Tag: Teachers

Child Pornographer and ex-Lakota Teacher George Merk Strikes Again: The continued problem of sex addiction among public education employees

I shouldn’t have to say it, I don’t take pleasure in saying it, but I warned everyone about the former Lakota teacher George Merk nearly ten years ago. Click here to read what I said then. Now he is facing four felony charges for pandering sexually oriented material involving a minor. He left Lakota back in 2014 after being suspended for the same issue in 2013. And now, he was arrested after his most recent teaching assignment with the Greater Ohio Virtual School, so this guy has been out there for a while doing this sexually perverse activity, and many people knew about it. And they hired him anyway. This is the problem with public schools and their union-controlled employment forces, they work so hard to keep out prying eyes to protect their members, but often kids are left vulnerable in the vacuum. And the institutions put the employees before the kids’ safety way too often. And many parents know it, but they need to send their kids to school, so they try to overlook the problem the best they can. But when they see how Darbi Boddy was treated as a school board member at Lakota for trying to police the halls and see for herself what kind of bad behavior is actually going on behind the security parameter, then people get mad. Because they hear stories, lots of stories of swinging teachers, crazy naked pictures sent on school phones, and abuses of power that are beyond forgiveness using authority of position in ways detrimental to the community, to say the least. And when some loser like this George Merk character keeps emerging with the same problem year after year for decades now, and nobody does anything to protect kids from him, natural anger emerges, and people want justice. 

For all those who are asking about situations that are just beginning to come out in the open at Lakota, I would remind everyone what I say all the time; people are innocent until proven guilty. Even when there is evidence, sometimes people make up things about other people out of complete spite, so we can’t just take people’s word for something. Co-workers and ex-spouses can and do harbor malicious feelings and will sometimes make things up completely to harm someone they want to destroy. But when they present evidence, that evidence must be considered and investigated. I can say that I know for certain that several investigations are going on that the police are handling. And we need to give them the room to do those investigations. The crimes of the past that occurred with Merk are not happening presently, people are speaking out, and action is taken to conduct proper investigations without the hint of a cover-up. (Yet) But given the past, especially at Lakota, and all public schools for that matter, I can understand why people would assume that the police would sit on these kinds of crimes and why school boards would not want a public relations nightmare by knowing about bad things, and not doing anything about them to protect the children in the school. It has happened plenty of times in the past. Nobody in their right mind should have hired George Merk for anything. But the schools will say that they are desperate for labor, for people who will show up for work, and all too often, teachers are a certain kind of person who is all too tempted to drift into sexually perverse lifestyles. And once that path is started down, like drugs, it’s hard to get it under control.

We just had the John Gray incident in Goshen, where he was president of the school board and very involved in education issues in Ohio. I have known him, actually, quite well. A few months ago, he was caught trying to meet an 11-year-old girl for a naked backrub in Indiana, and it took citizen journalists to catch him. If people didn’t speak up, he wouldn’t have been caught. In public, nobody would have thought that he would be any kind of person who would even think of doing such a thing. But, apparently, it’s been going on for a while with him, and he had access to children for a long time. I have noticed that public education types; they tend to lean more liberal than the rest of society; they have expendable income and time to use that money on a leisurely lifestyle. And often, they fill their time with overly sexual lifestyles. Whether it’s the swingers club in Milford or a wine party at someone’s house where sex partners are passed around like baseball cards because all the adult participants are bored with life and looking for some way to spice up their marriages to match their porn addictions, it doesn’t take much to end up crossing a line when it comes to kids. I’ve covered many stories of sexual impropriety in public schools, which has been just the tip of the iceberg. I would never consider knowing what I do about public schools and sending any child I love to them. I consider them dangerous places. Very dangerous places and the less oversight there is, the worse the sexual problems get—the less the teachers and administrators try to hide it. 

