Tag: Public Schools

After A Year of Darbi Boddy as Lakota School Board Member, Was it Worth It: Lawyers have had too much power and wasted entirely too much money

It’s been about a year now since Darbi Boddy was sworn in as the new Lakota school board member, and we have to ask, was it worth it? Was it worth all the trouble, the news coverage, the hard feelings, lawsuits, threats, scandal, petitions, and civil war with the rest of the board?   Well, of course, it was worth it. Darbi Boddy has turned out to be precisely what was needed, and because of her, we are seeing many good things that would have never happened any other way. When Lynda O’Conner and I set out to have a conservative majority on the school board of Lakota schools, Darbi Boddy was precisely what I had in mind. Lynda obviously had other ideas, and we ultimately disagreed with the final result. In management, my philosophy is obvious and well-known; I like conflict because it gets people to the root cause of a problem. And many people in Lakota, not as conservative as I am, are sick of the government school system always taking too much money from the community and wasting vast sums of money only to teach children progressive politics that is detrimental to the human race. At the start of the year, we were all worried about Critical Race Theory and same-sex bathrooms at Lakota, and with my kind of management philosophy, Darbi Boddy was just the kind of firecracker that needed to be thrown into the hornet’s nest to flush out all the bad guys who were causing so much of the trouble. Darbi was worth the investment of the Republican Party, and the fundraising, and all the negative media coverage. Because she did what all good managers do, she used the conflict to root out the trouble and force everyone to live up to a performance standard, and that requirement has crushed the weak elements of the public education façade that were too expensive and brought liberalism into a very conservative community.

We will hear something of a purge from Lakota; many resignations will be notable, which will be excellent. In a liberal world, which is typical in government, they classify quality as in hiring more useless people to perform a task. So a value to them is in paying too many employees too much money to perform a needed task. And leading up to the last school board election, Lakota as a school system was pushing for another school levy, which had many people extremely upset. As expensive as Lakota schools are presently to the taxpayers, and for what they are teaching, which is all the crazy progressive garbage that we hear about negatively on the nightly news, the idea that Lakota would try to obtain a tax increase to pay for more wasteful employees was simply a horrendous enterprise. In truth, what too many wasteful employees provide any organization is inefficiency and corruption. We have seen plenty of that at Lakota, which was hiding behind a compliant school board that lawyers ran. One thing I learned during all this was how much lawyers have their hands in everyone’s pockets, and they are turning out to be a significant problem not just locally but nationally and internationally in politics as well. They operate without a political party to shape political activity in devastating ways and suck off way too much taxpayer money as a result. Looking at some of the invoices from legal work over just the last couple of months at Lakota shows all that needs to be known on this topic. The amount of corruption that lawyers were covering up and diffusing from the public was enormous and expensive. So when we were asking questions about where all the money was going, it wasn’t just on high-priced administrators advocating for progressive politics at taxpayer expense; it was in a more devastating way going to lawyers who have the sole purpose of covering up scandals and employee misconduct and preventing the public from having an opinion on that conduct. The result has been a loss of free speech, which is a significant violation of the constitutional parameters between the public and their employees of elected representatives, and the financial burden, as a result, was enormous. 

It’s a shame that the other school board members on the Republican majority weren’t as good as Darbi. The other two turned out to be RINOs, John Boehner-type RINOs. The Republican Party isn’t as unified as it was when we had that last election, so it’s not clear how endorsements for the next election will happen. Based on the previous election’s results, it might not be needed. There is a power struggle in the Butler County Republican Party that was unified a year ago, which goes back to my management method of using conflict to identify weak spots. We have indeed found weak Republicans behind all the smiling faces of campaign mode. I was very proud of Isaac Adi when I took a picture of him with Jim Jordan at a GOP event not that long ago. I still think Isaac is a good person, even though he has worked against Darbi Boddy since the moment she was sworn in. A lot of people have learned over the last year just how conservative, or not, they actually were, and that will make this next election an interesting one now that the cards are on the table. It will be a different kind of election, and there will be a chance to get two more Darbi Boddy types on the school board, which will be a great opportunity. 

Yet to the question, was it all worth it? Well, the answer is yes because the obvious thing that everyone is fighting for is a good education for kids, and taxpayers throw money into a pot to accomplish that task. And many parasites obviously want to suck up that money to support their often lazy and maniacal worldview. Just because Lakota will be peeling away a lot of employees doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. The best thing is to do more with less, let the trouble leave, and not replace them with more expensive employees. Just because Democrats had an insurrection in the Ohio House to essentially protect their extensive government views regarding the Backpack Bill, education is changing, and only good management will prepare Lakota for what is happening. Eventually, the money will go to the child, not the zip code. Lakota will have to be competitive and not just sit around with their mouth open and have lawyers shovel in vast sums of money and keep the public from interrupting the process. So far, after years on the school board, only Darbi Boddy has been a good school board member who has truly given the public what they have been needing, proper representation under a great deal of duress. Many people in Darbi’s position would have fallen apart, but she has been challenging and lived up to all the rigors I knew she would have to face going in. It has been bloody, ugly, and treacherous. But she is doing a great job and is poised to have another great year. Meanwhile, those most unstable under the pressure of performance are jumping ship, and for the taxpayers paying for all this mess, that’s a wonderful thing that we need a lot more of. 

As we reflect on this past year and plan for the upcoming one, remember in April of 2022, Matt Miller and the school board chose to run the newly elected Darbi Boddy off the school board, just as they had previously with Todd Parnell the year before. There was a radical push by activists encouraged by superintendent Matt Miller to remove by force Darbi from the board. There were media hit pieces orchestrated by many of these same people who went way out of their way to publically embarrass Darbi; they were camped outside her home with the media cameras focused on her, and her child as Matt Miller sent a trespassing order to her for a school she was supposed to be managing. The radical unfairness started with Matt Miller and the current school board. But Darbi held tough and stayed sincere through all the pressure. She showed what could be possible if one good school board member asked the hard questions and challenged the management of millions and millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars. The radical leftist elements openly harassed supporters of Darbi Boddy and threatened them with lawsuits and other forms of intimidation, attempting to publicly shame them into hiding. But people stood up for themselves, and good things did happen as a result. Now, just think about how good the school board could be if Darbi had some support. And for those who are upset about all this, take some notes. Don’t play the game unless you plan to lose. Everything started with a vote and people picking their representation, then politics stepped in to try and erase that vote. The same methods can and will be applied to any office holder, no matter where or what they do, or how long they have been doing it. Remember that the voters are in charge of their political representation, which a government school certainly is. Politicians don’t decide fates, voters do.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

