed, dope-smoking losers. But very responsible, and respected VIPs. And their comments would hold up in court with no problem. Anyway, these sources told me the story of three of them who asked Sheriff Jones directly how he could support a candidate to run against Thomas Hall, and against the nomination of the Republican Party, where he became very defensive and told them all to “bring it.” He was questioned why he thought he could be a leader in the Republican Party and behave against the endorsed candidates. He didn’t care what the Republican Party thought and was audacious to throw his weight around. And by itself, that is not a very exciting story. But it does lend value to what I’m about to say regarding a conspiracy by the Lakota school board to remove an elected representative in Darbi Boddy, which has all kinds of things wrong with it. Details matter, and I get plenty of them that add up to the kind of stories you don’t get from the local press.

The real villains behind the RINO political philosophy is behind this door

I know the law firm’s name and the person who told Lynda O’Connor how to remove Darbi Boddy from the school board by making Isaac Adi the vehicle. At this point, the name isn’t as important. However, lots of people already know about it. I’m interested in the intent. This is not a story about Darbi Boddy going to jail for violating some bogus court order controlled by Judge Lyons and all the Butler County network of hive-minded bureaucrats; this is about judicial activism by one of the area’s most respected law firms to destroy every way possible the life of an office holder elected by the public to do community business. And their deliberate tampering with that effort maliciously is where the real meat and potatoes are. I was livid when I found out that another attorney was being introduced to Darbi’s legal defense before her November 29th hearing to answer a citation given to her just for attending a school board meeting, and this guy wanted a $5000 retainer. The goal is obviously to put Darbi on her heels, destroy her economically, and consume her supporters with a rat race that the real bad guys were controlling. So I was just a little angry about it, let’s say that politely.

These law firms are very politically manipulative. Here is a screenshot of a big one in the Lakota area. Their words, their actions.

I had heard for weeks this revelation from many sources, well-placed sources who are close to all these people, how this law firm got involved and schemed with Lynda O’Connor to essentially override the voters by destroying the life of a fellow school board member.  And this is what lingers in the background with all these cases.  These law firms are very progressive and lean far left of center most of the time.  So if you are trying to manage a school district and they essentially own the minds of the school board, which is the case here, then you can elect all the school board members you want or put up elected representatives to handle our business, but it won’t matter.  Because in the background, these lawyers think they are in charge.  We see that with these multiple cases against Trump, and in Butler County, Ohio, Darbi Boddy is our local Trump, and they have pulled out all the legal stops to destroy her in all ways possible.  But why?  Well, teacher union contract negotiations are coming up next year, and the school board will want everyone to get along and not go on strike.  And guess who negotiates those contracts?  They brag about how many labor contracts they negotiate successfully, but many times, they take the position of labor against the taxpayers, and the best way to make that work is to get rid of those who oppose labor.  The taxpayers have plenty of money to give; they need to figure out how to take it from them and give it to the radical labor element.  So having a loose cannon like Darbi Boddy on the school board isn’t in their best interest, to be polite about it.  Based on what people have been telling me.

History is good to study because it explains the actions of the present

Now, I’m not at all impressed with this. I argued with several of their people during the Covid lockdowns about the correct course of action, and they turned out all to be wrong. Lawyers seldom give good advice; they usually only give answers that drag the clock out for another six minutes and line their pockets with gold they steal from you with a comprehension of Latin that they think you don’t understand. I was right then about the Supreme Court cases defeating all the lockdowns, and they were grotesquely wrong. So, as I hear this story about Darbi Boddy’s attackers, the unelected types who hide in the background all the time and destroy the Republican Party from the erosion that takes place in those types of relationships, I know we aren’t dealing with people of intellectual superiority. This scam of using Isaac as the fall guy while all these insiders pave the way for easy future labor negotiations makes perfect sense to me. It sounds like what lazy people on cruise control in life would do. And to mask it all, they have turned Darbi into the vehicle of collaboration. There’s an old Metallica song about this very kind of transference. I told Darbi personally to drop all these losers and let Lakota die on the vine. I don’t want her to be hit by friendly fire in the coming months. But she told me that she wants to help the kids and was elected to do a job, so she is dug in to do the right thing, which I admire. But for her to defend herself by this constant stream of court cases that these bad guys keep throwing at her is not the right strategy. The fight has to go where it belongs, where the real trouble is up to no good, to the real influencers controlling everything from behind a fragile curtain. We don’t need Toto to pull back the curtain to see them or what’s happening. Plenty of people know. They don’t know yet how to do something about it. But admitting to the problem is the first step, and after the conversations, I have had with people, talking to me about it has been part of that first step of admission, something they never thought they’d have to do.

