Tag: public education

They Teach You To Be Dumb So You Don’t See Their Crimes: Thoughts from the Ohio State/Michigan football game

Government Schools are designed to Make You Dumb

If you do a root cause analysis on corruption, you will conclude that laziness is the primary driver.  And when you look at the most common trait of a government employee of any kind, on average, you will find that they tend to seek that type of work because they are lazy.  Therefore, it’s nearly a promise in every circumstance that you will get corruption out of government employees that will need to be heavily monitored.  Yet what do you get when you hire government employees protected by a socialist labor union to educate your society?  Well, you get the results of laziness and corruption on a mass scale.  And to look at it another way, what is the root cause of criminal behavior?  Well, it’s laziness again.  People would instead steal something than earn something because they think it is the easier path to a personal objective.  So guess what happens when you have criminals running your government, and they are also in charge of educating your society?  Well, you get the results of what I saw while watching the Ohio State, Michigan game.  The audience of over 100,000 people there in Ann Arbor all caught looking at the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, the illusions, the smoke, the mirrors, the bellowing projection of fear seeking the blue pill distraction of an exciting football game.  But not dealing with the root cause of much of what is wrong with society, a poor education not because we didn’t fund it correctly, but that we allowed people to learn all the wrong things.  

Education to me is a lifelong experience.  I think everyone should read a book or two per week, during their entire lives.  Graduating from college at age 22 isn’t enough to become an “educated person.” I deal with many people who have master’s degrees and doctorates, and I don’t consider these people educated.  It may give them a good start in a field of endeavor, but education is a daily adventure, not a final destination.  In the times we are in now, there are so many opportunities to be educated; we have access to more books and information than at any point in the history of the world.  And being well-read is a responsibility of all people.  If you want a great society, you need an educated society.  But as it stands, and what was evident at that college football game, all college sports, and even professional sports, is that the criminals of our society have deliberately dumbed down our people through the education process so that they can get away with committing crimes on a massive scale. 

One example of this deliberate ignorance was the expectation of the Biden administration into lying to our face about gas prices.  The Biden radicals shut off oil production in America.  Gas prices went up.  Then we were told that a global cabal runs the oil market and that America was powerless to do anything about it, when in fact, we just had a president in Trump who had the oil price issue under control.  But what is really driving up the costs of deliberately sabotaging the oil market is the Biden administration’s commitment to the United Nations climate change agenda.  Those same officials stood in front of the media and lied to everyone about the cause of the rising prices, and they expected their answers to stick.  They also expect the media to report the information as propaganda out of sheer laziness and the crippled mind of ignorance the public education system had given them.  The best way to hide a crime, or many crimes, in this case, is to teach people not to see it.  That is the result of our public education system and our colleges.  They are mass failures, and they were made that way on purpose by lazy, criminal-minded government employees who would rather live by a life of crime than by the ethics of hard work.  For proof, review the contents of the Biden laptop, and everything will become very clear.

Those poor people at that football game are most upset about the high gas prices. Still, they do not want to shake up any controversy with their friends and family over politics and election fraud instead of turning their energies to a football game.  They spend fortunes at those two prominent colleges, and they want to see something positive for it.  Is their education valuable? Did it teach them anything really useful in life?  No.  If anything, it has crippled them intellectually.  But if Michigan could only beat Ohio State, well, then there’s something to cheer for.  Suddenly, a six-figure education is worth the money if Michigan could beat Ohio State only one day a year.  Or, as usually happens, Ohio State wins and justifies all the wasted effort in those educations with a rallying cry all the students and their parents can enjoy. This dominating sports program serves as the face of the school.  Meanwhile, all the bad work is done behind the scenes; all the wrong things are taught for reasons that only serve a criminal enterprise in public service. 

It’s just something I noticed as the students rushed the field at the end of the game, where Michigan won the game.  The pent-up energy was more than a victory; it was a justification for their belief in a system that has let them down.  The results of the football game at least gave them some lipstick for the pig.  But it had emptied their bank accounts on another kind of theft, the looting of minds that might otherwise function from intelligence.  But it’s not all bad.  Education is the most important thing we do, but its responsibility cannot come from the criminal class, the public servants who do those jobs because they are too lazy for anything else in life.  No, the education for things in life must come from you.  You must not look to others to educate you; you must do it yourself.  And it doesn’t end with a college degree, a $400,000 house, and 2.5 kids in a flat marriage to someone stuck in the same rut.  No, education is every Saturday morning from 5 AM to noon, or every morning from 4:30 AM to about 7 AM, reading books, voluminous amounts of books, the great classics, popular fiction, modern commentary, speculative sciences, sciences, the religions of the world.  Everything that’s going on, I can see it all very clearly, but then I function every day in the manner I commented.  I get up early every morning, and I read.  And on weekends, I usually read for 6 or 7 hours per day before everyone else gets up and does things.

You do that kind of thing all your life, no matter how young you are or how old you get.  You educate yourself by feeding your mind good things.  You can still watch the Ohio State, Michigan games.  It comes on at noon.  You can still do your weekly chores.  You can still run the kids around town and drop them off where they want to go.  But while you’re waiting on things, you read a book instead of wasting time on Facebook updating your profile picture to people who really could care less about it.  They only give you a vote because they want the same from you.  Instead of wasting your time, feed your mind, make yourself truly smart, and only then will the blatant antics of these modern government crimes become apparent because the criminals count on everyone not to see what they are doing.  And the dumber you allow yourself to be, the more you trust the education they gave you, the more crime we will see in our society.  And they’ll do it until we stop it, and the results of the Michigan game won’t prevent it. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote No by Saying Yes: How Great Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy are for Lakota

Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy for Lakota School Board

I could tell you many stories about politics that are dire and would make you want to climb under a rock and never get involved again.  But sometimes, some stories are fantastic, and that is the case with the two endorsed Lakota school board candidates, Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who are running to replace incumbent Democrats in November of 2021.  Every event I have been to with these two has been good; a few examples are shown below.  The video might be a little rough, but it’s what they say that matters.  Darbi and Issac work well together and are as unselfish as I’ve ever seen in politics, in any position. I’ve said from the beginning that I supported four candidates for the school board, but in this race this year, the Republican endorsement is what matters.  In the past, liberals have infected the school board, so critical race theory and transexual policies became part of the dominant conversation. They have managed to hide their intentions by calling the school board “nonpartisan.” Well, we know that nothing in politics is “nonpartisan,” especially the Lakota school board.  But when this idea of supporting school board members for Lakota came up, I never thought that two of them who would win the endorsement would like each other so well. That’s when the “can you imagines” started coming to my mind, where the school board represented the conservatives of Butler County, Ohio truly, and that they worked well together.  It’s one thing to have conservative votes on the board to manage things the way voters expect, but that they would perform functional management is a bonus that didn’t seem possible. 