“Escapades of Doom”: Kristi Ertel’s Interview with Brian Thomas on 55 KRC

I’m very proud of Kristi Ertel of Protect Lakota Kids.com for her really good interview on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas. She was there to talk about the latest information on Matt Miller, the controversial superintendent from Lakota, and the trouble he has put himself into with his reckless personal life. Many in the Lakota district, over 800 people, have signed the petition to force Miller to resign. Miller and his radical union members at Lakota did the same thing to the new school board member Darbi Boddy just a few months before, having a petition to force her to resign essentially because they didn’t like her. Supporters of a conservative school board took exception and found out what kind of crazy sexual lifestyle Miller thought was normal, and it became public information at that point. So now the shoe is on the other foot, and I thought Kristi did an exceptional job representing the many people in the Lakota school district who have found how the school board has dealt with the issue reprehensible. And some people like Kristi, who is a fantastic Christian woman with very high standards, can’t deal with the level of morality exhibited by the Lakota administration and its school board. Even with the threats of lawsuits that the superintendent has lashed out at toward his critics, Kristi is the type of person who can’t turn away from a dilemma, which is asking the community to look the other way when reprehensible moral circumstances are imposed on everyone. And she’s not alone. But good for her to stand up for what’s right even when so much is wrong and horrible, and that has been threatened by the public employees as if they were ultimately in charge. When I read the cease-and-desist letter from Matt Miller’s attorney, and Kristi talked about this on the radio interview, I thought some alien from another planet had written it. It clearly didn’t consider any Constitutional provisions regarding free speech. And to the point discussed on 55 KRC, all the information was based on Matt Miller’s own words. But my conclusion reflects the microcosm that is essentially the macrocosm of global politics these days. 

It wasn’t just this interview with Kristi that had spawned a lot of attention on this story over the past week; Libs of TikTok was talking about it, which cascaded into it being covered by the very popular Louder with Crowder show, and Charlie Kirk. The story was always going to get out; when a very public employee exhibits such bad behavior, it was bound to. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s the cover-up of that information that has presented itself as far worse, as if all the participants involved, the media, the school board, the police, the prosecutor’s office, a whole bunch of lawyers, its as if they believed that if they denied that anything happened, then sent out threatening letters to harass the public into submission, that they could somehow change the nature of reality itself. And if they believed that, then no wonder they thought they could do anything and get away with it. That is, after all, what we are seeing in international and national politics, that characters like Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, or even the fact that Covid was made in a lab in Wuhan, China, and so long as the communist country pretended that nothing happened, then they could literally get away with murder. Or that election fraud never occurred in 2020 or 2022, even though Katie Hobbs in Arizona was caught certifying her own election by pushing all the complaints of voter irregularities past the certification date forcing constitutionally protected fraud in the process. What we saw happening at Lakota was essentially the same type of crazy, extremely liberal behavior. 

Yet the thing that gets missed in all these cases is that no matter what the administrative state does to contain information with public relations officials, lawyers, or open harassment through violence or other means, people are still going to have an opinion on the matter. Unlike in China, where they control every aspect of people’s lives, people in America still have free will and the ability to think independently. Just because authority figures say something is red or yellow when we can see it’s blue, we are not obligated to accept what those authority figures say just because they are authority figures. What’s fascinating about this Lakota cult of liberalism is that they really thought they were going to be able to contain the bad behavior of their superintendent and force good people like Kristi Ertel to act against her conscience, her strong belief system in goodness and the good of God, and accept evil right in front of her face, and that there was nothing she, or anybody could do about it. It’s as if Matt Miller and his army of wife-swapping administrators thought they were in charge of the whole community or something instead of employees within it. And that they could literally do anything, say anything, and push any kind of agenda onto the taxpayers, and they would be obligated to accept their reality without question. It was essentially the China Model but without the controls of a totalitarian regime controlling over a billion people in every way, shape, and form, upon fear of death.  It has been a head-scratcher because I know many of the characters involved. It has been bizarre to see them so consumed with the process and willing to accept outright evil because of some misplaced fear that the law was working against us all and that the big bad administrative state could destroy us at any time. Hey, read a book sometime, and get smart. Lakota schools, their public employees, lawyers, PR people, and the media tag alongs who have helped cover some really detrimental behavior have all contributed to making our community worse, making things more dangerous for children, and thumbing their noses at the community in general.  Lakota was already declining in quality before Matt Miller came along, and since he stepped into that superintendent role, the grades for Lakota have continued to drop. So why all these people would seek to protect a bad employee with a bad track record is beyond logic. But yet, what we have seen come out of all these liberal institutions is an assumption that so long as they control information and how people perceive it, they can hide their poor performance behind this strange veil of corruption. And that people wouldn’t form their own opinions on things. Well, people do have opinions on things, and free minds have arrived at the opinion that what has been going on at Lakota and public schools, in general, does not reflect what taxpayers want. And they are angry about it. I am very happy to know that many people like Kristi Ertel are free-thinking enough to form their own opinions and defend them when challenged by such nonsense as we have witnessed in this Lakota case. If not for free speech and people like Kristi, there would be a lot more corruption in the world, and now we see why things are so screwed up everywhere because there haven’t been enough Kristi Ertels in the world standing up for what’s right, and teaching children how adults should behave by condemning bad behavior when we do see it. And if more people did call out such bad behavior, it would at least force the perpetrators to keep it hidden from public view. But when bad people don’t fear the judgment of the public because they think the system will hide them from the guilt of their actions, well, then you get what we have seen at Lakota, and other places, wherever liberalism is out of control, and a war against God and goodness has been unleashed as if the pages of the Book of Revelations were manifest on the earth and the Devil himself were in charge of everything, and everybody. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

The Smokescreen of Ana D’Ettorre: Ombudsman exposing reckless lives and moral inadequacies within the Lakota employee population

I tend to feel sorry for Ana Leigh D’Ettorre, who was a student teacher at Lakota schools and looks to have started a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy while at Liberty Junior School. I have seen some of her work; clearly, the 24-year-old was a nice fresh-out-of-college progressive who was just doing what she had been taught. And in the hallways of Liberty Junior and in the teacher’s lounge, based on the behavior of the other administrators and teachers, the young girl likely thought it was normal to seduce one of her students, which led to the Butler County prosecutor’s office indicting her with one felony charge for unlawful sexual conduct along with 11 counts of disseminating material harmful to juveniles. As soon as this story broke, and there is, of course, a lot more to it, the mother of the boy discussed the details with my good friend, Vanessa Wells; people were wondering why these same harsh standards weren’t applied to Lakota’s superintendent. Naturally, when the school board and the leadership of the school show that they have such permissive attitudes about sexual lifestyles, then what kind of example in the culture were they sending to Lakota employees like Ana D’Ettorre? Suppose you are a new teacher, even if it is just a student teacher and not a long-time member of the teacher’s union with several decades of work behind them when you know what leadership at Lakota is projecting as lifestyle choices. What other conclusion would you make about the permissibility of having sex with children? I mean, D’Ettorre herself is just a kid, as far as I’m concerned, and in this no-judgment world that progressives who run these schools expect to live by, why would the young teacher not think it was appropriate to engage in sexual pursuits with a 14-year-old boy? 