For many in the world, they find safety in collectivism. It’s too scary to be an individual.
Sad but true, mass collectivists are at war with individualism in Butler County, Ohio

Rich Hoffman

Prove Me Wrong: What the Lakota School Board should do over the next six weeks of 2023

I was at an event just a few days after the election of 2023 for Bernie Marino.  He was at Lori’s Roadhouse with J.D. Vance, ahead of the upcoming Republican primary, for a pitch session, and I saw a lot of great area Republicans who had come out to support him, which was great.  It was the first time since Lynda O’Connor had suffered such a massive defeat for another term on the Lakota school board and tempers were still pretty hot that I had worked with the “No Lynda” people to keep her from winning.  And it was the first time we all had a chance to talk, which we did.  Many people thought that I had created a monster by keeping a conservative off the school board, and now a liberal monstrosity had been unleashed with an overtly Democrat school board that was going to take Lakota school’s quarter of a billion-dollar budget and bring about doom and despair.  I explained to them that the excuses were now gone. Let’s see what they do over the next six weeks at Lakota. No more elections. No more motivation for the politics of personal destruction. It has been my opinion that Lynda O’Connor was never a conservative but was only pretending to be one to win support. When she had control of the board and the votes, she attacked Darbi Boddy to avoid proper district management. Now that she has lost re-election, she can work with Isaac and Darbi to implement real conservative ideas into Lakota. Let’s see how they behave. If they really care about the community and the Republican Party, they’ll put their differences aside while they still can. But I don’t think they will because it was never a conservative school board in the first place.

That idea of unity came to me after Isaac Adi approached me to tell me that he forgave me for all the disparaging things I had said about him.  He wondered why I didn’t reach out to him more to get the truth of the situation, and he explained to me that as an insider, things look much different than they do on the outside and that I was an outsider.  So I couldn’t understand everything clearly and his feelings were hurt.  I reminded him I had sat down with him previously, and the meeting didn’t go well.  And we haven’t spoken ever since.  If I spent time sitting down with everyone I had an issue with, I would never get anything done.  With me, once you lose me, you lose me pretty much forever.  I’m not such an outsider as many would like to comfort themselves.  I know pretty much something about everything, and when it comes to the Lakota school board, I know all the characters and the situation very well.  I have over 30 years of experience, so I know what’s going on, I also understand what’s going on in executive session.  Lynda O’Connor and I used to work quite closely together and while we’re talking about hurt feelings, it bothers me that she thought I was a sucker like she clearly thought of everyone else, that she could con me into believing she wanted to do conservative things on the school board, and that her relationship with me was purely to neutralize my strong opinions.

I’ll talk to anybody who wants to talk, so I spent more time with Isaac than I intended to because he wanted to give his side of the story.  I had just spoken to Darbi Boddy, who was also there, but she saw Isaac sitting next to J.D. Vance at this spectacular event, and she had to leave because of the court order that Judge Lyons got suckered into because of Lynda’s provocations, and I could see the pain on her face.  Everyone had ganged up on her and treated her as an outcast for doing her job on the school board in the way that people elected her to do it.  I don’t like to see people treated the way she has, and it wasn’t easy to listen to Isaac talk about his role in trying to destroy her.  But as he was speaking about peace and forgiveness, I thought it would be a good idea if all three of them could pull it together for the next several weeks to do excellent conservative work for the Lakota school board before the next session comes into play.  If the liberals want to undo it all, let them, and let them own the results.  I listened to Isaac talk; he’s a likable person.  But I have also known a lot of salespeople over the years, and much of our conversation was similar to that of a time-share salesman who wanted a commitment to buy.  And I was just there for the free orange juice.  Once I saw the place he was selling, I couldn’t help but think of the cat urine in the corner that smelled the site up and distracted me from the palm trees outside.  I was a hard pass on working with any of these people anymore, except for Darbi.  But for the good of all those friends of mine who were hurt by the election results, it’s always good to come up with ideas everyone can be happy with if you can. 

I think the best way to prove to everyone that we never had a conservative Lakota school board was to encourage everyone to work together for the remainder of the year.  Put the differences aside and do what they should have done that first month when Isaac and Darbi were sworn in and handed the board’s presidency to Lynda.  From there, Lynda went on a path of personal destruction against Darbi for reasons many people don’t understand.  I think it’s because she had to hide the fact that she was never a conservative and was hiding that from her supporters by playing the victim.  But instead of embracing that role like a kid who couldn’t wait to get that Red Ryder BB gun on Christmas Day only to open it and find out that they suddenly didn’t like guns, she instead moved on to the next shiny object, a Barbi dream house of progressive liberalism. I want to keep my enemies in front of me, so Julie Shaffer and this Doug Horton Dr. Seuss guy are at least what they advertised.  I may find their politics despicable, but it’s essentially the same as Lynda without the pretend conservatism.  But I’d love to be wrong.  There is no reason to fight now; the election is over, and Lynda will be gone from the school board.  So, if she genuinely wanted to leave a conservative mark, what’s stopping her now?  She is still the board president.  She still has three votes to do good things while it lasts.  Why not do it?  My offering to all those who have talked to me about it is that Darbi was her excuse for not doing anything.  After getting to know her, she purposely pushed Darbi so that she could always point to a distraction so she didn’t have to show the other school board members, Kelly Casper and Julie Shaffer, that she wasn’t one of them.  And the Darbi distractions kept the mask on Lynda so that fellow Republicans would never see who she was.  And I say that based on the contents of the last conversation I had with Lynda, something she told me that she probably didn’t intend to.  But prove me wrong; I’d love to be.  However, as history usually points out, I’m not.