Vote for Darbi Boddy

For instance, Issac Adi went door to door in my precinct, letting people know who he was and when to vote for him.  My wife noticed him in our neighborhood, and they struck up a conversation at the end of my driveway.  Issac recognized her immediately, which I thought was remarkable considering the number of people he has met over several months, including big names like Jim Jordan.  I would imagine his head is spinning with all the people he’s had to shake hands with, so it did impress me that he remembered my wife.  That is one thing about Issac Adi; he is one of the most sincere people I’ve ever met in politics.  He truly cares and is a good person.  So he remembers people and cares about them long after the handshake.  Of course, he wanted to know where I was which my wife told him I was babysitting my grandkids inside the house.  So he came up to see me and talk for a bit. 

After talking and catching up, I noticed that Issac wore Darbi’s campaign sticker on his shirt.  He was doing the hard work of going door to door on a pretty hot day, full of enthusiasm after talking to many hundreds of people personally, and he was promoting Darbi along the way.  Now I know that they are both endorsed and are part of the same team.  But the way the vote occurs, they very much have to run individually.   The top vote-getters are the ones who win in these kinds of elections, and it’s always hard to beat an incumbent.  The union vote and latte-sipping liberals always show up on election night, making it hard for conservatives to get a lot of votes.  But here was Issac promoting Darbi just as much as he was promoting himself.  And as I understand it, Darbi has been doing the same.  She was out promoting her and Issac as a team, not just individual candidates.  For any election, that is a pretty unique concept that doesn’t have a lot of historical precedents. 

Adding their votes to that of the current Lynda O’Conner would be a game-changer at Lakota.  I have been to other events where I have seen the three of them talking, and the chemistry is just there.  You can see it from a long way off. I’ve been dealing with school board issues in many districts around Ohio for twenty years, and I have never seen such a good combo.  Seeing Issac that day took some of my natural cynicism toward politics into a place it had never been before.  It seemed possible that at Lakota, something good had a chance to happen.  They are both so much better than the other alternatives, and if people had an opportunity to see that for themselves, these two could get elected.   There are still very significant obstacles, but as hard as they have worked throughout September and into October, it seemed like more than a fantasy and more of an eventual reality.  Usually, when I think of the Lakota school board, I typically think of severe dysfunction and people who do not know what they are doing with the money.  But here were genuinely competent and hard-working people who actually liked each other, at least as much as I’ve ever seen in politics, and there was a chance for great things to happen at Lakota for the first time in forever. 

Vote for Issac Adi for Lakota School Board

Issac had to eventually leave and return to the campaign trail from my house, but it took a while.  I enjoyed his company so much that it took us a long time to say goodbye that day.  I can say that I have been talking actively with many of the old No Lakota Levy people preparing ourselves for levy fights in the years to come.  The current school board has been trying to find the time to put one up for a vote to satisfy the out-of-control spending the teacher’s union expects.  This was an election year. Otherwise, the current board would have proposed a tax increase this year.  Likely, they’ll wait until next year now that they’ve agreed to give all those teachers sitting home on Covid excuses a raise that they’ll have to pay for next year.  But a levy fight is so damaging.  It’s much better to support a new school board that would manage the money that we already give them, which is a massive 200 million-plus budget.  If you can’t teach 17,000 kids on that, you have problems.  But the school board has never listened. Instead, they have attacked businesses for more money, like trolls always looking for a shakedown of tax revenue to pay for their reckless and infinite spending ultimately. Lakota’s school board has been deficit spending for their entire existence; no matter how much money we’ve given them, they never find a way not to spend more than they take in.  When they did have a surplus for a bit because of declining enrollment, they couldn’t wait to waste it on something new.  With this prospect of an actual conservative school board to replace the majority of liberals, great things can happen.  Issac and Darbi have done the work to get people to know who they are.  Now it will be up to the voters.  For the first time in many of their lifetimes, they have a great choice as the Lakota school district residents.  They can vote for the same old tax and spend liberals that have screwed up so much at Lakota.  Or, they can vote for Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who enjoy each other, work hard, and care to give the board a conservative majority for the first time.  If voters don’t vote for them, then when the tax increases come, people won’t be able to complain about it because they had a chance to say no to those tax increases by saying yes to Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The LEA Union at Lakota Goes Too Far: Trying to screen school board candidates to protect their stranglehold on the district

Labor Unions think they are Management, they aren’t

It’s safe to say it now; it’s no longer a conspiracy theory, as it used to be when I first started talking about it years ago.  Teacher unions formed under the John Dewey public education system have been communist recruitment centers meant to re-shape the minds of our children into diabolical menaces against American values, life, liberty, and capitalism.  In my school district of Lakota, the LEA labor union has been a treacherous disaster for decades, imposing on the community, which tends to be conservative, a lot of liberal ideology that people aren’t comfortable with.  Many of the kids who have been through the Lakota school system and are now adults can easily see the damage.  Parents tell me all the time the sad stories of their precious little kids who were so sweet and wonderful, who turned into delectable losers through their high school and college years.   By the time the kids get into their 20s and 30s, they end up as unrecognizable communists of anti-American sentiment.  And where did it all start?  Well, in Lakota, there is a group of mad moms led by Sandy Wheatley, an old name to me but likely new to unsuspecting parents new to the school district.  She used to lead the local teacher’s union at Lakota and still has been one of the “sweat bees” always aggravating Lakota school business in the ways you can see in this article.  All the trouble starts with people like her.  In truth, all labor unions were born out of the push for communism during the mid-1800s when Marx published his destructive concepts that have stifled the world in many ways we see today.  But it’s one thing to look at it happening and have feelings about it, but quite another for it to happen in our backyards and not be expected to do anything about it.  I’ve never felt compelled not to do something about it.  I think we should fight these losers everywhere they show themselves because now many can see what I’ve been saying for years.  Teacher unions have not just been bad for our public education system, wasting millions of our taxpayer dollars over the years as an actual imposition. They are additionally harmful to our flag and country and must once and for all be considered domestic terrorists and threats to our children’s very lives.  Because they are.