Based on my history with Lakota and public schools in general, I think there is a lot of sexual misconduct going on in all government schools. I can think of a case right off the top of my head where a teacher in a power position over a concerned mother seduced her into an affair. The mom wanted what was best for her child and found herself on the bad side of a power relationship that certainly benefited the teacher. And of course the teacher’s talk. There is a lot of dating that goes on between them, and as we learned about Lakota’s superintendent, there are a lot of swinging lifestyles occurring that they think are perfectly normal. Out of a large employee body in a public school system, the number of destructive sexual lifestyles among adults I think are as high as 10%. And we would define destructive by alternative sex that does not result in pursuing a spouse for marriage and raising children. Sex is purely a recreational pursuit for its own sake and with whoever might happen along. Sex, after all, is the ultimate form of collectivism, which progressives love, but conservatives hate. So the community sentiment toward these things is far different from the employees drawn to the teaching occupation. We haven’t just seen it a few times where teachers fall in love with their students, both males and females; we see it a lot. And the schools themselves have a general policy of squashing the stories before they ever make it to the school board. And suppose they do make it to the school board. In that case, public relations firms and lawyers control the narrative so the public doesn’t get suspicious and start to believe that the schools aren’t safe for the free babysitting service that the public schools genuinely are. 

In the case of the 24-year-old girl, it sounds almost like a normal relationship; a young girl finds herself attracted to a young boy. I mean, at least we aren’t talking about some creepy transvestite who wants to shake their fake boobs to their shop class here. It’s at least a biological girl and a biological boy. They are all young people. These days a 10-year age difference hardly seems strange, by ridiculous public-school standards where talk about molesting children is considered “pillow talk.” Yet we saw the police and the school system attempt to look like they were throwing the book at the kid. For essentially doing all the things, and less, that the school superintendent and the school board had just covered up with great public spectacle. If that is the standard for sexual conduct between students and teachers in Lakota, then there should be a lot more prosecutions going on. Instead, what it looks like to me is that Lakota and the public unions, in general, were looking for a fall guy in the education process to throw under the bus. Ana D’Ettorre made a convenient target, not a long-time employee, so the unions were fine to sacrifice one of their own. And in these media-reported stories, it’s always a “student teacher,” never a fully staffed long-term employee. And usually, the employees are never working at the school when a prosecutor puts forth indictments. There have been a few cases where the media have reported sexually bad behavior in public schools during 2022, and they are largely like this case with Ana D’Ettorre, who is not currently working in the district and is a student teacher instead of part of a full-time staff. 

So yes, I feel sorry for everyone involved, the mom of the son, the kid who thought he met an older woman, and a young girl who, by the way, she expresses herself, had traded away her own youth for the progressive journey of the Brave New World that public education is. And when Lakota needed to show the public that they took sexual matters seriously, they threw a bone like Ana out there for the public to consume. At the same time, the much worse sexual behavior continued without a media spectacle. Because if people knew what was happening in these government schools among the employees, they would not think of this prosecutor’s case with a grand jury indictment as much of anything but a smoke screen. It’s a long-known scam that many parents are just learning about. But don’t worry, if the media and their public relations people think they are going to manipulate the public all in the scheme to encourage the tax-paying public to stay asleep and continue funding these liberal disasters, we have developed a nice little network at Lakota where ombudsman abound with great passion. And if you find yourself in such a mess, we will help you with it. While we can’t make people who insist on doing bad things and hiding them do good things, we can expose them so that the public can know what their money pays for. Much of the disappointment over the school superintendent case at Lakota was the trust people put into the systems of control that clearly let them down, particularly the media. People expect a certain amount of corruption in school boards and the police. The media traditionally keeps corruption as honest as possible with free speech coverage. But as we saw, the media can be bought by the kind of public relations mechanics Lakota utilizes to protect its workforce from outside judgment. And when they need to throw the public a bone, they pick a nice, easy target, like Ana D’Ettorre, and throw her to the wolves hoping to protect the rest of the flock from proper social judgment for their reckless lives and moral inadequacies. 

Rich Hoffman

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Protect Lakota Kids.com and the Public Records that Show all the Evidence: Defending children from the extreme liberalism of Lakota schools

It’s not like the bad behavior at Lakota schools happened overnight. It took place over a long period of time. For those who have been wanting to see all the evidence from the Matt Miller divorce and the crazy sexual lifestyle of the superintendent of Lakota that has been much talked about, you can see it all down to the last public document at the excellent website Protect Lakota Kids.com.  CLICK TO Visit for yourself. I am proud of the great people who put that site together, and you better believe it; it was not an enterprise of a few lonely people. It’s a community effort; even better, over 600 people have signed the petition to protect Lakota Kids from the diabolical exploits of the radical progressives who work for all these government schools. This particular school is in our neighborhood, and it is challenging our values as a community, so it’s great to see people coming together to stand up to the vile behavior that has been on full display for quite a while now. The evidence of that behavior is reflected in the meeting segment shown below. A parent gave a very nice speech about the bad behavior of the superintendent, but additionally on the behavior of the school board members and other administrators. No wonder they didn’t see anything wrong with the superintendent’s sexual behavior because they are just as bad in many cases. What does that say about the people who run Lakota schools, especially when you can see for yourself just how bad that behavior has been for the superintendent? 

When the upset parent’s speech was given, I was working on getting new school board members elected. For me, that was the solution: to get better management on the board who would take the job a lot more seriously, not drink so much, and find themselves in compromising situations when they went to social events around town and out of town. The stories from some of these events have been horrendous and embarrassing to me. I like my community; I think there are a lot of good people who live in Butler County. I’ve been associated with Butler County most of my life. I could have lived anywhere in the world that I wanted, but I loved Butler County so much that I stayed in the area by choice. But these extreme leftist types who always come with more government expansion, especially in the public schools, do not represent the values of the community I have known for five decades. Many people moved to the area to be part of that kind of community. They did not move to Butler County to be embarrassed by the extreme liberalism of Lakota schools. For too long, they have put up with it to go along to get along. But after learning more about just how liberal and sexually reckless the people who run Lakota schools really are, there has been a very steady chorus of anger that has been building for several years now. To say the least, when Matt Miller was hired to be the superintendent in 2017, he reflected the values obviously of the people who hired him. And to understand what those values were, just read the voluminous public records on the Protect Lakota Kids website. We know the school board knew in 2020 just how bad things were, and instead of fixing the problem, they moved to cover everything up, which everyone should find alarming.

I had hopes that good management might fix some of these problems, but instantly the governing board gave the new school board members a fruit basket of friendship and worked to either bring them into the fold or to get rid of them. One of the newly elected board members seemed to like the fruit basket. The other one could care less, and instantly, Matt Miller and his partners on the school board worked quickly to get rid of her. And at that point, it was apparent that I had wasted my time trying to work with the board to have proper management at Lakota. Because the sexual deviants, the swingers, and the radical left loons who make up Lakota management wanted to protect their racket from the outside eyes of the holy rollers in the community and their pesky “Christian values.” They had no desire to listen to voters; they simply wanted to hide bad behavior from the public, and by reviewing the public documents at Protect Lakota Kids, it’s obvious that this was a common assumption, not an isolated behavior. With our tax money, we were funding the kind of behavior among the adults at Lakota that we wouldn’t endorse in our community otherwise except behind the innocent faces of our children. 