Rich Hoffman

Don’t Talk About Party Loyalty: Lynda O’Connor lost because she was disloyal to her base support

They keep saying we are a small, but loud minority of radicals, as if to say, critics aren’t important. But all that did was fuel the opposition against Lynda.

It wasn’t a surprise that Lynda O’Connor had an embarrassing defeat on the Lakota school board. She shouldn’t have run for another term after the mess she caused over the last few years. Her brand was down in a big way and instead of trying to right the ship, she dug in and alienated all the people she should have been working with. The voter turnout was unusually high for a Lakota school board race, but that is largely due to the increased interest from the scum bags and pot-smoking losers who voted to kill babies and legalize drugs, who went in the direction of Julie Shaffer and Doug Horton. During the election, I saw all of them as the same, but it was Lynda who I felt had personally betrayed me, and I couldn’t support her. This hold your nose, and voting for someone who has done a lousy job isn’t an excellent way to conduct elections. Lynda deviated from the original plan and decided to move to the hard left and work against Darbi Boddy, and after two years of mismanagement, the results were evident in the election. Unfortunately, Lynda dragged Russ Loges down on the ticket because the GOP was split and not united behind the candidates. When you don’t have the Central Committee lined up with the desired outcome, it’s never a good thing. And it’s even worse to tell them to deal with the party leadership picks and to accept bad behavior. Lynda O’Conn0r was horrible as a school board president, especially after all the support that was thrown her way. She used people to get power, then abused that power overtly to destroy a popularly picked school board member in Darbi Boddy and cause problems between her and Issac Adi. And the results were evident well before voters cast a vote on how election night was going to turn out.

This is why Lynda O’Connor Lost the Lakota School Board. The Republican Party doesn’t run the voters. The voters run the party. The RINOs aren’t in charge.

I was in Japan, far away from Ohio when it became apparent to me what the cost of Lynda seeking re-election was going to have on Butler County politics. Over the previous two years, we had seen a couple of incidents where party leaders had abused their power to attack upcoming talent or long-standing respected leaders. Such a case was what Sherrif Jones did to Roger Reynolds, essentially sticking the label of a felon onto the former auditor for entirely personal reasons, which then of course alienated the base of the Republican Party. Then, of course, Darbi was a popular pick, and Lynda went on a campaign of personal destruction against her, which resulted in two years of bad branding. I told Lynda on a phone call about a year ago how to fix it, and she ignored the advice. She dug in and name-dropped a few people she thought was important then continued to support horrendous behavior on the school board and aligned herself closer to Julie Shaffer and Kelly Casper. And in the process, she made herself indistinguishable. People who don’t understand these things so well put their support behind her believing they had control of the party and the people in it like some kingly aristocrat and they resorted to a lot of pushing and shoving to get everyone aligned, which was not going to work with the Tea Party types in the Republican Party. Then, to make matters worse, they sought to destroy the Tea Party of West Chester to make their point more vocal, which essentially sealed the fate of Lynda O’Connor in politics. She had used the West Chester Tea Party to advance herself as a brand for the Lakota school board. And when she turned against those values, she lost the only real support she ever had.

After I returned, I attended a Central Committee meeting in Liberty Township after there were some political shenanigans in West Chester with their Central Committee, and it was obvious that the establishment types were going to screw everything up. The RINOs wanted appeasement, and the MAGA types wanted authenticity, so there was going to be an impasse, and it was just going to have to play out. Republicans everywhere, locally and nationally, have gotten into a lot of trouble trying to appease evil, and it has caused them to work with Democrats on all kinds of Marxist issues and has essentially pulled the country away from its foundation and more toward socialism and Marxism all because they wanted to “hold their nose and support the party.” For the preservation of a party that only wanted to live, not actually to represent voters’ values. That has left people who have values and want to see those values supported in politics hungry for accurate representation. That’s why Trump is running for president as opposed to all the other Republican offerings they have tried to give us over the last few decades. And with all the excellent work that has been done, a lot of people in the Republican Party didn’t get it. I explain it to them voluminously, but they don’t have the mind to listen. They think they know better, and the best they can give you is to hold your nose and put up with what your “betters” can provide you. They emphasized that they knew better what that was, and everyone should get in line and deal with it. Support Lynda because she didn’t want to challenge Ann Becker for the open West Chester trustee position because Ann was in trouble over trans rights, so Lynda screwed up and ran again after two years of serious mistakes, and everyone thought it was going to work out great?