That’s why the attack on Darbi at Lakota opened up such a can of worms, because people don’t go to the meetings to be seen in public, but they watch online from the comfort of their homes, and they see the hypocrisy. They like that Darbi was looking out for their fears of what is happening in these public schools’ halls. Even where my mind is on these things, I would say we shouldn’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater. For many parents, public schools have become a necessary babysitting service that they need. But I would say that much more oversight is necessary because without a very vigilant management group in public schools scrutinizing everything, the perverted minds of a certain percentage of the employee population will be up to no good. And when no good becomes boring, and wife swapping isn’t exciting anymore, then sex with kids starts to become the next gateway drug. And unfortunately, the evidence points to the fact that this is a massive problem, not just an occasional one. I’ve been talking about this stuff for a long time, and people like this George Merk loser are typical, not unique. It is possible to discover them before they bring harm to innocent children. But to do that, school boards, parents, and even other teachers need to start thinking about what’s best for the kids, not what’s best for the institution itself. When we learn about people like George Merk, the damage is far less than the attempted cover-up of the bad behavior. Until government schools stop covering up the sex-obsessed employee base with all their indulgent behavior that is too politically progressive for most parents, if they knew about it, then we will continue to have these types of embarrassments in public education. We can’t change the direction of society; we are no longer the kind of society that kept the Playboy and Penthouse magazines on the top shelf away from kids. We are a society of porn addiction, and too often, those who are most liberal in our society and make the most money, like government employees do, and have time to think about these kinds of destructive things; we must correct the behavior with more oversight, not less. And only when we have done that can we say we are doing what’s right for the kids in the school. 

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Lakota Wants Another Tax Increase to Pay for their Progressive, Radical, anti-American Teachers: The lawsuit of Emily Osterling

A little bird landed on my shoulder recently to tell me that my local school system of Lakota was thinking about attempting another tax increase on property owners after years of declining enrollment, and poor performance, and it sent my blood into a boil. My position on school levies is pretty clear, especially these days. When I’ve been against them before it was largely a cost thing, public schools were just too much of a burden in their communities and they weighed them down needlessly. But now, we have seen that not even the extraordinary costs were even worth the trouble as the kids coming out of these schools are just a mess. Little birds have a way of always coming back and what’s more, its not just one, no matter how much time passes. What they whisper is the kind of things that are truly things to be angry at, because the audacity is something to behold, because if you really do care about kids and their futures, which I do, then this public school scam of sucking so much money out of tax revenue for poor management by the school boards is something that we all must deal with.

For instance, that same school board which is proposing to put another tax increase on the ballot perhaps as early as 2020 also is trying to get transgender policies enacted for the sheer progressive intention of social theatrics. A school like Lakota which is one of the largest in Ohio and has many thousands of students, only has a handful of students who would lay claim to any kind of transgender policy. While a person like me would argue that transgender anything has nothing to do with education and is purely a creation of the progressive political movement, accommodations are made at Lakota for that very specific minority. So there is no need for costly modifications or even the wasted effort by management (the school board) to embark on any kind of transgender diatribe. It’s not even something that a school board should be discussing in relation to budgetary considerations. In any kind of world that type of cause and effect proposal is completely non value added to the end use customer, the children and their families and really is at the heart of all public schools. They simply don’t produce anything of any real value to the world and have worn out their welcome.

In business, it is common no matter what the size for management to ponder how to squeeze cost out of everything so that a company can make money and survive. One of the ways that is done is to determine what elements of a company create value for their end use customer while putting all the other efforts to a category of waste to be eliminated from their processes. When a school system like Lakota is in the mode of thinking that transgender issues are a value to their end use customer, the tax paying public, then there is a big problem and it becomes an even bigger problem when they consider any proposal that increases taxes on a future ballot.