Yes, the title of that website, Protect Lakota Kids.com, is appropriate because if we don’t do it, who will? The school board certainly isn’t interested in helping kids find their moral compass in life. And if we aren’t teaching kids the basics of living a good, productive life, then what are we teaching them to be? If you leave it to the school, the role model they have in mind is Matt Miller. Obviously, the Lakota superintendent has serious sexual issues, as chronicled by the public records listed on the Protect Lakota Kids website. And you don’t have to live in Lakota to have an opinion about this matter. This is a problem in all public schools. Everywhere there are government schools, we see the same essential issues.

What is different about the school district of Lakota is that parents are taking control of their community. We have tried to elect good school board members. But the progressive types have rebelled against that notion. So, if parents can’t control their school board, they will create awareness with their own media, with websites like Protect Lakota Kids.com.   At that site, they are doing the job that the media should have been doing all along. But it’s not as if good people didn’t try to do things the traditional way. Speeches like the frustrated parent shown here have been going on for a long time. And it proves that the school board chose not to listen and to act to defend the bad behavior from the judgment of the public at all costs. And that isn’t acceptable. We aren’t paying all the money that we do in taxes to fuel this level of liberal politics. Butler County is a very conservative place in the world, and Lakota schools are a playground of liberalism that has embedded itself into our community in extremely unhealthy ways. It’s a fight worth having because, in the end, the product of the community is the children. Left to their own devices, the leadership of Lakota is intent on making kids into reflections of their own impoverished lifestyles, into the train wrecks spoken about by that concerned parent. I know that parent, and when she was talking about handpicking people from the GOP for the school board, she was talking about my work. She was frustrated with the results; she was ready to give up on the school way back then. I would say that it’s always good to try to fix something. But to her point, Lakota has been beyond gone for a long time now. And it will never get better if we allow them to govern themselves. Because given a choice, Lakota management will always pick the wrong thing.

Rich Hoffman

Protect Our Lakota Kids

The Public Education Scam: It’s all about protecting an image to sell tax increases no matter how bad the behavior of the employees is

I wouldn’t say that Thom Fladung of Hennes Communications is the example of evil in the world, but it would be quite sufficient to define him and his partners as bricks in a vast wall of evil meant to destroy the First Amendment and ruin the foundations of American government. Whenever you see a message on some news report, such as, “we are not in a recession” or “the sex allegations are unproven,” you are likely seeing the work of some version of Thom Fladung working the media behind a veil of manipulation that would make William Shakespeare blush. In a clear case of child pornography possibilities, such as the Matt Miller case at Lakota schools, where the school superintendent was interviewed by police admitting to pillow talk about drugging, molesting, and videotaping the abuse for sexual gratification, and the kids weren’t random, but kids who went to the school he manages, the lack of concern for the children involved has been stunning. Rather than disciplining the superintendent or finding a new one, once this information got out in 2020 the school board called up Thom Fladung, a managing partner at Hennes. They advertise for just such crisis management. For them, a crisis is meant to be repaired to maintain reputations. And the reports are that Lakota schools were willing to spend over $300 per hour to make the Matt Miller story go away. They weren’t concerned about the behavior; the school board determined that what Matt Miller did in his private life had no impact on his job, even though in Matt’s ex-wife’s police interview, she indicated that there were naked pictures of kids on both of their phones which the superintendent had sent her and that during the divorce, there was a lot of effort to hide his online dating profiles with Ashley Madison, which were on his school computer. Logic would say that hearing such a thing, there would be an investigation to learn the truth, which would be vital if the school’s priorities were the students’ safety. Instead, they called Thom to come in and provide “reputation, crises management.”

This is how they contain stories and keep things from the public. Most people don’t understand the law or their rights and are easily intimidated. But not Venessa Wells. With the amount of information that has come out about this client, discovery would be a good thing, and would put everything in a public record where people could then learn much more. When I saw this, I took it as a bullying tactic, and I don’t like bullies. Especially after what we learned after the police report. The response to this notice resulted in legal action going the other way, and the lawsuits against the school that have been occurring. This employee of Lakota schools is their responsibility, and bad conduct will not be tolerated. They should have dealt with him in 2020 when they first learned of this vile behavior.

Apparently, Matt Miller is listed as one of the top superintendents in the country and is scheduled to speak at the ASU+GSV Summit at the Manchester Grand Hyatt from April 17th  through April 19th in San Diago, 2023. To protect that reputation, built over a long period of time, Lakota was willing in 2020, when they first learned about the problem, to pay to make it go away. The work of Thom kept local media from getting into the story and concealed the details from the public in general as if the public never had a right to know what kind of people they were hiring at Lakota with taxpayer money. The goal was concealment and protection of a reputation that was meant on paper to prop up the superintendent in progressive circles and get awards like a dog for doing what his master told him to do. According to the ASU bio, it says of Miller that he was one of only two superintendents in the country to lead the League’s Real-World Challenge Collaborative, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. Yes, that “Zuckerberg,” the progressive owner of Facebook, and his Zuckerbucks program to illegally steal elections with mail-in ballots tampered with during the 2020 election. Those are the kind of people who think that Matt Miller has been doing a good job. Miller has since gotten into a lot of trouble by essentially being the Dr. Fauci of Lakota schools and strictly enforcing the mask mandates for Covid, which made many parents angry. And when Miller dug in and became more combative, people started digging into his personal life and found this messy divorce which Thom has been paid to cover up. And now it’s out in the open, and everyone through public records who wants that information can have it.

And, of course, the reaction of Lakota to all this information, which is clearly terrible for the superintendent, was to cover it up. They tried to find a way to prevent massive amounts of evidence from coming out in public requests, text messages, dating profiles, emails, and all kinds of very serious allegations. But the information got out through the local sheriff’s department as it should have, leaving Lakota obviously uncovered about their methods. They had been caught covering up the actions of Matt Miller in 2020, and now they were paying more legal clean-up people to continue to cover it up. The media all had the information, of course, but by the rules established by people like Thom, who has experience as the managing editor of the Cleveland Plains Dealer and the Detroit Free Press, nobody was going to run with the story for fear of legal action. And in that way, crisis management professionals keep valuable information away from the public when they need it most. When bad things happen, and government schools or other institutions can hire someone like Thom Fladung to keep the information from the public, how can justice of any kind be utilized?   And it worked at Lakota with a story that should have been national news. A big-time school superintendent was caught in sexual conduct involving children, at the very least, thinking about sex with specific children, and there was proof from the police. It wasn’t hearsay and irrelevant or gossip talk. It came from Matt Miller’s own mouth during a police interview that is clearly indicated in the police report. 