A political party either represents voters, or it doesn’t. There have been times that I have loved being affiliated with the Republican Party and have been very proud of what we have had in Butler County. But then, after these last few years, since Trump has been out of office and everyone has snapped back into their true natures, we have seen a lot of embarrassment that reminds me of the old Bob Shelly days with Michael Fox. Party politics, arm twisting, deception, all the kinds of things that made people run to Ross Perot or Donald Trump. And they will continue to run because they don’t want to support the politics of the machine. I’m not interested in politics to hold my nose and vote for some loser, all for the “party.” I want to see things run well with constitutional value. But don’t lecture anybody on supporting the endorsed candidates as a base of loyalty to the Republican Party. Lynda went after Darbi, and the party should have helped the “Republican Endorsed” person. And Sheriff Jones worked to destroy the life of a very popular Republican in Roger Reynolds, and nobody stepped in to help him. And nobody stepped in to save the West Chester Tea Party when a media campaign went against them and essentially destroyed them for the time being, at least their meeting venue. When the RINOs decide to fight the actual base and future of the party, nobody should have expected good results for Lynda. Lynda had to earn those votes. Instead, she went on a crusade of personal destruction and acted as if she were entitled to the position purely off the backs of party affiliation. And some of the back-bending endorsements from people I know were concerned that they would be cut off from the money machine, were reprehensible. And the results reflect just how bad it was. When the approach to an election was filled with such ridiculously stupid behavior, the results should surprise nobody.

Rich Hoffman

Avoid Electing Panicky Liberal Parents to School Boards: Brad Lovell makes threats at Lakota to Lynda O’Conner

The Danger of Liberal Panicky Parents

It is always dangerous to put a panicky parent in charge of the money, and that is just what has been going on at the Lakota school district in Northern Cincinnati.  We just had an election, and two conservative new members will be joining the Lakota school board in January.  They will inherit positive income to work with, and it should be very manageable with conservative votes on the board.  But first, we had to get off the board, at least a majority vote that they did have from liberal panicky parent types who have grossly distorted views of what’s suitable for a child and how much responsibility society must pay for that neurosis.  The meeting shown within this article was the first since the election and one of the last of the year, and it displays at around the 1 hr and 5-minute mark why it is so dangerous to have panicky parents elected to a school board. That’s when Brad Lovell went on several long diatribes about why spending money was good for his kid’s future which left many wondering about his sanity.  Regardless, we can all be thankful that voters in Lakota replaced him and other progressive candidates with logical, conservative replacements because there is so much wrong with this school board meeting that we could write books about it.  But the essence of it all is that politicians like Brad Lovell make all politics bad.  They get into the endeavor for all the wrong reasons and expect the world to pay for their view of reality, which is often too distorted to live functionally with everyone else. 

I don’t go out of my way to spike to football on anything.  I would be OK just to let the election results tell the story and move on.  But Brad, in all his liberal-infused diatribes, chose to make a fool of himself at the Lakota board meeting after the election.  He had set in his mind that Lakota had surpluses in the budget. The money needed to be spent on more liberal programs, more buildings for liberalism to be conducted, and he wanted to raise funds for the school with tax increases.  He called out the only current conservative board member, Lynda O’Conner, by name at the meeting by saying to her face that he wasn’t going away from the board but would return as a concerned parent to hold the board accountable if they didn’t put a tax increase on the ballot.  Lynda suggested that if the school was operating at a surplus, and she has said this many times, Lakota should give the money back to the community.  And it is over that concept that Brad was obviously disturbed. 

When I talk about liberals, I often talk about mental illness.  I don’t mean that in a tongue-in-cheek way; it’s quite a profound statement.  Liberals are the type of people who build their whole political philosophy around living off other people’s efforts.  Self-reliance is not a priority at all. Instead, they seek to hide their vast insecurities behind social causes and collective salvation.  They are the deranged parents who are so terrified of their little kids getting hurt that they strap them up with knee pads and helmets just to ride a bicycle in the driveway but will surrender those kids to a college campus to end up face down drunk and naked on a Saturday night after a football game to be defamed for the rest of their lives in embarrassment just ten years later.  They are insane and crippled with a lack of logic, and they need treatment, not to be in charge of millions of dollars.  At Lakota, Brad came in as a board member four years prior.  People had a taste of his big-spending habits, and there were many calls for his removal.  Smart on his part to take a job as a “business development” guy at Sycamore schools because he was in trouble at Lakota, and his reputation was taking on water.  He got out of Dodge while he could.