I am clearly aware of the Emily Osterling case who sued Lakota for transgender issues which cost $175,000, $75,000 coming directly out of board funds. Osterling was a long time teacher, one of those employees that I have said for years was overpaid for the kind of work that she was doing. The school board had determined that her activism into transgender rights was cutting into her actual duties, so the activist was put on administrative leave. The school board was trying to do the right thing and get rid of a troubling, and expensive employee that was pushing off progressive causes onto a learning environment that was supposed to be teaching kids. A few years prior in a close vote that Julie Shaffer was pushing on creating a transgender policy at Lakota the issue was narrowly defeated not in a small part due to the two conservatives that sit on the Lakota school board in Lynda O’Connor and Todd Parnell. The progressive activist Osterling wouldn’t let the matter stand and continued to push the agenda which eventually forced the board to settle with her such an extraordinary sum of money over something that most people can agree was not a value to the end use customer, the students and their tax paying parents.

And that is where the real problem is, that the employees of Lakota and every other public school are runaway activists intent to perpetually run up their labor costs and to ultimately turn our children into progressive advocates of liberalism and launch them into a life of confusion and turmoil. On the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati Osterling cited that her administrative leave in September of 2018 to begin termination proceedings based on “flimsy and retaliatory allegations” was somehow out of step with the actual needs of the community, and it is in those kinds of employees that jack up the extraordinary costs of the employees at Lakota which cause the need for ever more tax money to be wasted on them for the basic luxury as acting as glorified babysitters.

Osterling was a prominent Lakota teacher’s union official and a National Education Association board member, and co-chair of the NEA’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender caucus—otherwise as an employee, she was a nightmare—expensive and underperforming toward what the value of an education to children really needed. As part of the settlement Osterling had to submit a letter of resignation on March 26th of 2019. The problem is, she is just one employee at Lakota which has many hundreds just like her, only not quite as vocal. Even when it was obvious that Osterling had to go, it took moving mountains to get her out, and it was expensive.

I didn’t say much on the matter because I felt the school board, at least a few of them, was doing a good job. Julie Shaffer continues to be the entry point for activism allowing people like Osterling to feel they even have a platform to speak from. My history with Julie goes back a long time, our debates can still be found by Googling them which were aired on WLW radio some years back. Of course when she and her board members back then couldn’t win a school levy three times in a row because they couldn’t make a good argument for the money the board was wasting, she turned to identity politics to try and bring great harm to me personally which remains to this day an issue of contention. I offered to put the matter to rest by supporting a tax increase which I knew Lakota wanted to propose soon, but only if they allowed teachers to arm themselves in the classrooms to protect against a mass shooting. Of course, they ignored my proposal which pulled my support of any levy off the table. I’m willing to pay teachers to get gun training and to protect kids from bad people, but I’m not willing to support progressive union activists like Emily Osterling. The school isn’t there for the employees, its there for the kids, pure and simple.

Due to the lack of management, again, not by all the school board members, but there is still a three to two vote against logic in Lakota. If that ratio could be turned around, and activists like Julie Shaffer who obviously has serious problems and is aligned with the radical elements of the employment base, money management might occur. But under the current leadership, Lakota plans to consider another tax increase soon and we’ll be back to all the same old tricks and nonsense again. I don’t think any of us want that. I don’t want expensive employees and lawsuits that are non value added to the end use customer working at Lakota. I thought it was wise for the board to try to get rid of her, which they did eventually. But when members of the board are encouraging the Emily Osterling types along, that expense is on them, not the taxpayer.

Rich Hoffman

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Guns and Teachers in Florida, an answer to a problem that won’t go away by itself

It passed the House in Florida with a comfortable vote of 65 to 47 after hours of debate. Now it goes to the desk of the governor, Ron DeSantis to be signed. The bill that has now passed and will become law in Florida is their answer to the long debated question about guns in schools, and now at least their teachers will be able to take a course and qualify to carry guns to protect students which is the ultimate answer to the whole school shooting debate. I personally have never thought it was a debatable situation and have said so in my own school district in Ohio. Guns are the answer to the tendency of violence, not the cause. But just like other aspects of culture that involve liberal input, the government tampering on the matter has created a more dangerous situation, not less of one and the only thing that needed debate was how people are afraid of guns are going to have to deal with a world that made them in the first place, out of necessity. The eradication of guns from society was never an option. Having guns in more places more often is, because of the nature of humanity, which invented them for a reason.