Recently I have told many stories about a group of school board challengers endorsed by the Republican Party of Butler County, Ohio, running this year to replace three seats on the Lakota school board.  They are great candidates functioning on their own for good reasons which they have determined for themselves.  But I’ve been around for a while and understand the impediments that get in the way of good people intending to do a good job where good jobs are needed, and old labor union presidents like Sandy Wheatley don’t want to see a good job done in public schools.  They function from a different idea of what “good” is.  You and I, dear reader, might call “good” a well-balanced kid who can read, write, think, and grow up to get married, have good kids, a job, run a good household, and come over to a happy family gathering on Christmas for some quality exchanges.  For the communist labor union types, “good” is to turn the kids into servants of the state, do drugs, experiment sexually, collect unemployment, and vote Democrat.  And when it comes time for Christmas dinner, to send those children into those nice American homes filled with nice American families and to torpedo them all from the inside out with disappointment, anxiety, and malice.  Yet many people have always thought that my statements about the teacher’s union were overstated and purely political.  Because I have been more involved in these school board candidates this time around, I have seen how the labor union at Lakota behaves from a different point of view, and that view has been ugly.

One of these school board challengers asked me the other day about the questionnaire shown in this article, along with correspondence showing some Facebook postings from old Sandy Wheatley herself disparaging members of the current school board and the challengers in ways meant to impact the vote the way labor unions all over America intend.  These documents show the intent of the LEA teacher’s union at Lakota in a very honest way that voters should know about.  I found the questionnaire sent to this particular school board challenger to be reprehensible.  As I explained to them, they want to do a nice job for the district, and all this labor union radicalism can be a bit scary, that as a member of the school board, they are the management.  The labor does not get to interview the management. The other way around is the first problem with managing all public schools, especially at Lakota.  These labor union types felt it was appropriate to gather information on incoming school board members at Lakota.  Just read the questions for yourself.  What is being proposed by this questionnaire is that the labor union wants to know how progressive the candidates are.  Will they support the current progressive political agenda such as gay rights in the schools or uncontrollable spending with perpetual tax increases on private property through school levies.  How the candidates’ answer will determine the level of activism the union will perform against those candidates.  The LEA wants people like what they have molded on the current school board, lapdogs of union appeasement from Julie Shaffer, Kelly Casper, Michael Pearl, and the Brad Lovell replacement, Douglas Horton.  As you can see from Sandy’s direct comments on Facebook, they hate Lynda O’Conner because Lynda has tried to do the job a school board is always supposed to do, represent the community who elected her into place.  While the rest want to get along with the communist teacher’s union so bad things won’t be said about them.

People never wanted to face the facts of the origin of the labor movement, especially when it came to their kids.  Parents wanted to like their teachers; many of them started with good intentions.  Everyone always does, including Sandy Wheatley and the union thugs sucking the life out of the Lakota school system.  Even in the human body, viruses want to live.  Cancer wants to live by being a parasite of the host.  Everyone from their perspective wants to live.  But good is determined by logic, and that is why we elect school board members to insert reason into the management of children in a school and the millions of dollars it takes to teach them with free education.  But the quality of that education has always been under attack by teacher unions who want far more than just a job in a school district.  They want to act as parasites to our children and the property we own and maintain to fund their menace.  Attacking private property is one of the communist goals as they were adopted directly from Karl Marx and John Dewey was quite aware of it from the beginning.  It was a mountain of corruption from the start, and it shows in the products of public education, most of us, our children, and the state of our nation now.  And based on these documents shown here, you can see what is going on in your local teacher’s union.  These aren’t unique to Lakota.  But they do require action from voters who have a mind to fix the situation.  In Lakota, during 2021, voters will finally have a chance to do something about all this nonsense.  But really, this is a nationwide problem, and it needs to be addressed in America once and for all.  Otherwise, we won’t have a country, making all teacher union members very, very happy.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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Vote For Vanessa Wells to Lakota’s School Board: Elgin Card is just the beginning of the problem

Vote For Vanessa Wells to Lakota’s School Board

Vanessa Wells, shown in the video above, didn’t foresee herself running for school board at Lakota a few years ago.  She was a mom, just like everyone else sending their kids to school.  She and her husband moved to the Lakota district specifically because the school had a good reputation. Many thousands of similar parents could tell about their experience and reasoning for moving to the Lakota school district.  And that dream was alive and well up until the point in time that a politically immune resident’s son threatened to kill her daughter while in school at Lakota, and nobody wanted to deal with the problem.  At that point, Vanessa considered her options.  First, she decided to pull her child out of danger, out of class, and homeschool her.  That solved the immediate problem of the threat in the classroom and Lakota’s school board having no stomach to do anything about it.  As I say all the time, the kind of liberalism that grows in all public schools emphasizes the institution, not the essence of the individual child.  Of course, the Lakota school board wasn’t going to deal with a foreign agent and all the political attachments to the case by defending the rights of one individual child. That’s not the political climate of any school board or school system—to protect individual rights unless those rights advance a progressive cause, such as gay rights or race-baiting.  Threatening to kill another student when it’s a young white lady born of traditional white parents is grounds for dismissing the issue altogether.  After all, the radicals of the political left are threatening to eliminate white people all the time, and this was just one more of them.