Yet, he stated to Lynda O’Connor about the election results of 2021 that he didn’t see the removal of two of the three incumbents as a referendum on spending and his general tax and spend philosophy.  Like most liberals, he talks only to his types of people, and he doesn’t hear the talk at Waffle House or Frisch’s from coffee drinkers who think people like Brad are idiots and detriments to society.  The teacher’s union loves Brad because he gave them what they wanted, money and attention.  But the public at large isn’t all that happy with public education. It’s not just me.  I can put words to what people are thinking, but people think what they think.  And they spoke through the vote.  It wasn’t just CRT or transexual bathrooms.  Ultimately, it’s about conservative representation on the school board, and with that comes fiscal responsibility.  Do more with less, and like it.  Most of the multitudes of Lakota voters do not have kids in the school system, so the amount of tax money they are willing to spend on other people’s kids is a diminishing objective.  Brad Lovell sounded just like every liberal Keynesian economist in the school board meeting, and ordinary people who don’t pad their kids up in helmets and knee pads just to ride a bicycle don’t like that kind of talk.  For the liberal, if there is extra money, spend it on something stupid and call it investment without ever questioning the original cost.  No thanks.  If Brad had stayed in the Lakota race, he would have been defeated because he was very unpopular among the non-Keynesian crowd, most ordinary people.

But this video and article are helpful to everyone who is dealing with these kinds of things in their local community.  Every school district has its own version of Brad Lovell.  Just look for the kids wearing masks afraid of the Omicron or the Delta variant, who are protesting in favor of communist Black Lives Matters at the expense of traditional America.  Look for the children who are afraid of lightning and who can’t ride a bicycle without safety equipment.  Then look for politicians like Brad nearby who are terrified of life and expect society to pay for their lack of security, and you’ll begin to see the problem.  And that is where most of the money in these school systems gets wasted, on the perception of value instead of experience and diligence.  With danger and the efforts of living life, knowledge is gained, which understands that spending money often doesn’t solve insecurity.  No amount of money can make people like Brad Lovell feel safe.  No matter how many programs Lakota pays for as options for children, it will never replace the faults of lousy parenting, which every college campus displays nightly in their bars and fraternities.  Children are so precious when they are 5 to 15, but when they are 18, we can just throw them to the sidewalk and let them be taught by institutional failure and wipe our hands clean of all the money wasted in the past.  No, if we have a school for a fancy babysitting service for busy parents, fine.  But there are limits to what that’s worth to a community.  And as Brad and many others learned in this last election, there are limits to that value. 

Rich Hoffman

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Lynda O’Connor Stands Up to Mask Mandates at Lakota: Pushing back against peer pressure to do the right thing

Whether or not anybody likes it, wearing masks in public or private to fight a viral outbreak is a Democrat thing that Republicans resent.  Masks show stupidity and a backward approach to science that thoughtful people find objectionable.  To put all your trust into experts in a field only to discover they are corrupt, stupid, superstitious, or worse—truly up to no good is a party-line thing that has stoked the fires of division, and that’s only going to get worse over time.  People’s unity under governor-driven executive orders under emergency conditions was a cry wolf moment that will never come back.  And that has left public schools since they are government institutions on the front line to do what they always do, hide behind children to evoke some progressive cause.  This is precisely what happened to Lakota, the school district in my neighborhood.  They have been one of the first to implement a mask mandate in the schools, which has angered parents. I’ve gone to school board meetings for years, and I’ve never seen one as contentious as this one, shown in the video included.  Of the five school board members, only one has done what the area Republicans expected. That is to refuse to wear the mask during public meetings. That has caused the union labor socialists to isolate her to direct their anger.  I have known Lynda O’Conner for several years, and she represents most of the people who reside within Lakota.  At the meeting, I intended to speak about how much I appreciate that Lynda was not wearing a mask and showed that someone on the board hadn’t been suckered into the mask mandate nonsense.  But after the parade of angry parents took turns criticizing the school board, it was clear I didn’t need to say anything.  Finally, in Lakota, other people were willing to do that, which was good to see.  If anything good came out of the mask mandates, it was that it had brought these divisions to the surface so that we can finally have these arguments.

Lakota School Board Meeting September 13th 2021

I could talk all day about how wrong masks are from an individual point of view. I’ve traveled to Asia, and I saw the mask-wearing that went on well before Covid ever hit.  In eastern cultures, they are compliance masks because the intent was to make the wearers superstitious to the mysteries of science and place the government ahead of all spirituality to become like a religion.  I figured while traveling that some bone-headed idiot in government would try to implement mask-wearing in the United States, which I was sure would be a problem.  There are always submissive types, too lazy, too stupid, too scared to think for themselves, who will do what a government says and put on a mask to fight a viral outbreak.  But in an area like the Lakota school district, many people are pretty smart Republicans and can think critically who think such an approach is one of the dumbest things anybody could do.  There are treatments for Covid, in hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, that are science and should be used to treat any outbreak.  But it’s evident that there is politics behind the virus, and not everyone is willing to play along.  Masks have become a symbol of submission to a sickness that Republicans find inconceivably stupid because scientific treatments could have ended Covid a year ago.  Instead, Democrats are using Covid to drive progressive needs, which has exposed school boards all over the country into playing along and forcing children to put on masks to get an education.