The terrifying thing about this case is that everyone was caught red-handed. We know what Thom did and when; we know what the school board did and who knew what and when. We know what Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota schools, did because of a messy divorce that shows a very different person from the one who is supposed to be a featured speaker at ASU+GSV Summit, where they give you rewards for masking kids and following the progressive rules that Mark Zuckerberg is pushing on society. When those kinds of people like what you are doing, it only supports those who say government schools like Lakota are incubators of liberal politics meant to reprogram our children away from their parents and into a progressive nightmare that is unraveling all over the country currently. But to hide that evidence, Lakota would rather pay Thom Fladung to perform “reputation management” than to deal with the bad conduct that harmed the reputation in the first place. It’s a phony system built on lies and manipulation. And the media is obviously controlled by public relations and legal manipulators who keep things concealed behind the scenes in the hopes that the managing public who pays for everything will never find out. And when they do, they just grab the ball and hope to run out the clock by denying everything until people get tired of asking. The government plays a little game to protect its own; the police play along by not charging the target, which keeps it from being a story. Lawyers use threats of legal action to keep everyone on the fence.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg and his progressive friends give out rewards to people like Matt Miller for their work toward liberal politics on a mass scale; and the local government school uses that reputation to help sell more tax increases to the public. But lucky for the people of Lakota, there was a lot of citizen journalism that people like Thom Fladung didn’t control who did report the story, and people know what they need to now despite the efforts to cover it up. And now we see all these characters for what they are, what they did, and when. And we are far better off as taxpayers because of the bold actions of many people who just want their kids safe in public schools.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Rinos for Lakota: Time to call the public education scam for what it is

For the record, given the level of taxation we have now, locally, statewide, and nationally, you can’t be a conservative and be for higher taxes. Yet, at Lakota schools, behind all the reckless gossip of the superintendent’s life that has spilled over into his professional capacity, the real story under the surface of the debate is that Lakota has wasted all its money that has been generously given by the community and that levy whores are already pushing for tax increases to be placed on a ballot, because they know it will take several attempts to pass, to wear down the voters, and the big government spenders behind the Lakota school system want their money. And they are remarkably willing to overlook any problem so they can get it, which is grossly apparent not just by the labor union elements but the disguised face of the Democrat party, a Facebook group called Rinos For Lakota (Conservatives). They are obviously not conservative, they are pro-big government schools, and they want the hired superintendent, no matter his personal flaws, to sell a levy to the public and push up the income extorted from the community even higher than it is now. The school board recklessly gave out raises to the teacher’s union recently, and now they have to pay for it and are running out of money. So essentially, the next levy fight has already started, even if it’s not formally on the ballot, and Lakota has been keeping Matt Miller around, hoping that he has some miracle rabbit tucked away to pull out so that the public would vote for it. The anger toward whistleblowers reporting real news on Matt Miller is the giveaway to the real motivations and the example of why vast evil is permitted in public schools. Because groups like the Rino’s For Lakota Schools want the free babysitting, the hope that the school will be better parents for their kids than they are and that the school’s reputation will keep pushing up their real estate values artificially, perpetually, they don’t really care about the kids of the school, or what happens to them. They are like all liberals, they want what they want, and they’ll run over anybody to get it. 

There are plenty of lawyers involved. They’d all like some easy money out of a school that allows administrators to create unsafe environments for children. Be careful what you wish for.

Most of the assumptions that government school advocates utter, like the Rino’s for Lakota, are essentially old union talking points, like all public schools are the centerpiece of a community. If they go down, so will the community. Well, that’s false, and it’s time to call their bluff on that assumption. People move to a community for lots of reasons.   Schools might be one of them, but those tend to be low information, young neurotic parent types who eventually grow up anyway, often during election cycles. The unions have seized on this ignorance to exploit it for their own use, which is why we have our beliefs about public schools. But in truth, a good community full of good people is why a school district is successful. It’s not because of what a school does that makes a community good. The school system is simply riding on the backs of success that comes with the parents. Parents who move to a district because of the perception of a good school are already putting the extra effort into their children that is conducive to good behavior, so naturally, one thing causes the effects of the next thing. But it’s never the schools themselves that make something good. The belief that a school superintendent can make a good school is simply ridiculous. So is the notion that the teachers of Lakota are better than the teachers of Mason, or Monroe, or anyplace else. Lakota might be able to recruit good teachers for their first decade of service that might be better than other districts because of the nice roads, the great shopping, the wonderful restaurants, and other great things. But they are all unionized employees, and by the time they reach their shelf life after a decade or so of service, they start to become complicit slugs that aren’t worth the money we spend on them. 

But when that belief system is jeopardized, you can see by some of these Facebook musings from the Rino’s of Lakota that they have bought the ruse hook, line, and sinker. They swallowed the union bait and have built their lives around the scam. And they hope for the protection of legalizations to maintain their vast illusion. When people come along who challenge their premise, they get angry because they fear that everything they have built their lives around is false. And they want to attack anybody who shakes their confidence in that system they want to believe so intensely because they are too lazy to let the facts guide their decisions. It’s interesting to consider that just in April of 2022, the school board, led by many of these Rinos for Lakota, wanted to get rid of Darbi Boddy because if she stayed on the board, Matt Miller might leave for another district. Now, because they have seen Matt Miller’s police report, most everyone would gladly keep Darbi and say bye-bye to Matt.   Yet, the Rinos for Lakota aren’t mad at Matt; they are upset that anybody exposed Matt for who he really was. We went from complete illusion in April to an overdose of reality by September. And if the world were run by people like the Kool-Aid drinkers of Rino’s for Lakota, we would never know what kind of activity these public-school administrators were up to because the school itself, with the help of the board, would simply cover it up. 

My suggestion would be to call the public education bluff and terminate the superintendent on grounds based on his behavior. There are plenty of opportunities in his contract to release him based on his personal behavior that has impacted his public role as a hired administrator. But the main concern for Lakota, the teacher’s union, and groups like these Rino’s for Lakota is for the passage of another levy. They know they need the money, and they are hoping they can sit on this story and push it under the rug, then parade Matt around to high school football games like he’s Elvis and appeal to the young moms who are voters and might vote for a tax increase because they find him appealing. They aren’t selling facts but purely imaginary hopes and dreams with no bases in reality. They hope to control the narrative with rules and procedures that protect them from whistleblower judgment, and when that fails to protect their intentions, they get upset and scream to the gods of legalism for more power to shut down the voices that would tell them the truth. Because they don’t want to hear it. But regardless of their wishes, many people spend money on Lakota schools, and they are in the vast minority. Vanessa Wells only lost in her election because she made an ethical decision not to carry the Republican nomination. If she had kept it, she would have easily beaten anybody on the current school board. And that is a lesson for the next time around. But, if she had been elected to the board, she would not have had the freedom to act as a conduit of valuable information as she is now. And we likely wouldn’t know what we do. And Lakota is far better off knowing the condition of its employees than in not. Because if it really wants to get better, as a district, it will correct the bad things so people can believe in it beyond just mindless lip service from people too lazy to consider the truth.  