Listening to the debates against guns in schools in Florida was interesting. It was all emotionally driven and largely preprogrammed. The fear based diatribes were not conducive to a proper sentiment. In essence, we know from trial and error that we cannot trust the government network to protect us, and that includes police, firefighters, FBI agents, the military—if given the opportunity to fail, they often will. As it is true that we do hire those types of people for our government the truth is that they are often too slow to react or when they do, they don’t have enough skin in the game to act properly. So when there is the potential for danger, those with the most to lose and who are at the heart of a matter should be armed with deadly force so that they can protect whatever threat might come about. It’s a perfectly logical element to a problem that permeates human thought, the temptation to abuse other people for failures of others.

During the recent California synagogue attack by a nineteen-year-old kid it was a border patrol agent who was in attendance who was able to put a stop to the rampage and thwart the advance of terrorism, otherwise a lot more people would have died. There is no way to deal with mass shootings but to confront them at the point of the attack. Waiting for a 911 response simply isn’t an option. Violence has to be confronted, not avoided, and the fantasy that guns can be removed from society and that therefore opportunities for attackers to conduct themselves in such violent ways will be diminished, is simply a false hope evolved under a premise of utopia that is grounded in reality as a fantasy story. Guns are not the villains; they are the answer to villainy.

As everyone knows I have a long history with public schools and feeling that the teachers are overpaid and are dangerous in what they teach our children. But I have been willing to say that I’d support pay increases for teachers in my school district in Ohio if they are willing to carry guns while on the job, and taking on that extra responsibility. That would prevent mass shootings. It may not prevent the intent to violence, but it could minimize the impact such as what happened at that California synagogue. When the danger erupts a person comfortable with a gun needs to be there to confront the attacker. And in essence, that is the only logical answer. Nothing else will work, not metal detectors, not more school security because like the police, it’s just a job and that doesn’t always promise that in a tenuous situation, they will act properly—and certainly not more gun laws. The reliance on more centralized authority, which is always the liberal perspective gives precisely the opposite result. Only people who are highly motivated to solve a problem like that, who are in that life and death situation can really be trusted to act in their own self-interest. And when they do, they need a gun to perform that task. It was out of protecting self-interest that guns were invented in the first place and why they are such an important part of American culture.

Schools and places of worship, or any place where would be attackers know that people do not have guns are made so much more dangerous by the insistence that gun restrictions be present. Anywhere that a lot of people conduct themselves, guns should be frequent. To my experience even at bars and nightclubs, people who become gun owners don’t go around trying to shoot everyone. Guns require discipline and those who learn to use them become better people not worse in the exchange. Most of these young attackers such as end up in these school and synagogue shootings do not have that background. Even in a bar fight it’s not the NRA supporters who pull out a gun and start firing. Using guns tends to make people more responsible, not less. So gun owners are less prone to suddenly become a lunatic while at such places. More guns are better for society, not the other way around. Most gun owners who carry are by default much more careful about engaging in a conflict with another person because they are aware they are carrying deadly force and that responsibility tends to regulate irresponsible behavior. Even for that driver who cuts you off at an intersection and they give you the finger in anger provoking you. Gun carriers tend to blow it off because they know that they have the ability to control the situation and that self-assuredness brings about a much more mature outcome.

The problems occur when you take away that natural tendency and replace it with government enforcement which not even they want. The responsibility for good conduct needs to fall somewhere and experience tells us that people who carry guns tend to be the type of people who will take responsibility for a situation quicker than waiting for a centralized authority to respond to danger. So in all public places guns are the answer to less violence. Not fewer guns and more government authority. The difficult things for liberals to admit to themselves is that more government isn’t the answer. More cops in schools, more people to work security who might end up paying union dues for their job at a metal detector—those are not options because they cost too much and they do nothing to solve the problem. We’ve seen it too often, when gun fire does erupt, cops aren’t always willing to throw themselves in front of the bullets. To some of them, often a ratio that is not acceptable, it’s just a job to them and like the cops in Parkland Florida, they run and hide like everyone else. But not everyone is like that, some people are naturally inclined to leadership and those are the people we want carrying guns, everywhere. And its good to see that Florida is moving in that direction. Maybe the rest of the country will get it and follow before more school shootings occur.