Yet, for Vanessa, that wasn’t good enough.  She loves her kid the way all parents do; she has to defend at least her right to exist.  Hiding at home homeschooling was a retreat away from a system that our tax money is paying for, which has been openly hostile to the type of targets that Critical Race Theory seeks to attack. That’s what was being taught at Lakota schools under various masks they use to deter public outcry.  But the school system’s mission could never have been made more evident. They were committed to the progressive implementation of political goals aligned with the teacher’s union, and anybody who got in the way of that would be run over. Vanessa’s family was just the latest in a long list over the years who have found themselves chewed up and spit out by a government institution that is more committed to creating a real-life Brave New World rather than a bright-eyed child entering adulthood ready to meet the challenges of life. That’s when Vanessa decided to run for the school board and directly fight the corrosive elements that were making school life dangerous for kids like hers. To target Critical Race Theory at its source, the school board created the position of Elgin Card, and that was the feature of Vanessa’s presentation.

You can hear Vanessa explain her personal story and her experiences dealing with the school board in the videos contained here.  She also presented the kind of radicalism in Lakota school’s hallways advocated directly by the six-figure school employee, Elgin Card, which should concern everyone.  Additionally, Elgin Card’s social media screen captures further display the evidence of Critical Race Theory being taught directly in class.  In the videos here, it is evident that Vanessa isn’t alone in this concern.  Many people showed up at a local church to learn what they could do to stop CRT teaching at Lakota.  I was surprised by the showing because I knew many threats made by the usual teacher union surrogates on the same scale as what we see on the national level in politics attached to the Black Lives Matter Marxism movement.  It’s very much happening in all our school districts, specifically Lakota. It’s a big target, one of the most prominent schools in the state of Ohio in an affluent neighborhood.  So, by attacking Lakota, the Marxists behind the Black Lives Matters movement see an opportunity, and the harassment of any resistance to their plans was deep on their minds.  There were plenty of threats made to discourage people from coming to this filmed event.

Vanessa Wells talks CRT at Lakota Schools

But as you can see for yourself, a lot of people came anyway.  I was expecting a crowd of 25 or so concerned parents.  Even with all the threats leading up to it, those who showed up were visible from the footage.  That’s precisely why there aren’t more Vanessa Wells parents out there because when they stick their heads up, the radicals in the school district immediately move to cut them down.  Any way possible.  And they pride themselves in their ability in much the way that blue state governors have become obsessed with Covid mandates to boss around their populations.  The same thing is going on at Lakota.  When parents complain, the school board appeases them with a gently worded email, almost like patting a dog on the head to make them happy and stop barking.  But then they turn around and hire expensive radicals like Elgin Card at Lakota to implement BLM political Marxist strategies, essentially with an openly hostile approach to most of the Lakota student population.  Lakota isn’t seeking to teach diversity and fairness, as they claim.  They are seeking outright Marxism from Black Lives Matters which is evident by the screen captures of Elgin Card himself. That’s why it’s such a great benefit that Vanessa has decided to run for the school board at Lakota and offered to bring leadership to these matters where it is needed.  It would be great if more parents joined her, but she’s a great start. 

It wasn’t easy for Vanessa; I can tell you that.  But she’s a fighter; it’s in her nature. She’s also brilliant.  While it might make sense to just homeschool her child, turning away from a vast evil in her backyard didn’t make sense for her, so she’s working to improve the situation precisely what we should all be doing.  The clear answer to these problems is to replace the management that allowed them to happen, which is 4 out of 5 school board members.  Many people don’t know it, but up until this year Lakota, led by Brad Lovell, was planning to ask for even more money on a tax increase just so the board could hire more people like Elgin Card at more than $100,000 each to bring this level of radicalism to our community school.  Because of Covid and the election year theatrics, they backed off it for now.  But they indeed plan to as soon as they can.  After all, they have to pay for the teacher contract that they just voted for, and they can only pay for those raises with a tax increase which they are now committed to.  And think how many radical teachers are just like Elgin Card waiting to be activated.  Before this new diversity position that the school board created for Elgin, he was the principal at Lakota West.  So, there are more like him waiting for a chance to bring more radicalism to the children of Lakota.  At this point, the only legal means we have to defeat this attack is to replace the school board, starting with Vanessa Wells, and the courage she managed to muster to face an onslaught of evil intent to destroy us all, one child at a time.

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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The Great Option of Homeschooling: To see just how bad public schools are, walk the halls of Lakota

Saving Kids by Homeschooling Them

Just to let you know how bad it is, the pictures included here were taken in one of the 22 schools within my school district of Lakota.  As you’ll see, it’s all about Critical Race Theory, all the time with them.  So much so I would consider them a danger to any child.  I would never in a million years send any kid of mine to a public school these days.  If you want to know what’s wrong with public schools, take a walk through the halls of Lakota in Cincinnati, Ohio, and you’ll get a good idea.  I never thought they were any good, but now, they are just horrendous.  Ironically, just as revealing as those pictures were, I had the chance to meet up with some old friends at the Annie Oakley Wild West Show I’ve been involved in for over a few decades.  They have a swarm of kids I’ve watched grow up, and now they are all bloomed.  I only see them once a year, so it has been fascinating watching them grow, and I can only say that they are such intelligent and fully developed kids.  They are super nice kids, very gifted, socially extremely confident.  They don’t have that beat-down look on their faces that most children have these days, 22 and under.  Taking those kids out of the cesspool of public education has been great for them. The results show after looking at those pictures from the walls of Lakota schools, which is reflective of all public schools all over the country, it’s easy to see why parents are upset.  They have a right to be. But at least there is a silver lining I’ve known about but haven’t had much exposure to.  Like the kids I mentioned who have homeschooled their entire lives, more and more parents are taking advantage of that option.  My kids are a few of them, and they were over this week showing me the learning material they have for starting this school year, and I have to say, I was very impressed. 