At the beginning of the Lakota school board meeting, you can hear it in their voices; the members had been planning to explain away all their problems with Covid to the local and state health department.  The ridiculous quarantine periods for anybody coming down with Covid or being near someone with the virus were missing many days of school. It was impossible to plan for teachers who would be out or bus drivers and other staff members.  So to appease the government, Lakota instituted a mask mandate for students, teachers, and staff, and magically the quarantine periods were minimized.  Because the health departments got what they wanted, the schools implemented a superstitious mask policy based on no science.  In effect, it was a bunch of Democrats who could suddenly boss around a bunch of Republicans and making them submissive to the party line.  When it comes to electing people to run things on our behalf, we elected the school board, and we expected them to put up more resistance on our behalf.  We didn’t elect the health department people who had no power to do anything, not even decide the quarantine period.  No legislation will hold up in court backing a health directive on quarantine periods, mask mandates, or mandatory vaccines.  Only stupid, lazy people would fall for such a thing, so the parents that night at the school board had a right to be angry, and that anger isn’t going to go away.  People pay a lot of money in taxes to Lakota, so for it to turn toward the Democrat superstitions of virus management is something most Republicans aren’t willing to do.  And of the school board members, only Lynda O’Conner stood firm and represented the people of the district adequately. 

At the end of the meeting, Lynda spoke about the pressure she was feeling by not wearing a mask on the board as one parent had attempted to get her in trouble over her position.  The mask shaming is a problem that Democrats brought on themselves.  The attempt to use peer pressure to invoke actual policy has not forced compliance; it has instead brought out intense anger.  When people wonder why we are so divided as a nation, Democrats have attempted to drag Republicans into socialism and communism.  And they have tried to hide those attempts behind health directives.  Most health officials could easily be working in communist China because their ideology is aligned with such dictatorships.  I admired Lynda for being the only member not to wear a mask.  Sure, I understand peer pressure.  I feel it too, but I’m always the only one of the first to do things in my life.  If there is a room full of a million people with masks on and I’m the only one not wearing one, I wouldn’t feel a moment’s pressure to put one on to conform.  Conformity to peer pressure is a largely Democrat thing.   Republicans tend to think on their own, so as long as Democrats try to shove Republicans into some blind compliance, there will be a fight or many fights.  A school board like Lakota should know better and strive to represent the community they are functioning in.  But most of the board and their employees are progressive types, so they quickly adopted the mask mandates to drive the social narrative.  And now they have been caught on it and are on the hook with the rage of the community.   No matter their personal feelings, they should have known better and respected the community they were operating in and pushed back against the health departments as our elected representatives.  Instead, they caved quickly and forced compliance on the rest of us, which is what the anger showed at that meeting was all about.

Rich Hoffman

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The Losers of Lakota: Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are the keys to the bank vault the teacher’s union wants to rob

Let’s just say that the election for the local school board members at Lakota has been a miserable experience for me. Not because on the Republican side of the voting selection there aren’t good candidates. There are, Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn are very good candidates whom I am sure if both are elected together would represent us very well on the school board against a hostile teacher’s union that is always looking to wreck the budget we all supply that school with our hard earned tax money. But along the way, doing research of all the positions for all the other candidates, and the people attached to them, it has just disgusted me. That would of course be the plight of Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer. Julie is currently on the board. Ray lost his seat a few years ago and now wants it back. Both Ray and Julie are part of the budget deficits that I have complained about over a decade so I have never been big fans of them personally. But it has only been until this election that I did any real look into the quality of their positions, and what I have learned by asking lots of people, and reading lots of things is that they are just complete losers I wouldn’t hire to wash my car. They are far worse than I thought they were, and it has been depressing to learn.