Rich Hoffman

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Should You Attend School Board Meetings: The Lakota school’s trouble is why “yes” is the only answer

I know the school board meetings are boring and cumbersome with regulations. The thing I have never liked about the one we have in my district of Lakota is that you only get 3 minutes to talk, and usually, my political enemies are the ones who sit as the judge and jury as to what gets said and to what degree. If you go outside of their accepted limits, they call the police on you to shut you down. Well, that doesn’t work for me; I’m accustomed to being in charge everywhere I go on every topic, and yielding that control over to a political rival on the school board is not something I consider smart. But I have attended plenty of school board meetings and spoken at them when needed. I understand why more conservatives don’t attend school board meetings, yet liberals do. I simply don’t have the time to give to three hours of just doing that one thing while a heavily rule-compliant school board meanders on with loathsome rules and regulations. I’m used to doing three or four things simultaneously from sun up to beyond sundown, so it’s difficult to slow down enough to attend a school board meeting that you know will not affect things at all. Nothing you do at a school board meeting will change a thing that is going on at the school. School board meetings are designed just like elections to make people feel like they have input into how things work in public schools. Yet, they are simply consensus-building exercises meant to bring people over into the way of thinking of a liberal board of education by grinding people down with the sheer boredom of it all. 

The situation has been so bad that I decided over a decade ago to create my own media format to talk about school board business and, in general, politics and current events that weren’t being covered by the media we have had. I always attended school board meetings; I also did a lot of radio and television, interviewed, and wrote for newspapers. In my early days of doing public school work, it became obvious to me that the entire argument that would solve many of the problems was not on the scale of the discussion. For instance, the part A of an argument was set at the wrong point, and part B never went far enough. So I stopped doing media and writing for other publications and instead created this blog site as its own mass media source. Since then, it has had millions and millions of visitors who know they can get more of the news than is typically talked about and that they can send me information that will actually get attention as opposed to trying to force information through the public education filter that everyone can clearly see is a scam. But even with my own thing, I still occasionally attend school board meetings and try to make the system work, even knowing in the back of my mind that it’s probably a useless enterprise. I do that so that nobody can say that I didn’t try. I do try; I just have changed over time to create my own media because I couldn’t trust the established media or the school board members ever to do the right thing. 

The Lakota school board meeting in September 2022 was OK. Some of the controversial superintendent issue elements were discussed, but as usual, a lid was put over the whole event in the standard way that occurs in all government schools. But I would say that what happened was worth the effort because community members did get to voice their opinion, even if the school board’s goal was to drown out the whispers through procedural bureaucracy, which often hides all the bad behavior that so many people are concerned with. Usually, the only people who go to the school board meetings are liberals who don’t have anything else to do anyway. They don’t mind sitting around and wasting time because they like to complain, and those meetings are designed for them to do so. And to get their complaints recorded by someone. They are like those people who carve their names into some wood at a popular tourist destination to show that they were there. The school board meetings give them a voice and a sense of purpose in life, and they are happy to stay asleep so long as they can complain about what they see and feel. Conservatives aren’t like that. They are usually busy with something, so they don’t have the time to deal with that level of nonsense. Suppose they think the school board is a waste of time, which they are designed to be by the OSBA (Ohio School Board Association). In that case, naturally, they will stay home and do something else, yielding everything to the crybaby liberals. 

But it doesn’t have to be that way.   The Lakota school board meeting on September 12th is a good example; there were enough people there to at least get the media’s attention. It was interesting to see how the board responded to evidence that I had already seen and what they considered “credible” or “relevant.” It was also interesting to hear their interpretation of the police report, which they say “cleared” the Lakota superintendent of wrongdoing. I’ve read the same report, and it hardly does that. But without the school board meeting and pressure from the conservative community in the school district, much of this would just be shoved under the rug as it always has. I have watched stories that were undoubtedly in the public interest be crushed by liberal school boards for years, which, as I have alluded to, managed alternative media sources that would dig into a story more than traditional media does, which essentially takes their complete dialogue straight from official public comments because they are too lazy to do any further investigation. This is undoubtedly the case with Lakota, and the people up to no good expect lazy reporting and phony legal protections to conceal bad behavior that taxpayers should know about. Notice how the John Gray story from Goshen where the school board president just disappeared off the news. Apparently, it wasn’t illegal to conspire to meet an 11-year-old girl for a naked massage so long as it hadn’t happened yet. School boards have evolved into cesspools of cover-ups because only liberals attend the meetings. But maybe we should change that. I am happy that enough people showed up at Lakota’s meeting to get some attention and apply pressure where it needed to be applied. Otherwise, bad things do happen a lot. And ultimately, kids do count on us to give them a good world to live in, including their public education environment. You can’t just trust that everyone will behave. You sometimes must look at them in the face and make them answer your questions, even though many rules are designed to protect them from the taxpayer. It drives me nuts too, but it’s worth doing. 

In saying all that, I continue to be very proud of the good work that Darbi Boddy is doing as a Lakota school board member. I think we now see why they hate her so much. To answer the questions of the rest of the board, who are very liberal and have been working very hard to get rid of Darbi. Wasn’t it political for the Lakota superintendent to try to push Darbi to resign over much less charges? Who started that fight? Hmmm………maybe think about that for the future. Because I am very much looking forward to the next election where we can get more school board members like Darbi elected and really make these meetings more constructive. Eventually, we’ll publish all the evidence, but right now, it’s more interesting to see how various people handle the evidence, and public judgment later likely won’t be as kind as people are now–because they haven’t seen it yet.

Rich Hoffman

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The Teaching Profession is Losing Teachers: Who wants to be a part of the Liberal World Order and the destruction of America

Let’s clarify things, especially regarding the many problems in the government school in my hometown, Lakota. There is a shortage of public-school teachers entering the profession, leaving all public schools scrambling for applicants and hanging on to losers they should never have employed in the first place because they fear the shortages more than the poor performance they are getting from them. This is also why public schools hang on and pay too much to the superintendent profession and put up with bad social behavior when they are discovered for far too long because the belief is that a good superintendent will be able to attract teachers instead of letting them peel away by attrition. Labor shortages are far more complex than pay and demographic association. As the country of America has become more MAGA, and clear roles of conservative behavior, as opposed to liberal behavior, have become more pronounced in the days after the Covid lockdowns, ideologically, the merits of the teaching profession have changed. There isn’t a lot of motivation to enter a field that is anti-family, anti-American flag, anti-God, anti-value. When we have watched now for several years a bunch of radical leftists in Chicago covered in tattoos, body piercings, and chanting for gay rights and more pay while on strike, it’s not exactly a winning combination for recruitment. Most people aren’t liberals, and now that the teaching profession is identified with liberalism, why would some nice young person want to enter that field? 