This is what is in the Halls of Lakota Schools

I remember what it was like; as I told in the story above, public schools have been garbage for decades.  They weren’t very good when I was in school.  They were terrible when my kids were going to school, so much so that we homeschooled for one of their years, and in their last two years, they finished their courses online and graduated at home.  Both of my children graduated early and spent time in Europe learning about the world while their classmates from Lakota were still trying to get a date for the prom.  And as for today, I would say, if you love your children at all, do not send them to the garbage heap that is public school for the life of you.  It’s no accident at Lakota and many other schools that they have started All Day Kindergarten because that is all that government schools are to parents, a free babysitting service ran by radical progressive activists paid for by the taxpayers.  That is why they are also pushing pre-school options because parents have kids, but they need to get back to work.  So they drop their kids off at these government schools to raise because they need the free babysitting, then wonder 12 years later why their kids are all screwed up as young adults.  Well, it doesn’t have to be that way, and my kids love their kids, so they’ve been looking for options, and what they brought me to show me was some of the most wonderful homeschooling material I’ve ever seen.  There was a time when my wife and I homeschooled our kids because the public school at the time, Mason, wanted to teach sex education in the 4th grade by putting a condom on a cucumber.  Well, these were my kids; they were little and were never going to have an opportunity to need to learn to put a condom on a penis.  My kids were going to be little and learning as much as they could as long as I could fight off the evils of the world to let their childhoods be as good as possible.  The school freaked out when my wife and I wouldn’t sign the permission slip, and a fight ensued that got quite bad.  It resulted in us pulling our kids from school and homeschooling for a year, which at that time was one of the hardest things we had ever done.

CRT at Lakota Schools

It wasn’t the education that was hard; it was the social stigma.  I never cared, but it mattered to my wife.  We were in our 30s at the time, and we did not have the support of our parents.  For our parents and society in general, public school was about dances, school jackets, and class rings.  They were the kind of people who went to their class reunions at five and 10-year intervals.  The friends they made in public school lasted a lifetime.  It was like the movie Grease, the school was about friends and memories, and they hated that we were robbing our children of those great things.

They Have Groups for Everything, But American Appreciation at Lakota

Only, school had changed since their days, and they had no idea what was going on.  When the Department of Education was put in place by teacher union lobbying in 1979, I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade at the time.  I was able to watch firsthand how that old view of public education changed into a radical political cesspool controlled by labor unions and their leftist desires.  I hated school more and more each year I was there; it was stifling to creativity and involved too much group think.   By the time my kids went to school, it was worse.  Not in the first few years, but by the time they were trying to push off sex education to 4th graders, it had gotten out of control.  Most of the kids were going home to empty houses from the school’s logic, and the kids were having sex until the parents got home from their jobs.  But that wasn’t fair to the kids who went home to a loving parent or two and had good lives at home.  Those kids didn’t need to be destroyed by such education methods of social rendering at the expense of innocence.  So the only real option was to homeschool them, but back then, when my kids were of that age, there wasn’t great social support. 

The Future is Women, so think of all the Young White Boys, what are they Supposed to do?

Now that has changed, my kids will teach all their kids at home, and all their Instagram friends think it’s great.  Of course, they have parental support from us, but more than that, most of their friends are saying now that they wish they could afford to teach their kids at home instead of sending them to these terrible public schools.  The branding of public schools has gone south over the years.  Most adults who have kids wish they made enough money to either send their kids to private schools or take advantage of the tremendous network of homeschool resources available now.  They feel the same way the rest of us think about public schools, except they don’t have the option of staying home because they have jobs to teach their kids at home.  My kids have built their life around the matter, and I’m proud of them, even more so now that I’ve seen what kind of resources my grandchildren will have to work with. I’ve seen the results of homeschooled children.  Every kid in America should have such a chance at a good education.  But they just aren’t going to get it at these misrun government schools as they are today.  If you love your kid, you will not send them to any of them.  Because if there is anything genuinely equal in this world, it’s that public schools are all equally bad.  If the government runs them, they are terrible for your kid, and you should do everything you can to avoid those places at all costs.      

Rich Hoffman

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Brad Lovell is a Great Example of What’s Wrong in Public Education: Taking a job in Sycamore keeps him advocating progressive tyrannies like Critical Race Theory

Why School Boards Never Listen

Brad Lovell of the Lakota school board in Northern Cincinnati is an excellent example of what’s wrong with public education.  Likely wherever you are reading this, you have your version of a Brad Lovell type.  You wonder why the school board never listens, and when they do, they give you appeasement answers, never really dealing with the actual problem.  When for instance, there are radical activists who push transexual bathrooms in a public education setting, and the school board never shows an inclination to deal with it or to go along with it and expect the community to live with their decision as it falls on deaf ears, you can know that for people like Brad, he’s using the school board to protect his nest eggs. Brad’s wife, for example, is a teacher at Lakota.  From his position on the board, he can protect her job and benefits in many indirect ways as a member of the school board, while building up his portfolio for a job like he just landed with Sycamore schools, just across town from Lakota as a Director of Business Operations.  This is ironic because he recently made it clear on the board that he wanted to blow all the reserve money at Lakota and to spend it into oblivion on completely useless renovations so that he could push another tax increase.  The school board punted this year on it, likely due to the election this fall, but Brad loves to spend money and has a big progressive mindset regarding public education, which other schools love, like Sycamore.  But Sycamore wouldn’t have known Brad from a hole in the ground had he not been a school board member in good standing with the teacher’s union at Lakota, which has provided him with a great networking opportunity to exploit.

You could go to virtually any school board in the United States and see the same behavior from the school board.  School boards were designed to be volunteer services by the community to manage their local school systems. Still, with the big international trade unions running the majority of the employees, community volunteers are often not equipped to deal with the political influences of these radical unions.  The union tactics are usually enough to keep good people from running.  That usually means what you get is someone like Brad Lovell, who wants a job in education and will do anything and endure everything to have it.  If the political pressures mean he needs to be a big-time progressive, then he’ll do it.  People like these types often tell themselves they are doing all this for their children, but the truth is, they love the public adulation and the feeling of community that all liberals enjoy.  That sense of community that liberal people crave like a blanket at night to hide under from the monsters they think is in their closet.  They are big spenders of other people’s money, and when people complain, they do nothing about the complaints.  Their real goal is to get the next big education job and show the system itself that they can be trusted to keep all the secrets in such places as public schools.

I could name off many cases over the years where a teacher or administrator would send naked pictures of themselves to students they fell in love with.  It happens more than you’d like to believe.  It’s always a frustrating mystery why school boards sit on their hands and do nothing about it.  Well, people like Brad don’t want to screw up their next big gig like going to Sycamore for a job as a “business director.” The goal of most school board candidates is to make friends and keep the image of the school on the high side.  Not to protect the students from predatory teachers or the eventualities of financial collapse because the teachers can’t live within a budget and always look to the school board to rubber-stamp everything.  Brad is on the record to be a tax increase supporter and active one.  So that makes him a member of the club in the school system and an attractive prospect at Sycamore.  They protect their own once it’s been established who they are.  Brad has managed to market himself as one of “them” since his election to the board in 2017. 