Looking at all these candidates the way I would in hiring for a new position for some important job, which a school board management position is, it is clear that Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray shouldn’t be anywhere near a job consideration due to their severe ineptness as people. No wonder they are such bleeding-heart liberals. They can’t afford to be anything but, and that is not doing any children in the Lakota school district any justice, which angers me considerably. They should have respect for the rest of us to not waste our time. Now, for me, Julie Shaffer lost me a long time ago when she and I debated school topics on WLW radio. Back then the school board was Joan Powell’s and she was building her little coalition of liberal union suck asses and Julie was part of it. Electing a school board is to hire representatives for the taxpayers to negotiate on our behalf. Not to be stooges for the labor union which already is well represented in school board activities. They don’t need help. But the way Joan operated until she stepped down a few years ago was to be a stooge and Julie was part of that culture, which is why everything operated as a deficit. Of course she couldn’t debate me on anything anywhere, in public forums, on the radio, anywhere, so Joan, Julie, the previous school superintendent along with many mad mom Lakota socialites tried an early version of the “me too” movement on me with the help of the newspaper reporter Michael Clark. I’m still angry about that and likely will be for the rest of my life. It showed me just what lowlifes these people really were who were spending massive amounts of money that we give them so recklessly and maliciously. I can handle people who come after me, which Julie clearly did, but in so doing she showed what she was really about. After the last levy since they stopped asking for money at Lakota due to declining enrollment, I haven’t paid much attention to her or the school, so Julie has been off my mind pretty much. However, after the last debate done this year for this election I was reminded just how bad for the job that she is and to be honest I am embarrassed that she even lives in my community, let alone sits on the board representing me as a decision maker. I saw her recently at Sam’s Club in Tri-County and thought about confronting her about things I had learned about her bad behavior regarding extracurricular Lakota events that were quite embarrassing, but her husband was with her, so I left it alone. I don’t want to be the guy that destroys her family. But I wouldn’t vote for her for anything if there was only one name on the ticket.

And she’s the good one. Ray Murray I have learned is even worse than she is.

Ray Murray I always thought of as kind of the Juan Williams of the Lakota school board. I disagreed with his politics but thought he was a nice enough guy to not run through the ringer. He’s a neighbor of mine, he lives close to me and I see him around. My wife likes him a lot and always has. But I kept hearing things about him from people around the community, especially the business guys that Ray wasn’t such a good guy. Well, I had no reason to think otherwise until he threw his hat in the ring for another run at school board then heard his alarming comments at a recent public forum regarding budgets and his views on transgender politics. So I followed the leads where they went and sure enough found out that Ray has drugs in his past and that he has had some serious financial problems. I don’t want to embarrass him; people go through things in life. Some of those problems were years ago, but some were quite recent. If he wasn’t running for school board, I might slide a $100 bill under the door so he could buy lunch, but I sure as hell wouldn’t elect him to a managing position of millions and millions of dollars at Lakota. He was part of the problem before, and knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t give him the keys to a demolition derby car. I sure wouldn’t let him near my wallet. He obviously has a hard time with money, and we’d be crazy to put him anywhere near some. His comments at recent Lakota school board debates are just the tip of the iceberg. He is a walking financial disaster. Look him up on Courtview for yourself at the Butler County Clerk.org site. You’ll see what I mean.

Then there is the reporting, if we had decent local reporters, we should know a lot of these things. Honestly, a local blogger who is busy with millions and millions of other things shouldn’t be the one covering these stories. I’m not even talking about the partisan angle, which from my point of view, the Journal News reporters, well all the Cox Media people are deeply in bed with all the progressive activism that is going on all over southern Ohio, and they sit on stories that might make their people look bad. A lot of this information about Ray should have been covered by them years ago, and maybe if it had, we wouldn’t have had some of the very contentious levy battles that we did, which was very costly to the community. Their coverage has been and continues to be disingenuous to the community who would like to read their articles but have learned that they can’t trust the content.

I will be glad when the election is over because I simply don’t like seeing and hearing from these losers as much as I have over these last several weeks. These people have not been representing me as a voter but have been serious partisan hacks hidden behind a mask of bipartisanship which was always a complete lie. I’m not sure we can believe anything that comes out of Julie Shaffer’s mouth and certainly not out of Ray Murray. I’m not even sure he ever lived in Chicago at this point, let alone was a cop as he has been saying. I was so disappointed in him that I just stopped looking to confirm. The other topics I learned about left me sick. Its nice that we have some options in this election and we’ll see if people show up and actually vote. However, the process up to this point has just been a disgusting look into a bunch of losers at Lakota who should be hiding in the cracks of society instead of being placed on a pedestal. But of course, those who want to steal from us want a key to the door of the bank vault, and for them, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray are the incompetent stooges who would let them in and to take everything and then some, then ask for a levy from the tax payers to refill the vault. That is the game that has been going on for a long time and the more you learn about the whole thing, the angrier anybody would get about it. And that’s certainly where I am at.

Rich Hoffman

 

Ray Murray Thinks it will take 38 Years to Spend Lakota’s $100 Million Surplus: Why people like he and Julie Shaffer should never be in charge of a budget

$100 million is a lot of money to liberals who only see future pay increases for subpar work leading to easy labor union contract negotiations. And clearly one school board member, Julie Shaffer displayed at a recent meet the candidate’s night at the VOA Miami University Campus Lecture Hall how little she knows about money. Her partner in such a perspective was Ray Murray, the former school board member coming back for more and local pastor pontificated that we wouldn’t—couldn’t spend that much money of a surplus for 38 years, so to his utterances why not give it all away. Now you can see dear reader why it’s dangerous to elect these kinds of people into a management of our tax money. Instead of respecting that money and understanding that the surplus wasn’t really one at all, but a debt leverage problem that needed attention, they tried to paint the fiscal conservative on the board, Lynda O’Connor as a Chicken Little for pointing out that deficit spending is not a healthy condition. No wonder the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get Ray and Julie back on the board and managing their contracts a few years out. They already have that money spent whereas Lynda and the newcomer James Hahn understand that $100 million is not that much money, especially when you look at the overall budget needs.