Rich Hoffman

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Vote HELL No on the Butler County Safety Levy: It’s a money grab for ineffective school board members afraid to make hard decisions

Essentially if the school safety levy fails for the combined efforts of Fairfield schools, Hamilton, New Miami, Edgewood, and Monroe—Hamilton will vote to allow teachers to arm themselves. And the other school boards will have to follow because doing nothing simply isn’t an option. Out of Butler County, Ohio’s 10 school districts five of them are looking for this safety levy to hire more employees to keep the school boards from having to make a hard decision on how best to protect schools. At the core of the argument especially among young and inexperienced parents who have been taught all their lives that guns are bad, school boards are trying to appease them with a more centralized process. This involves spending millions of dollars on additional resource officers, mental health assessments and similar employee staffing increases which of course cost more money. Yet we know now from experience that the real solution is a more decentralized process where teachers can act as first responders the moment a crisis breaks out. And the good thing about that approach is that it doesn’t cost more money.

At the heart of the problem is that the basic assumption about public education is that it should not involve guns—because the aim of the progressive education philosophy is to live in a world where guns aren’t needed, value judgments are surrendered to equal rights and the people being educated are subjects of the state. Guns do not fit that view of the world. But in no way is that vision aligned with life in the real world, it’s an idea that mostly people who think politically left of center strive for. Most parents enroll their children in a school without thinking about politics or danger, because their primary concern is that their child is safe, and they want to believe that the schools themselves are free of any turmoil. School boards love to spend money, because its easy and when collections of people are in charge of administering finances, spending money is the only real way to get along because everyone loves to spend money, especially if it is other people’s money. So this issue is particularly challenging for school board members. The only way to make panicky parents happy is to give them more safety personnel, mental health specialists, social workers and counselors—because buying those types of employees give people the illusion of safety. It gives parents the feeling that the institution itself can keep their children safe, and as school board members yielding to that fantasy is safe in itself, until there is a real problem and a deranged shooter comes into the hallways that none of the new government employees could see coming.

Many of the gun rampages we have seen just this year, not to mention year’s past involved people who were considered mentally deranged in some form or another and the institutions of our society proved they were completely ineffective to stop such people from acting in a deadly way. To stop such a deranged mass murderer before the act occurs requires a decision based on judgments, and this is something that our modern institutions just don’t do, because they are so politically charged. Our modern institutions for which public schools are a part are more prone to trying to make a deranged lunatic feel more at home by attacking the normal kids into unnatural acts of compassion than in removing the threat from society by implementing a judgment that might seem unfair. So public schools are powerless to protect children from those who decide life isn’t worth living and they take to becoming mass murderers. By their reasoning, if they are going to kill themselves anyway, why not take a few people who made them feel terrible along the way pay too.

All the methods of implementing school safety as proposed by the Butler County safety levy is to deal with the aftermath of a mass shooting, not to prevent it from happening, and that is what needs to be clear about what people are voting for. There is only one way to ensure that a mass killer doesn’t gain an advantage over a student population of unarmed kids is to have teachers be the first responders to end the threat seconds after it has started, instead of minutes. That is the only way to properly protect students in a school from deranged killers which are becoming more common place these days from many influences. This idea that guns will be legislated out of existence is simply another liberal fantasy that they haven’t come to terms with yet. Guns are part of American life and children should learn to live with them, how to properly use them and what function they serve in the context of society. For instance, a serious course of study could be made of how the invention of gunpowder has changed the nature of human existence politically. Americans are living proof of that evolution, but the path to the political philosophy which created that American experiment is confirmation that no human society will retreat back into the compliance of a communist state, which as China is now and the Soviet Union used to be. Once people have tasted personal freedom, there is no way to erase it from their minds and over the last thousand years mankind has marched toward more personal freedom and much less aristocracy. Yet that is not what schools are teaching and that is also what makes them dangerous—because they are not aligned with the world around them.