When a teacher or administrator gets in trouble with a student over sex, or other bad behavior, it is nearly impossible to fire them.   Instead, they reshuffle the deck in public education and move them to a different district.  After all, there’s not much difference between Sycamore, Lakota, Fairfield, or Cincinnati Public.  Young parents are not quite wise to the world’s ways think there are differences, which is why they buy homes in Lakota instead of downtown Cincinnati. Still, all government schools are rackets built only to support progressive causes, like Critical Race Theory and very high incomes for those who play along, like Brad Lovell, for a good paycheck and a chance to be someone in life.  What business is there in Sycamore for an Operations Director?  The product is our children.  Schools don’t sell anything; they just take, take, take from those who produce things in the world.  What is meant by a Director of Business Development is someone who can set the image of the school into something that can get the subsequent tax increase passed.  And Brad needed to take a job like that before he ruined himself by trying to push Lakota through a levy increase.  A few failures at the voting booth often destroy the brands of the administrators guilty of supporting tax increases for quite a long time. 

The critical thing to know is that this is the nature of the game for school boards, so when you wonder why they never get involved in problems like transexual bathrooms or critical race theory, and your cries fall on deaf ears, now you know why.  The school board people themselves don’t take money for the jobs. Still, they use the positions to build them up for other things later, like a nice, high-paying administrative job that is just a token position to justify another tax increase on property owners.  That is the aim of the teacher unions, which are very committed to abolishing private property as a communist goal from the beginning.  Most teachers in these public-school unions aren’t sitting around reading Karl Marx.  But where else can they make six figures with their worthless skills?  And where else could someone like Brad Lovell be considered an “administrator” of any worth?  Government jobs are done for the dreary average who surrender thought to the system. Those employees aren’t asking questions about ideology so long as they are getting paid within the system.  And that’s why Brad will never listen to concerned parents as a Lakota school board member.  Because across town during the day, he is one of the paid stooges who is making big money off the public education system.  And he won’t do anything to jeopardize that job, which is why they picked him.  It doesn’t matter if a race war started in the school provoked by inaction by the board.  Brad and the board might answer an email with sympathies.  But they won’t change the behavior, ever, because they work and live off the system itself.  And they like the results a lot more than they like your kids. That’s why nothing ever happens and why school boards will continue to not listen to concerned parents and will continue to lay down and lick the feet of the corrupt teacher unions without ever a challenge.

Rich Hoffman

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Public Schools Should Be Prosecuted: Examples of school board members advocating liberal destruction

Public Schools are Dangerous Places

It is great to see more and more parents speaking out about what happens in their public schools.  Early this past week, I provided some stories about my home district of Lakota who expressed themselves over transgender policies that are part of the teacher union progressive political platform.  Then, the mom from Georgia unleashed on her school board an excellent speech about removing the mask mandates.  The video went viral and brought a lot of attention to the core problem; public schools are not our friends.  They are not places of sanctuary and learning centers of intelligence.  They are progressive re-education centers that intend for your children to be reprogramed. Government schools plan to reprogram our children. Your society has produced a hopeful lifeform growing up in a healthy community. Public schools want to destroy them into a collective goo of liberalism and dangerous thinking that will destroy our nation from within. They should all be prosecuted for their active role in that corruption.  It’s one thing if these school board members didn’t know better and were just well-intentioned malcontents.  But there is too much evidence, and it goes on far too often in virtually every public school in our government education system for it to be an accident.  The destruction is purposeful.  They intend what they do, and that makes it criminal rather than just innocent stupidity. 

The mom from Georgia who unleashed her fury with her school board there had a good point.  School board members may be frustrated that these young moms are grandstanding in their public speaking forums. I’ve known enough school board members from all over the place to know that school board members don’t come into their roles as corrupt activists for liberal causes.  They seek election for those boards to help educate children and play a role in the goodness of their communities as they understand those roles in a “liberal” society.  Most of us have been taught that public education is the first ingredient to a successful life and that children must at least stay in school to have a shot at life.  That leaves a community member seeking importance well-defined criteria for doing something meaningful.  And it’s not easy to be a school board member.  Management is complicated and often not very rewarding. Most of the time, especially in a group setting, you leave at the end of a meeting not getting everything you want.  An elected body expects disputes with other school board members at the meetings.  But it’s hard to disagree with someone you’ve spent a lot of time with, and quickly friendships form. Peer pressure persists. Often, the platform a school board member ran on to get elected gets forgotten and is replaced by state mandates and teacher’s union expectations for progressive causes.  And they end up being consumed by the system.

A couple of school board members from my district of Lakota, Julie Shaffer and Brad Lovell, are excellent examples of this problem.  I know both of them from the beginning and am pretty sure they meant well.  But in the vacancy of intelligence that should come with any leadership position, they have sought to cover their lack of ability with the national trend of radical leftism and masking it with a façade of caring for the district’s children in all the ways that are typical of Democrat politics.  They profess to the voters that they are nonpartisan, that politics does not play a role in their decision-making process.  But clearly, Julie’s role has always been appeasement of the teacher’s union as a radical mad mom seeking to throw resources at children rather than the hard work of leadership.  I debated Julie Shaffer on WLW radio many years ago, and her pro-education views were significantly left-leaning, and she came apart fast while on the air.  Recently she has been the advocating voice that has pushed the transgender agenda at Lakota.  She didn’t have to, but she went out of her way to put her name on the controversial proposal.  Lakota is in a very conservative area, so her actions do not represent the community that elected her.  She argues that politics did not play a role in her decision, but the evidence says otherwise.  So when a school board member knowingly does something harmful to children, such as adopting a liberal agenda that looks to be destructive to the education position of a public school, isn’t that a prosecutable offense?  If you knew about a murder that was planned and you didn’t say anything, isn’t that still a prosecutable occasion?  You bet it is, and she is guilty of these accidents.  Knowing her, she knew what the transgender policy would do, but she did it anyway, to hell with what people thought. When pressed on the matter, she claims a lack of political partisanship and insists that what she is doing is for the good of all children.