I did get to talk to Matt Miller the Lakota superintendent and the very good treasurer Jenni Logan, recognized throughout the state of Ohio as the very best in her field, and they assured me that they were going to tackle the deficit spending problem. Sure, it’s fun to spend money like there’s no tomorrow, but smart people like Jenni, and Lynda understand that $100 million as a surplus isn’t much when the operating budget is around $160 million per year, where the only product is educating students, (or babysitting them) and they aren’t doing a very good job at that either, getting a recent poor report card from the state that shows money does not improve results. The teachers need to work harder and worry less about transgender bathroom policies.

I was encouraged to see many friends from the business community not sitting this election out, they are not impressed with the $100 million surplus either. They are wondering why Lakota can’t lower their tax burden if they are operating at such a surplus and not considering spending pauses so that they could continue to build up elements of our community that really matter, jobs and recreation that make a community what it really is, and not just a cesspool of employment for a liberalized labor union trying to program our children into future Democrats. Had they not been there this election might have a different tone, but even the spending addict Julie Shaffer had to watch her mouth so not to sound “too” Democrat in such a conservative district even with pro spending liberals showing out in full force to support future contract negotiations. The smart people want to see James Hahn elected instead of Ray or Julie because that would put a third conservative on the board and would help manage that surplus responsibly. But if left to Ray and Julie, to Lynda’s point, the money will all be gone in around 5 years. Jenni gets it. But Matt didn’t look so happy to see me, and not so excited about focusing on the deficit spending aspect. Elections have consequences and a lot of people are waiting to see how this one turns out.

The best thing to do with the money would be to lessen the burden on future taxpayers to inspire more investment and continued growth. What is lost on Ray and Julie as to the role of the school board in the community is that they not only have to manage the quality of the school, but the cost and to understand the balance between the two. The way it has been, which has sickened me to my core, is that school districts leverage their power to tax against future investment. If you want to play in their school district then they expect you to pay, which is something I will be covering much more in subsequent articles. I can understand the tension in the room at that candidate’s forum. I understand idealistic people with a bloodthirsty zeal to support their school system without understanding how the cheese is made behind the scenes. It’s much easier to just focus on kids and transgender bathrooms, whether or not busing is available and the quality of the sports program. But the question remains, what makes a school district good, is the businesses that attract jobs and good quality applicants who need housing, places to eat, and shop. Or is it the schools that we pour millions and millions of dollars into that just go to overpriced teachers teaching our children radical leftist political activism only to have those kids grow up and to move away. I would say it’s the businesses that come first then the schools that reflect the quality of a well-managed community. And that is something no school system wants to admit to, because it would destroy their extortion racket that they have politically on a community, and financially.

There is a reason so many real estate people are involved with pro levy endeavors, or government labor union types. It’s because behind the scenes schools leverage themselves into the business community with subtle threats directly attached to their ability to tax. Pay or be destroyed, or don’t do business altogether. Being in pro education anything groups like I was last night the people are not the risk takers who go out and obtain financing for some next new great thing, they are just average people who want to feel what they are doing by investing in Lakota will make their kids like them when they grow up. They want to think that the education system will fix all their deficiencies as people. That is certainly the case of Julie Shaffer and her past protégé Joan Powell who were part of those upside-down deficit spending habits that almost destroyed Lakota and the community it sits in. The reason there is a $100 million surplus now is because so many kids grew up and away and new kids did not replace them, so Lakota has declining enrollment that will continue into the future, and that took the pressure off our budget tremendously, but the deficit spending has continued and will so long as there is a three vote majority against proper budget management.

As Julie said trying to defer blame from herself, school boards don’t pass levies, they don’t demand further tax increases. They leave it up to the voters. But what school boards do however is mismanage the money we give them. They cave into labor union demands for ever increasing rates of pay that is not connected to any performance standards. And when Julie won’t take her part of the blame for the deficit spending and when Ray, who was there all along thinks it is party time at Lakota, that they have 38 years to spend that $100 million surplus, well there is the problem. We have a chance to fix it with this election, but people are going to have to show up to vote. If they don’t then the same deficit spenders will be in place, the labor unions will love it because Julie and Ray would gladly approve a contract negotiation because they don’t have the guts to deal with a strike or bad press for standing up for the taxpayers. And they will lead the charge against the business community to twist their arms into silent approval or else boycotts from the radical union members will come after their brand with a fury. And none of those questions were asked at the candidate forum because as we all know, it’s something that people just don’t talk about. But it is every bit the core of the problem.

Rich Hoffman

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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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