For many the history of firearms and the nature of why people love them isn’t relevant to this discussion of school safety, but unfortunately for those utopian minded liberals, such an understanding is mandated for resolution on the safety issue. Is the security of a school more effective if it is more centrally controlled, or is it more effective if it is decentralized? The obvious answer of course is decentralization, we know that from lots of experience as a society. Guns are a part of world culture, they were invented out of human necessity to protect individual rights and that is why history says they are here to stay. We aren’t going to “uninvent” them. Therefore, to have a safe society we have to have a means to defend ourselves from people who may use them for malice and especially in education institutions, such instruction and awareness is paramount for tomorrow’s next generations. To defend them from harm, guns must be part of the solution, not mental health specialists, social workers, and counselors. Those are investments into what happens after a tragedy. We want to solve such problems before they become deadly.

Parents and teachers who are not comfortable with guns are going to have to adapt. Their sensitivities cannot be the contributing factors to making schools less safe due to their emotional condition toward guns. For those people I would suggest some classes on firearms, and to learn more about them aside from what they have seen in Hollywood productions over the last twenty years. Guns themselves are not dangerous, they are precision instruments which defend individual rights. If a teacher is responsible for the safety of a classroom and a crazed gunman is outside their door looking to commit mass murder against harmless, innocent people, that teacher should have the ability to end the threat right then and there. There won’t be time to call the police. A counselor or mental health specialist won’t stop a killer in the hall and talk them out of committing violence, only equal or superior firepower can do that. And that is the way of things in a free society—decentralized first responders who can slow down or stop a threat until the professionals arrive, just like in CPR. The only thing stopping this safety measure from being implemented for the good of everyone is the sensitivities of those who insist that guns not be part of a solution that only guns can solve. And not just guns, but guns in the hands of everyday people who are on the front lines and most prepared to take action when threats arise.

For many, obviously the case with the school boards of the participating schools, the responsibility for such security in their minds fall on the professionals we hire in society to deal with these kinds of things. But it is that over-reliance on institutional safety that many of these mass killers exploit to instigate their wrath. Guns are not a particularly American idea, but the personal use of them is, which means that in order to have a properly safe society that is living in harmony with the invention of guns, that personal participation of guns is something we should use to solve the gun violence problem. The solution is in decentralization within our institutions so to make them safer. More centralization will give us the opposite, the likelihood of more violence. If we really want to solve the problem of mass shootings, especially in public schools, and especially in Butler County which is the focus of this unique tax increase for the five-schools mentioned, then we need to allow teachers to be that layer of security. Throwing more money at more centralized control will do nothing but waste money, which the school boards participating in this horrendous tax and spend approach should have already had in their budgets to begin with. Ultimately what the school boards are asking for in this levy request is for Butler County voters to bail them out of having to make a hard decision—whether or not to cut some expenses out of their budget to hire more safety personnel, which is what they should be doing. Or in having to make a decision in arming teachers which would hurt the sensibilities of some neurotic parents who need an education of their own to get up to speed with the modern world. But nothing about the Butler County safety levy will make schools safer from a potential shooter who might want to attack schools and the children within it.

If I had loved ones in these schools, which I personally do, and a lunatic comes to that school with a gun to shoot up the innocent, I expect a teacher or administrator to be carrying a gun and to stop that situation before mass carnage occurs. There isn’t time to call for help when something like that happens. The situation must be dealt with right then and there. I don’t need a counselor to talk me through the grieving process after a bunch of kids have been killed. I don’t need a mental health professional to rationalize the mind of the killer before the smoke has left the scene of the crime. I just need the threat neutralized and that loved one home safe every day. And just having teachers carrying guns concealed during their professional business makes the chances of a safe day at school much more of a reality.
Vote not only NO on the Butler County Safety Levy, but………………………….HELL NO!