Then there is Brad Lovell, a school board member who used to be a school administrator and is married to a current administrator who makes decisions as a couple who profits a great deal off the public education system itself.  The biggest problem with him is that he is tone-deaf to anything that might disrupt the education structure, making it very difficult to have complex opinions about anything.  Supposedly his conflict of interest is legal in being married as a member of the board to an active employee, but his actions show the real problem. He has shown no resistance to budget concerns and is always quick to desire to go to the public for more money.  He would be well at home in the Joe Biden administration of deficit spending, and we can understand why.  As teacher contracts continue to escalate in cost, administrators rise too in cost and make it a very lucrative scam for him as a school board member.  He is clearly in the role for the social status it provides him.  He has no interest in going against the political tide of transgender politics or taking a stand against Critical Race Theory.  And in that neglect, he is responsible for the minds that time will prove to erode under the weight of liberalism.  Rather than put community concerns over these matters first, he instead set his needs for income indirectly through his wife as a priority, which is why many of the parents of Lakota are becoming more and more frustrated.  He doesn’t want to rock the boat because that’s his life through his wife.  But they do; they want someone to care about these issues and to do something about them.

Those are just a few local examples, but every school district could tell the same story, leaving parents frustrated.  Rather than listen to the Georgia mom who pleaded with the school board to remove a mask mandate from her child, the committee instead follows the liberal agenda, blames the CDC for the decision, and claims they have no power to do anything about it. They have done the same thing at Lakota, to limit the number of parents who can come to the board meetings and talk; they have used the excuse of social distancing to restrict attendance, citing that it is Governor DeWine’s orders they are following.  Because school board positions are unpaid and pretty unsatisfactory otherwise, it doesn’t bring much passion for reform is needed to manage the district.  Instead, they follow the liberal plan that comes with all public schools and sign their name without taking any responsibility for what happens.  And in that way, for the many little lies they must tell while doing so, public schools should be prosecuted for the harm they bring community members for knowing lies they commit for political power instead of what’s suitable for children.  And it’s time to get all that to an end, for our own sake.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Lakota Parents Stand up to Transsexual Activism: Finally parents are making their voices heard to save their children from public school

It was a remarkable thing to see for a change; angry parents from my home district of Lakota showed up at the mid-April school board meeting and let it be known what they thought of the transsexual policies advocated by the members of the board.   Their concerns about Critical Race Theory were another topic that is now all the rage in public schools.  It was much of this lunacy being given directly to teachers of all public schools in by the Ohio Department of Education. So it’s not fringe actions by radical leftist groups, the radical leftist groups are now mainstream and in the government, and they educate our kids.  And several of the Lakota school board members in my community have been lockstep in support of the government push for diversity training in public schools making racism the central issue of our education of children.  That may sound fair and balanced to the helicopter parents who fly their kids into the government schools for the free babysitting services that are very much part of this scam of political insurgency. Lakota’s transsexual policies attempted to take the lead on what has been an outright attack on the efficacy and future of all children attending. Parents in my community are finally starting to stick up for themselves.

As I said in the video above, Lakota, the public school in my neighborhood, is a good baseline for what is happening nationally with public education issues. It’s a wealthy district with a budget, what the labor unions consider the best teachers money can buy, and parents who sincerely care what is going on with their kids.  Likely more than average, there are two-parent homes in Lakota, and it votes heavily Republican.  However, the public elected the school board in the typical way that labor unions put their people in power to protect themselves from the outside world.  And those school board members, specifically names like Brad Lovell, Julie Shaffer, and Kelly Casper, have gone out of their way to endorse these liberal policies, especially the transgender elements.  The community indeed wasn’t screaming for it. It’s an extensive district and for the most part, considering the massive population of over 100,000 people in a county of 400,000, everyone stays pretty well behaved.  Delinquent children are an anomaly, they certainly aren’t familiar, and because of the two-parent homes, the sexual issues are much less an issue than in other places around the country.  There are more guns in the school district of Lakota, for instance, than there are in some states, but there is very little violence.  The newspapers have to work hard to find any real controversy to report.  That makes Lakota an excellent place to start to understand the massive activism that is threatening our children.  If it’s evident in my community, you can bet it’s every bit as bad in yours, or worse. 

The Lakota school board has forgotten who they represent.  As mentioned in the accompanying video on this site of the actual meeting where the parents lined up under social distancing rules to speak at the public portion of the meeting, school board members aren’t paid for their work.  They do it as representatives of the community to make sure the massive $200 million-plus budget taken from property owners gets where it needs to go for the sake of the kids’ education.  However, all the members except for Lynda O’Conner out of the five officials voting are leaning toward the far left mandates coming out of the state, which ultimately comes out of the Ohio Education Association, the teacher’s union, which shapes a lot of what happens in public education as a radical progressive group.  They have chosen to make the decisions on transgender policy that they have, which has many parents terrified for their children’s lives, correctly.  I would argue that I know this school board and that these parental complaints will fall on deaf ears.  But it’s good to bring them up in public anyway and take the complaints several steps further than their little 3-minute spots in the board meetings.  These issues are far too complicated to be capped off under the Lakota management structure, and the urgency for the kids’ sake is nothing short of dire. So even if the school board doesn’t get it, it’s a fight worth having.  As a community, we could always elect new school board members.  But the discussion needs to happen in a front and center kind of way.

I used to do hundreds of articles on my blog site here about specifically Lakota challenges, but I have readers in most of the major countries.  I have been covering overreaching national and international issues now, but that doesn’t mean that local issues aren’t necessary for the scheme of things.  For Lakota, what is happening in my backyard is happening in yours as well; it’s worth mentioning what’s happening so that you, the reader, can take similar actions on your own.  However, for my newer readers catching up to the past, I have a long history with the Lakota school system.  My warnings were that this day would arrive.  I started formally just arguing the merits of the tax increases against property owners, and I was a frequent guest on talk radio and our television news.  I gave speeches all over the place and met with concerned parents all over Ohio, so I understand well how concerned parents are and can be out there.  But the more work I did in looking into the various progressive issues, the angrier I became because it was evident that public education was headed in this direction. They wanted our kids, and they desired as progressive activists and outright communists working in public education to ruin the minds of our children so that when they grew up, they’d become activist voters, and that is where we find ourselves today. 