It used to be that being a teacher was respected in society, but liberals have worked so hard to break down society and destroy the concept of the family that the teaching profession turns off people who value those things. The people who then tend to support it are those who simply need the free babysitting service that government schools provide. They aren’t necessarily motivated by the education quality, but they need to drop their kid off somewhere. At the same time, they go off and work toward anti-family occupations in corporate structures that are just as hostile to the goals of Americans as the public education trained everyone to be. Yet, that is not what human beings living in America want, so we are not seeing their young daughters and sons going to school to get a master’s degree for a job that pays on average $60,000 per year because society no longer respects teachers as the pinnacles of the next generation. Ultimately, the failure falls on the administrative state, just as everything else does nowadays. The teaching profession, as designed by John Dewey and other radical progressives, meant for the teaching profession to centralize learning for a country toward the goals of the Liberal World Order. That World Order is failing everywhere, and the teaching profession is just one of the casualties. It could easily be argued that the failures of the teaching profession are actually beneficial for our society because they will interrupt the mental destruction that has been taught to kids. One of the best things to have happened in public education actually has been Covid, where the stay-at-home orders interrupted the sending of kids to those places of mental destruction, and parents have now caught on to the terrible things that were taught to kids while attending. They are starting to voice their opinions on the matter. While that has been healthy, it has not encouraged young people to enter the profession of something that obviously doesn’t carry with it the kind of respect it used to.

Then there is, of course, the aspect of pay. Many people would consider the $60,000 average that public school teachers make to be a good wage, even though the Liberal World Order will complain that it’s on the low end of what a person with a college degree should be making. The pay scale that assumes such a thing is not based on reality but on Modern Monetary Theory, where the government sets the value of something, and if they need more money applied to the need, they just make it up like they do everything else. Add to that the problem that governments have put in the minds of young people the idea of a “universal wage” and $15 minimum wage that put the government as the distributor of value; many young people would rather sit at home and collect a free check while playing video games than entering a profession that would allow them to earn more money. If everyone makes the same amount of money anyway, why would they want to work for it? It used to be that a $60K per year wage was considered good in teaching because they only worked 7 hours per day, nine months out of the year. But now that’s all changed after Covid. Young people were told that they could stay home and get a free check by the government for just being alive, and of course, a large percentage of people are headed in that direction. 

It is not the burden of society to put up with bad behavior and a teaching profession that is not committed to making a great country full of winning participants of the next generation. Public school teachers have shown themselves as menaces to society, more concerned with transexual rights, open drug use, and political liberalism. When parents see their kids coming home from school and wanting to attend a gay rights parade, the public school they went to will lose that parental support. Then, parents see that public schools are run by teacher unions who think they have equal rights to their children. Then there is a level of hostility that John Dewey and the 19th-century socialists who designed public education were never prepared for.   They invented public education in the vacuum of liberalism. They never had a backup plan for when society failed to live up to the lofty utopian standards of the ideal society as they envisioned it with all the intellect that insanity could have constructed. Now we are seeing all that failure manifest into social policy, and parents, if they have options, are taking them. And their children aren’t running to the profession; they are running away. Who wants to be one of the radical labor union types they see on television protesting in Chicago during the latest strike? Especially if Joe Biden is paying off student loans and is pushing for unearned money given out by a radical socialist government where nobody has to work? Of course, there is a teaching shortage. And putting up with superintendents with social problems isn’t going to help solve that problem. It’s much more systematic than just throwing more resources at the problem or overlooking bad conduct among public employees. It’s a marketing problem; Americans have lost faith in the Liberal World Order now that they know it exists, and they aren’t encouraging their kids to move in the direction of supporting it. We are in a society where that Liberal World Order cheated in an election, removed a president that had America feeling good about itself again, and they gave us this Joe Biden loser. That does not inspire parents to teach their kids to support that mess. Instead, they will turn toward independence to solve their problems and construct their lives as far away from the Liberal World Order as they can. And no amount of pay will stop it. The teaching profession, as it was built by progressives, is dying, and it’s dying because of what they have done. People are turning away by choice because it’s a loser that people can see the results of presently, and they want better options.

Rich Hoffman

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More Conservatives Win School Board Seats in Florida: We need more Darbi Boddy types at Lakota

Just because the conservative experiment at Lakota has not turned out well doesn’t mean it’s a failure across the country. I would say the problems we have at Lakota are natural and part of the transition process. Not the result of failed intentions. When I signed up to help elect a conservative school board at Lakota with a 3 to 2 vote on issues, that, of course, assumed that we were getting conservative candidates. But through the rigors of the day-to-day operations, sometimes people find out they aren’t so conservative. They may have thought they were conservative in the safety of GOP meetings, but when the rubber hits the road, and process bureaucracy starts to take effect, people learn a lot about themselves that they may not have known. And people fall off the wagon. In that case, we just need to look for more candidates and keep putting them on the school board. I signed up for a Darbi Boddy type of school board, not a bunch of softies who would let the superintendent rule the world. I expect the school board to be in charge, not to let radical employees rule the day, and so far, in 2022, that is what has happened. Once things started to get tough, we discovered that Darbi was the only one showing up for work. And that is why we have a lot of the problems that are going on at Lakota now. I wouldn’t say it’s a failure of an effort as much as we are learning what kind of people make good school board members, and we are getting a definition of conservative values that is challenging people’s belief systems in themselves, which will ultimately be good for the community, even if it’s painful now. And as usual, what goes on in Lakota, a big government school in Northern Cincinnati, in the community where I live, so goes much of the rest of the nation. 

In the recent elections in Florida, Republicans showed up to vote for school board members 3 to 1. The more states in America that start to run their states as Ron DeSantis does, the more this trend will continue. Ohio isn’t quite there now. There are a lot of RINO Republicans who still think of themselves as Bush conservatives and Reagan admirers. But Trump is a bit too much “solution” for them, and when the pressure is on, they crack like eggs over an omelet. School boards should never have been considered “politically” neutral. The goal in politics isn’t for everyone to get along.

Public schools are radical institutions conceived by liberalism for teaching liberal arts. They have not produced children that grew up into happy Americans, quite the opposite. Many parents are seeing that they are unhappy with the product of public schools and are finally inserting themselves into possible solutions. For years people have asked me to be a school board member at Lakota for several decades now. Over time, the idea of public school has absolutely made me sick. I don’t think they are good at anything they do. But I have offered my help, especially these last few years, to help make them into a solution. I was quite aware that the people I was dealing with were professional community conversation types who befriend you to win you over, like a timeshare salesman. But I helped anyway because the school of Lakota was already in my home district. I personally pay thousands of dollars a year into that mess. So, I was open to the idea if it could be saved somehow. So, I helped where I could to see what might happen. It was worth a shot.

Other Darbi Boddy types are out there, and school boards across America have elected them by popular vote. It’s part of the trend of populism that is migrating to form the modern political movement that is going to sink all the mistakes of the administrative state finally, as it was conceived by communist and utopian socialists like John Dewey when they came up with the dumb idea of public education in the first place. Sure, it’s been a good free babysitting service for busy parents, but it has raised disasters in people who are failures of the 7 liberal arts in every way they could be measured. Even the best students of the public education system have turned out to be disasters of people and what is bad about the whole institutional approach is that public schools led by liberal-leaning school boards have developed the habit of protecting the bad conduct that goes on in the schools, rather than managing those problems for the betterment of the children involved. It’s all been a disaster from top to bottom, and finally, people are starting to admit to it and are offering themselves as options to get elected and help the way Darbi has been in Lakota. Even if the vote count at Lakota isn’t as conservative as it should be, it’s still better than what we had before. And future elections can certainly smooth that ratio out and will naturally match the national trends toward populism. 

