Like all good art, I think it reaches beyond the obvious world and articulates a core problem in the Lakota school district. And it’s pretty good, a work of art that was supposedly done by a student that an angry mom put on Darbi Boddy’s webpage after a school board meeting on Monday, the 17th of July, 2023. Darbi had once again made news, or rather Lakota did. I watched what I could of the meeting in small segments, and one thing that was clear to me was best represented in that Picasso-like painting, a caricature of Darbi Boddy, one of the most controversial school board members in the entire United States, and how kids have come to think of her. Art often says all the things that a complicated subject can’t say in an obvious way, and this artistic rendition of Darbi certainly does, despite its obvious negativity. This time the controversy that made the news was that Darbi mentioned “blood libel,” which is a very real thing. And that caused quite a stir that the media in Cleveland, Ohio, was talking about, and it provoked a reaction out of school board member Kelly Casper that was quite astonishing. The school board had been talking about the recent Supreme Court case where affirmative action was struck down for college entry. And when Darbi mentioned that Lakota should also drop those types of hiring requirements, Kelly Casper said that Lakota never practiced that type of conduct. But immediately, the most recent diversity tzar comes to mind, a person who clearly was assigned the job because of the color of their skin. To me, this is a normal meeting. To the pro-public-school people, this was a devastating conversation because what they want is a blue-pill life where nobody knows anything; they just live their lives oblivious to the outside world. They certainly don’t want to talk about affirmative action as it relates to human resource issues or blood cults that might infiltrate the school’s culture and destroy all the children.
Yet what struck me while watching all this wasn’t just the defensiveness of Kelly Casper, who has a friend in school board president now in Lynda O’Conner, but in the role reversal that Lynda now played against Darbi in public that was quite ostentatious. I’ve known Lynda for a long time and remember when she felt that the other school board members were picking on her continuously just a few years ago. The previous school board president, Brad Lovell, singled Lynda out because she was supposedly the only conservative member on the board, and things were pretty contentious. Now in that exact same role, as Brad used to have, Lynda has essentially become Brad. I know how it made her feel, so I can certainly understand and sympathize with how it made Darbi feel. And this started before Darbi became such a controversial figure. If Lynda had treated Darbi fairly, as she had throughout that last election, Darbi would have been a much different person in office. Instead, when the election was over, Lynda moved to ostracize the newly elected member, who never misrepresented herself as anything but a Tea Party candidate. And once elected, she stayed true to the type of people who had just elected her, which is a significant portion of the very conservative region we all live in within the Lakota school district.
Of course, the students see all this, and they form their opinions and based on the way that Lakota has treated Darbi, led by Lynda O’Conner in this case; it’s no wonder that if a young person reporting what they saw through art would make such a picture of Darbi as was put forth in the summer of 2023. In the picture, Darbi looks like some patriotic witch with the words “America” cast in a condescending way in the background. When we wonder why many kids these days become Democrat activists, here is a case where it’s happening right in front of our faces within one of the most prestigious public schools in the country. If it was happening there, it was happening everywhere. The leadership at Lakota, which is something that transferred from one person to another in the seat of President, had shown students that conservative opinions were not welcome and that people who expressed them would be punished and made fun of. Watching that Monday meeting, it’s quite clear that Lynda despises Darbi and doesn’t respect the voters who put her there. It was Lynda who changed political positions. Darbi is doing what Darbi was always going to do. Voters want someone who represents them in public, not people who fall in love with job titles and will do anything to have them. That is what has caused many of the problems in public education, and it’s not a mystery why students come to believe what they do about politics. The big question is why did Lynda O’Conner essentially become Brad Lovell when all that changed was the name of the person who was the school board president. And as to a bigger question, because apparently, Isaac Adi turned hard left after the election too, what makes people who were supposed to be Republican representatives turn into RINOs? Why is it so important to them to be accepted by their peers? Why aren’t they more like Darbi Boddy and fighting for the voters who elected them? Why do they think it’s acceptable to behave one way during elections, but an entirely other way, a much more Democrat way, once they are sitting in the president’s seat on a lowly school board for a public education system that is an obviously dying model socially.
All that adds up to the painting of Darbi Boddy by a student who had a parent put it on Darbi’s website as if to say it all with a simple visual. The poor leadership that runs these schools all over the country and are not supposed to be about politics at all are actually all about politics, liberal politics. Democrat social positions. And there is only one acceptable viewpoint. Conservatives are not allowed, not real ones, anyway. Public schools want to waste tax money on nonsense, and what they want to teach is unamerican and destructive to conservative values. And the only reason this is a clash is because Darbi is refusing to change her beliefs under the pressure of the group consensus on the board. At a point where I wanted to help her because I don’t like to see people being picked on, Lynda was Darbi, and Brad Lovell went well out of his way to treat her terribly from the seat of the president. And it looks like Lynda wanted so much to turn the tables that she worked hard to become the president, only to become Brad? This conflict is clear in that artistic rendition of Darbi. It shows how Democrats who run these public schools see opposition to their strategies for children, and it’s quite an honor for them to feel that way. But the more mysterious quandary is in how Lynda became what she used to hate. Or did she ever hate that treatment at all? Whatever the case, the students see what’s going on, their opinions about life are being formed, and the slant of their political beliefs are being shaped. And what they see is a fault of leadership as it exists and the power it provides to people who are obviously ill-equipped to handle it.
Rich Hoffman
The Overmanwarrior 