However, public school activists never plan for the parents to speak up for themselves.  They expect them to drop their kids off at the government schools and rush off to Starbucks before gossiping and becoming distracted by a thousand other things. Simultaneously, the teachers attack the children’s foundations with sexualized educations and race relation discussions. School distracts them from the elements they should be learning, such as how to grow into a critical thinking adult and how to read.  Modern educators want kids as dumb and witless as possible so that they will be easy to control in the future and for methods that we are now seeing openly on the news.  None of this is new, but what is new is that a group of parents stuck together and showed up to speak out against it.  They tried to communicate with their school board, which is part of the problem and is destined to blow them off.  But it won’t end there.  Challenges to the school board are bound to happen in the upcoming elections. The state of Ohio is taking notice, and some powerful Republican politicians are just as upset about this attack on our country.  That creates an atmosphere that has some potential for real reform.  And if it’s happening in Lakota, it’s happening in other places as well, and that is something to celebrate.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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Brainwashed: Glenn Beck’s revelation of what many of us have always known about public education

Over the last ten years I have been asked hundreds of times to run for a school board position, and even though I think most government problems can be solved from the local level, education is not one of them. I do know and have known many school board members and I think its great for people to run and win those seats, because it slows to some extent the inevitable. But government schools, all of them, have been flawed for too many years—and are well beyond repair. I would take the problem all the way back to Dewey. However, the real evidence of trouble has only just begun to be seen in the products themselves, the people functioning in our society from my age all the way down to the children just entering the school system of today, even in pre-school. And now we see what the strategy has always been. Thus, my position has been to defund public schools to bleed out the teacher union influence and start the process of complete reconstruction. If there has been anything good to come out of Covid-19 it has been the revelation to the masses of what public education has always been about, just as I have been saying coronavirus always was about. Public education isn’t about learning anything useful, its all about change state manipulation of the human mind into a socialist/communist supporter which brings us to our present moment, the 2020 election.

I think Betsy DeVos has done a great job as Secretary of Education. More people are talking about School Choice now than they ever have and of course there has been a contentious cost to it all. The teacher unions are not happy about it, and neither are the traditional politicians. And many of these problems are much older than the Black Lives Matters corporation that is designed exclusively to bring Marxism to America through the education system. Much of the results of decades of socialist strategies are discussed in the Glenn Beck Blaze TV segment included in this article, but the gist is this, President Trump has to be re-elected and Betsey DeVos has to have that mandate to take the federal government out of the local control of education. That starts by cutting funding to districts that support any kind of Marxist agenda and forcing competitive ideas to enter into the debate where parents can send their kids to the schools of their choice to break the union monopolies and restore education to what it should have always been, about learning. Not behavior control. Nothing Glenn Beck mentioned in his Blaze special surprised me, but for many, they are very shocked at what has been revealed as teachers were pressured to resume classes but pushed back using Covid-19 as an excuse not to work. That has opened people’s minds to the true intent of the teacher unions and let them see that what I have been saying for over 40 years has been true all along.

As a school board member there is little to no control that they can have over the district. The unions rule and sit in the nests of children’s minds demanding more and more federal money which keeps this massive machine running, that has a solitary goal of ruining children’s minds by teaching them Marxism off the fuel of infinite amounts of state and federal tax money, and we are expected to support this mess endlessly, and without question. Well, I have been questioning it for a very long time. When I first started this blog over ten years ago, I had some hope that a little public pushback might help correct the problem, but after I campaigned in an organized fashion to withhold future tax money from our local school and after a few defeated school levies the school did not change their behavior, they instead dug in and got worse, I gave up all hope that the system could be saved in any way. So working as a school board member was a useless enterprise, my goal would be to deny the funding and make the argument for the top end budget problems, which fed the teacher’s union itself as a political entity. As long as a public school had a teacher’s union, their goal would be all the things and more that Glenn Beck talked about in his special. A school board member was powerless to stop such a menace. The only way to stop them was to deny the funds that fuel them.

One of the many reasons that Jesus Christ was killed was that his teachings embodied wisdom, and did not need a church to be effective. It took a few hundred years and the needs of an empire to unite under some common flag, but Christianity figured out how to institutionalize Jesus Christ and to profit off it not just financially, but with political power. That is essentially what has happened to our public schools, yet the true essence of education is in decentralized opportunities to learn. The best education can be done in the middle of a field, or in the depths of a cave. It does not need a structured teaching environment because that’s not necessarily how people learn, obviously. If public education was so great, then why are there so many stupid people in the world today. Just look at the riots in the streets—and there you have your proof. Stupid people crippled by their public schools where some Marxist teacher has clipped the wings of intelligence forever leaving them dazed and confused as adults busting out windows and burning cars while they chant to defund the police—and actually believe that all those things together will make a better world. What all that adds up to are failures of the public education system that in many cases are purposeful.

It is good that people are now talking seriously about this. It took a long time and is yet another development that has occurred under the Trump White House. All Bush’s No Child Left Behind attempts did was feed the monster, it certainly didn’t starve it. It made it bigger, and empowered it to be even more of a Marxist activist. But now that parents have had to come to terms with what public education means to them, by the nature of the government shutdowns over Covid-19, there are honest debates occurring presently. Before anybody could even think of taking action against the public schools, they had to admit that there was a problem, and that process is finally happening. Its not enough to just say that kids need to go to school, its needed to discuss what kind of school that is, and only competition can improve the situation with school choice and a reduction of federal funding. Only then will education become what it needs to be, the federal government needs to get out of the business, because what they are making as a product is detrimental to the survival not only of our country, but of the human race. There are some really dumb people out there and they most of the time became that way because of labor unions and their grip on government schools. It’s not patriotic to be dumb. It’s a crisis, and to solve that problem, education needs to be taken away from the teachers and given back to the students.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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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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