Ultimately, however, my opinion hasn’t changed, even with this trend toward conservatism on school boards. Public education as a concept is doomed. It’s too expensive, inefficient, and doesn’t produce good people. It’s just a trainwreck in the best of cases. It certainly has not been a replacement for good parenting. After the behavior I have witnessed so far in 2022 regarding school board behavior and how the big liberal administrations behave toward it, it’s obvious to me that public education is doomed to complete failure. Suppose they think Darbi Boddy is bad and that the only acceptable Republican on a board is some wishy-washy RINO who will go way out of their way to get along in a “nonpartisan” kind of way, always bending the knee to radical liberals empowered through the teacher’s unions. In that case, there is no hope for them. If they are having trouble now, what will they do in the next elections when more Darbi Boddy types get elected and replace the stale old establishment types who covered up way too much bad behavior just to protect the school from outside opinion? They aren’t going to make it. I remember in April when the news story was all about Lakota might lose their superintendent over the radical school board member, Darbi Boddy, as if we needed to get rid of her to keep him and his $200,000 salary. Well, I don’t think he’s worth it, especially after watching his performance through Covid and recently over several things. We would do better with a much more engaged and less progressive person. I know they fear teacher shortages and bad state report cards, and the public relations of the superintendent are meant to put rosy glasses on all that for the illusion of goodness. But when a district is garbage, it is garbage. You can’t put perfume on it to make it smell better. The fact that the public employees of Lakota want so badly to get rid of the best school board member, Darbi Boddy, says that they aren’t ready to deal with the national trend in public education that is happening everywhere. And that fault is their own for failing to adjust to a changing world and holding on to a failure from the progressive past. 

Rich Hoffman

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$950,000 From DeWine Won’t Make Lakota Schools Safer: The teachers and administrators are the real danger, we need more school board oversight, not less

I think it’s actually bad news that Governor DeWine is issuing $47 million in public school security measures, $950,000 which is going to Lakota schools in my area of northern Cincinnati. That is like putting a lot of nice icing on a car tire, calling it a cake, and telling people to eat it. There is a lot wrong in public schools, one of which is the kind of school security that is needed to stop school shooters. I think Ohio addressed that issue best with H.B. 99, which will give training parameters to teachers who want to be first responders in case of a crisis in public schools. The false belief that kids are safe with teachers, administrators, and other paid employees continues to be the biggest concern that nobody has a stomach to discuss. But in truth, the extra security that DeWine was providing to Lakota schools and other public schools, with extra cameras and increased resource officers to keep outsiders on the outside, will only make it possible for the real threats to children to expand their malice behind that security. The problem is in continued belief that public employees can be trusted with our children implicitly, where I would argue that they need more oversight from a public that needs to be more engaged in their children’s lives. Having less engagement only allows public employees who have serious mental deficiencies to further dominate the time and attention of children in destructive ways, because the extra security keeps away the eyes that likely need to check out what’s going on more. 

This whole problem was exacerbated by the Darbi Boddy situation at Lakota, where the superintendent, Matt Miller, charged her with trespassing for showing up unannounced to take pictures of artwork on the walls of Lakota to see for herself what had been going on regarding CRT. Darby didn’t believe the teachers when they spoke at a school board meeting and said there was no CRT in the schools. Matt wanted to have an administrative state kind of audit. Darbi wanted to see for herself and leave the bureaucratic opinions at the door, which is what she was recently elected to do. As a result, Darbi was plastered all over the news and shamed for essentially doing her job. The behavior of Matt Miller toward Darbi made many people who supported Darbi very angry. Soon after, people started telling lots of stories about Matt Miller and how dangerous of a person he has been and how hypocritical his actions toward Darbi were. And now, a whole can of worms has been opened, and there is some very serious discussion going on that looks bad for everyone involved. It didn’t have to be personal the way it is. Still, all the parties should have known that it was a bad idea to attempt to make Darbi Boddy the scapegoat for much more serious trouble that continues to be a problem among administrators and the paid teaching staff. 

I have been neutral on Matt Miller, the superintendent at Lakota because there are people I trust on the school board who like him. So, I have put my feelings about paying him over $200,000 per year aside due to their opinions.   However, the reality of highly paid administrative types of government employees is consistent in many occupations, when they have lots of expendable income, which teachers at Lakota do. They don’t have heavy work schedules, they have summers off, and 7-hour work days of real productive time, then bad things are poised to happen because their minds are not occupied with positive things. And the stories of the cell phones with naked pictures between administrators and teachers are abundant. A bored adult mind that tends to be politically progressive often turns to pornography to fill their time, which opens the door to lots of terrible behavior, much of it illegal.

And regarding Matt Miller, he just went through a rough divorce, and some bad behavior revealed that he should have lost his job over, at a bare minimum. So, to my mind, he’s lucky to have his job still. But he’s certainly not in a position to place a value judgment on Darbi for doing her own investigation into bad conduct that voters have notified her is happening in the hallways of Lakota to the eyes of the students. And now, the hypocrisy of his position to Darbi and the purposeful intent to destroy her in the media and within the community has spurred on a lot of intense anger that has cracked open reports of a lot of very vile conduct that Matt Miller is in the middle of, and it’s not good. What they say about glass houses and not throwing rocks, Matt has been throwing rocks in a wet paper bag. It has turned out to be a terrible idea.

As I say all the time, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Just because people say things about you doesn’t mean a person is truly guilty. If it did, there would be a SWAT team at Matt’s house immediately. We must examine the reports and the evidence and let law enforcement figure out what’s what. There is a process, and we must let the process do its work. However, in relation to this school safety money from DeWine, trapping kids in schools where these Lakota administrators and teachers have more protection from the opinions of the outside world is not a good idea. It makes kids not safer but puts them in much more danger. Because school shootings are just one danger kids face. In the sexually charged world, we live in now, where so many adults suffer from porn addiction and seek to act out their fantasies in real life, there is a lot of mental illness going on in the lives of people with expendable income and time to spend it. And giving those people protection from spontaneous visits from the school board or even cautious parents who want to know what’s happening with their children is a terrible idea. It protects the sex abusers from those who need to check their behavior with frequent audits. The employees and administrators cannot be trusted at face value. They need oversight, a lot of oversight. I’m not going to suggest we throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. I don’t think public schools are good for kids in many ways at all. To me, it’s only a free babysitting service for busy parents. But for those who need it, we are fools to trust these people with our kids unchecked and behind tight security, which protects them from the public. Which is precisely what this $950,000 will do; it will give those most guilty of committing sexual crimes in public places more protection to do much more of it. I hear many reports of this behavior going on among the teacher population and that it is led by leadership. There is so much evidence that a lot of it is written down with text messages from reliable witnesses. So, there is too much smoke for there not to be fire. How much fire is the real question? And where there are fires to put out, we would be fools to lock out the firefighters with added security. That is precisely what more security means. It won’t make kids safer; it makes them much more vulnerable. 

Rich Hoffman

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