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman
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Lakota Teacher Busted for Child Porn made over $65K per year

Below is a story about the Lakota Teacher arrested for child pornography charges. For the thousands of you that follow this blog and know some of the history here, Ryan Fahrenkamp is #286 on my list of teachers that make more than $65,000 per year. Fahrenkamp made $69,456.00. That’s the kind of “quality” teacher that our tax money has purchased. My comments about the impact this has on Lakota are right after the Enquire portion of the article. Ironically, Doc Thompson did a piece about the value of teachers from a wage stand point as this story was breaking during his January 3, 2011 show. I think it is an interesting argument while at the same time reading the details of this child porn story.

Story from the Enquire by: dhorn@enquirer.com
A former elementary school teacher in West Chester was arrested Monday on charges of possessing child pornography.

FBI agents said Brant Fahrenkamp, 42, used his school-issued laptop computer to access pornographic websites and to store images of young men, including some former students, without their shirts on. Fahrenkamp is a former teacher at Endeavor Elementary School.

An FBI spokesman said their investigation began in May 2010 when Lakota school officials contacted the West Chester Police Department about a parent’s complaint that Fahrenkamp was sending text messages to a student.

FBI officials said a search of Fahrenkamp’s hotel room in May 2010 turned up a camera and the laptop, both of which had video files depicting a naked boy. Investigators believe the photos were taken in 2008………………………………………………..

Interesting choice of words, “former,” as mentioned above Fahrenkamp was receiving almost $70K a year while he was taking pictures of little boys at Endeavor Elementary with their shirts off. He was employed until August of 2010.

The first line of defense that other teachers would proclaim is that they cannot be judged by the actions of this demented man, Mr. Ryan Fahrenkamp. And I would say that’s true. There are always a few bad apples, and the actions of Fahrenkamp should not reflect on all teachers.

However,

How many times during the last levy campaign were we told that money bought us “quality” teachers? And if we didn’t pay the extra money in taxes, those teachers might leave Lakota. Right now, how many people out there think that Fahrenkamp was a “quality” teacher and what made him worth more than $65K per year?

On another philosophic debate, when talking about a utopia type of society, where teachers do the work of teaching our children while many parents trot off to work completely entrusting the lives of their children to people like Fahrenkamp, this incident proves that such an act is a folly. Fahrenkamp was using a school lap top to store images of several boys with their shirts off, several students from Endeavor Elementary, and if that cautious parent had not caught text messages going to their child, how far would this incident have gone and for how long?

The other issue is how the school system kept a cap on this story during the media blitz of the school levy of 2010. This teacher was arrested right after the first levy attempt of 2010 and all this investigation was going on during the last one that ended in November of 2010. How did everyone keep this story quiet, and why? This seems like the kind of story the community should have known about back in May. So since the Lakota School System kept the story so quiet, it makes you wonder what other stories they are keeping a tight lid on. I’m sure Fakrenkamp is not the only bad apple.

The pictures of the students with their shirts off from Endeavor Elementary dated back to 2008. The original arrest was on May 26th of 2010. The lag on this story is far too long. This shows that the Lakota School System was more interested in protecting their image than exposing the story. It is unlikely that the concerned parent was the first whistle-blower. It may have been the first alarm from “outside” the school system, but I’m certain there were other behavioral signs that some other co-worker was aware of. The choice was to keep it quiet when the public should have known. That says everything!

I’ll say again that Fakrenkamp does not reflect all teachers everywhere. But because of people like Fakrenkamp, schools will never be able to be 100% trusted with our students. Parents will always have to be a part of their children’s lives if they want to protect their children from people like Fakrenkamp. That might be an inconvenient truth. But it’s a fact of life that must be considered when assessing the value of the teaching profession.

Rich Hoffman
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www.overmanwarrior.com